Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716 - 1818 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travel in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces, and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the labouring classes, and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the 'man of taste' as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls' study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources at the peripheries of empire rather than at its centre. British readers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries eagerly consumed books of travels in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Beauty, sublimity, sensuous surfaces, and scenic views became conventions of travel writing as Britons applied familiar terms to unfamiliar places around the globe. The social logic of aesthetics, argues Elizabeth Bohls, constructed women, the laboring classes, and non-Europeans as foils against which to define the "man of taste" as an educated, property-owning gentleman. Women writers from Mary Wortley Montagu to Mary Shelley resisted this exclusion from gentlemanly privilege, and their writings re-examine and question aesthetic conventions such as the concept of disinterested contemplation, subtly but insistently exposing its vested interests. Bohls's study expands our awareness of women's intellectual presence in Romantic literature, and suggests Romanticism's sources might be at the peripheries of empire rather than at its center. Cover 1 Title 6 Copyright 7 Contents 8 List of illustrations 9 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 1. Aesthetics and Orientalism in Mary Wortley Montagu's letters 34 2. Janet Schaw and the aesthetics of colonialism 57 3. Landscape aesthetics and the paradox of the female picturesque 77 4. Helen Maria Williams' revolutionary landscapes 119 5. Mary Wollstonecraft's anti-aesthetics 151 6. Dorothy Wordsworth and the cultural politics of scenic tourism 181 7. The picturesque and the female sublime in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho 220 8. Aesthetics, gender, and empire in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein 241 Notes 257 Select bibliography 302 Index 317 CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM 321 Travel writing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was staple fare in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Elizabeth Bohls examines the ways in which women's travel writing of this period both drew on and challenged the conventions of aesthetic theory. Elizabeth A. Bohls. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 291-305) And Index.