Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism

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Editor: Jacqueline Labbe

The Enlightenment World

Famously commemorated by William Wordsworth as a poet ‘to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered’, Charlotte Smith is an originating voice of ‘the Romantic’ whose centrality is at last being recognized, 170 years after Wordsworth’s double-edged encomium. Her early sonnets established the genre as a Romantic form; her novels advanced sensibility as a trope beyond its two-dimensional reliance on emotional facility; and her blank verse initiated one of the most familiar of Romantic verse forms. As an innovator, she reflects the Romantic concern with energizing the familiar, while her interests in science and philosophy, apparent in her paratexts, reveal her ambitions to understand her place in the quotidian.

This volume draws together the best of current Smith scholarship. Essays are organized according to genre, and contextualized by a substantial introduction.

Sample pages

• Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism: Introduction
• Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism: Index

Readership

Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanticism, Women’s Writing

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Advancing Poetry
1 "Herself […] Fills The Foreground": Negotiating Autobiography in The Elegiac Sonnets and The Emigrants – Kerri Andrews
2 From Nosegay to Specimen Cabinet: Charlotte Smith and The Labour Of Collecting – Dahlia Porter
3 The Figure of the Hermit In Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head – Kari Lokke
4 The Subject Of Beachy Head – Christoph Bode

Part II: Writing Only To Live: Novels
5 "The Slight Skirmishing Of A Novel Writer": Charlotte Smith and the American War Of Independence – Barbara Tarling
6 Charlotte Smith, The Godwin Circle, and the Proliferation of Speakers in The Young Philosopher – A A Markley
7 The Alien Act and Negative Cosmopolitanism in Letters Of A Solitary Wanderer – Amy Garnai
8 Narrating Seduction: Charlotte Smith and Jane Austen – Jacqueline Labbe
9 Charlotte Smith’s The Banished Man in French Translation; or, The Politics of Novel-Writing during the French Revolution – Katherine Astbury

Part III: Private Theatricals And Posthumous Lives
10 '"This Village Wonder": Charlotte Smith’s What Is She? and the Ideological Comedy of Curiosity – Diego Saglia
11 Recovering Charlotte Smith’s Letters: A History, With Lessons – Judith Phillips Stanton
12 Intertextualities – Stuart Curran
13 Charlotte Smith, Women Poets, and the Culture of Celebrity – Stephen C Behrendt
14 "Tell My Name To Distant Ages": The Literary Fate of Charlotte Smith – Louise Duckling

Reviews

'Contextualizing Smith as a writer in various genres – poetry, novels, plays, children's literature, letters – and as a major voice in Romanticism, Labbe has put together an accessible collection that attempts to unite the multifaceted public personas of Smith and illuminate the many narrative personas of her oeuvre. Recommended.'
– CHOICE

Related titles

• Dying to be English: Suicide Narratives and National Identity, 1721–1814
• Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page
• The Works of Charlotte Smith
• William Godwin and the Theatre

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