The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry
by Marlon B. Ross

This is the first extended study of the role gender plays in the writing, reading, publishing, and reviewing of poetry in late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain. Ross examines the ways in which Romanticism has been constructed, from the Romantic period to the present, as a masculine enterprise. He then traces the growth of a "feminine" poetic tradition from 1730 to 1830, showing the importance of this previously neglected tradition in the understanding of 19th-century British culture, and the development of current literary history, theory, and taste.