Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Forcefully written and theoretically astute, this is a consistently interesting and intelligent contribution to the new work on the origins of aesthetic discourse." SEL"...is an important book, and will enlarge our understanding of this intricate and influential area....aesthetic discourse is admirably expounded..." Times Literary Supplement"Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 does present an important line of inquiry that explores the ideological assumptions of that most popular reflection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperialist assumptions, travel literature....Bohls adds to the growing appreciation of the literary and cultural contributions of eighteenth-century women writers who have largely been left out of such histories, and she adds her voice to the persuasive argument of critics like Nancy Miller who argue that in the gaps , fissures, and disruptions in women's texts are the moments of dissent and resistance that helped to shape a countertradition in social, literary, and political thought." Barbara Zonitch, Albion"...Women Travel Writers makes the most useful contribution to this project and is likely to significantly revise our maps of Romanticism." Amanda Gilroy, The Wordsworth Circle"Bohls's study provides a penetrating analysis of eighteenth century aesthetic theory and practice." Carole Fabricant, Journal of English and Germanic Philology"Bohls goes a long way toward accounting for the cultural impact of rhetorical strategies in eighteenth-century Britain and exposes the power implicit in standards of beauty and taste." Audrey Bilger, Women's Studies
Review
'An important and serious contribution to the field ... an interesting intervention in a growing field and Bohls's consideration of women writers in particular is timely. Importantly, the argument of the book reverses the practice, prevalent in post-structuralist criticism, of isolating the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century away from their immediate cultural context. Bohls's work, by contrast, explores the interaction between aesthetic ambitions and the practices of eighteenth century social life. In this respect Bohl's book deserves much credit.' English
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
This study re-examines the genre of Romantic travel writing through the perspective of women writers.
Table of Contents
1. Aesthetics and Orientalism in Mary Wortley Montagu's letters; 2. Janet Schaw and the aesthetics of colonialism; 3. Landscape aesthetics and the paradox of the female picturesque; 4. Helen Maria Williams' revolutionary landscapes; 5. Mary Wollstonecraft's anti-aesthetics; 6. Dorothy Wordsworth and the cultural politics of scenic tourism; 7. The picturesque and the female sublime in Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho; 8. Aesthetics, gender, and empire in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.