A01=Elizabeth Neiman
Author_Elizabeth Neiman
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBD
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=NL-DS
COP=United Kingdom
Discount=15
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Format=BB
Format_Hardback
HMM=216
IMPN=University of Wales Press
ISBN13=9781786833679
Language_English
Minerva's
Minerva’s
PA=Available
PD=20190215
POP=Wales
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
PUB=University of Wales Press
Subject=Literature: History & Criticism
WMM=138
Product details
- ISBN 9781786833679
- Format: Hardback
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 15 Feb 2019
- Publisher: University of Wales Press
- Publication City/Country: Wales, GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Between 1790 and 1820, William Lane’s Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of circulating-library novels by obscure female authors. Because these novels catered to the day’s fashion for sentimental themes and Gothic romance, they were and continue to be generally dismissed as ephemera. Recently, however, scholars interested in historicizing Romantic conceptions of genius and authorship have begun to write Minerva back into literary history. By making Minerva novels themselves the centre of the analysis, Minerva’s Gothics illustrates how Romantic ‘anxiety’ is better conceptualized as a mutual though not entirely equitable ‘exchange’, a dynamic interrelationship between Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics that started in 1780, when Lane began publishing novels with some regularity. Reading Minerva novels for their shared popular conventions demonstrates that circulating-library novelists collectively recirculate, engage and modify commonplaces about women’s nature, the social order and, most importantly, the very Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature that render their novels not worth reading. By recognizing Minerva’s collaborative rather than merely derivative authorial model, a forgotten pathway is restored between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelley’s influential conceptualization of the poet in A Defence of Poetry.
Elizabeth A. Neiman is Assistant Professor at the University of Maine, with a joint appointment in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include the British Romantic era, women's writing, the long-nineteenth century, and book history.
