Albion's epic heroines: Romanticism, gender, and nationalism, 1790--1830.

摘要

This study of gender and genre addresses how British Romantic poets feminized the epic form. Romantic epics deserve study because of their unusual focus on feminine heroism as a source of liberation from tyranny, a focus on gender that reflects the influence of Edmund Spenser and John Milton. Romantic epics deconstruct the warlike role of the classical epic hero, and elevate an ideal of femininity as a capacity for sympathetic identification with foreigners—a capacity at odds with isolationist hostility and militant forms of imperial conquest. Set in the British Isles, Spain, Italy, Arabia, India, Mexico, and the Pacific Islands, the Romantic epics discussed in this study each address a watershed historical moment, when cultures contact, clash, and change permanently. In many Romantic epics, feminine heroism operates outside of history, calling attention to gaps in historical records, and critiquing the role of tyrannical authorities in preserving knowledge of the past. If these epics deconstructed history's memorials, at the same time they tended to present the British nation as the end result of historical progress. Romantic epics further reflect British dreams of empire, but at the same time they reveal considerable anxiety about hybridizing forces resulting from cultural contact, forces that challenged British Protestant values with a dangerous spiritual fervor widely associated with “the Orient.” Most invest their heroines with Protestant and feminist values to strive against tyrannies of superstition and ignorance. A remarkable few conceptualize a “human form divine” as a fusion of gendered interests kept forcibly apart in tyrannical systems. Romantic epic heroines often promote British values, but as often they disturb received conventions about gender and women's agency in history. An important part of the movement to feminize epic were women poets, who aspired to epic stature in what had for centuries been a male preserve; therefore, this study explores how men and women writers influenced each other's ideas of gender, cultural encounter, and epic form. Poets discussed include William Blake, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Mary Tighe, Mary Russell Mitford, Lord Byron, Matilda Betham, Percy Shelley, and Margaret Compton.