![]() The thesis is a study of the representation of diet in Shelley's writing and in the sources and contexts upon which it draws. Contents: Introduction 'Real solemn history': rethinking tradition 'Fashion's brightest arts decoy': fashion and originality Disinterest, economics and the tasteful spectator Self-control: romantic psychologies of taste Rustic tastes: the romantic tale Conclusion Works cited Index. In demonstrating that women writers' discussion of taste can be understood as an intervention at the most fundamental level of political involvement, Price advances our understanding of Romantic aesthetics. Her book departs from previous studies of aesthetics that emphasize the differences between male and female writers or focus on higher status literary forms such as the treatise. The revolution in taste occasioned by their writing, she argues, was not only aesthetic but, following in the wake of British debates on the French Revolution, politically charged. ![]() While she offers a re-evaluation of major women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, Price also places emphasis on less well-known figures, including Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Hamilton and Priscilla Wakefield. How and to what extent did women writers shape and inform the aesthetics of Romanticism? Were undervalued genres such as the romance, gothic fiction, the tale, and the sentimental and philosophical novel part of a revolution leading to newer, more democratic models of taste? Fiona Price takes up these important questions in her wide-ranging study of women's prose writing during an extended Romantic period. In so doing, ecocritical approaches make for a fruitful reconsideration of Romantic and Victorian nature literature. The present analysis concludes in the belief that, in challenging the gendered hierarchy in the self-other opposition, such ideas represent a sophisticated continuation of the Romantic critique of the problematic relationship to the natural environment that exists in capitalist society. The ideas of thinkers such as Murray Bookchin, on social ecology, and Freya Mathews, on the ecological self, have been particularly influential. This work takes its theoretical impetus from environmentalist and feminist cultural theories. However, this thesis offers a contributionist literary history in which an interest in other species has advanced women's social status in terms of mobility, education and opportunities to participate in science and politics. Gender affects access to the countryside and determines the public context in which knowledge about the natural world is represented and shared. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the human negotiation with the living world is complicated by gender identity. The ecocritical groundwork of Bate and Kroeber is extended to examine a range of non-canonical texts that confirm and complement, but also occasionally contend, the Wordsworthian approach. These accounts are focused in discussions of literary encounters with particular genera: mid-Victorian seaweed collecting and the satirical treatment of the great apes. Categories of human well-being are explored in three contexts: valuing and accessing the countryside, botany and attitudes to animals. It considers how such claims might be substantiated by surveying a range of literary representations of the natural world between 17. With reference to Wordsworth's suggestion that the 'love of nature' leads to the 'love of man', this thesis examines claims that a sympathetic engagement with the natural world can contribute to human well-being and social progress.
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