Tracing Women's Romanticism

<p><strong>Awarded the 2005 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Book Prize by the International Conference on Romanticism</strong></p><p>This book explores a cosmopolitan tradition of nineteenth-century novels written in response to Germaine de Staël's originary novel of the artist as heroine <i>corinne</i>. The first book to delineate the contours of an international women's Romanticism it argues that the <i>künstlerromane</i> of Mary Shelley Bettine von Arnim and George Sand offer feminist understandings of history and transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within. The book examines meditative mystical and utopian visions of religious and artistic transcendence in the novels of women Romanticists as vehicles for the representation of a gendered subjectivity that seeks detachment and distance from the interests and strictures of the existing patriarchal social and cultural order. For these writers the author argues self-transcendence means an abandonment or dissolution of the individual self through political and spiritual efforts that culminate in a revelation of the divinity of a collective selfhood that comes into being through historical process.</p>