Product Description: In this ambitious cross-disciplinary study, Elizabeth A. Fay examines the Romantic era in Britain as a transitional period leading to the modernist focus on identity formation and legibility. Inventing the term “portraitive mode” to describe a diversity of cultural and material expressions of identity, such as visual and verbal portraits, miniatures, poetry, caricatures, and biographical dictionaries, she examines a widespread cultural shift toward a world of faces and figures that foreshadows today’s increasingly common self-reflections and depictions...read more

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Elizabeth Fay's invaluable book addresses the student in an immediate and direct manner to provide an unequalled introduction to the issues most important for feminist analyses of Romantic literature. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This innovative book explores the hypothesis that "Wordsworth the Poet" is an imaginative projection in which both William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy collaborated, developing a persona that the siblings strove to inhabit. Because William was its principal enactor, both publicly and privately, poetically and experimentally, his tendency was to sublimate Dorothy into an audible but invisible muse, located just behind him...read more

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"My mother still wants me to get a 'real' job. My father, who is retired after forty-four years in the merchant marine, has never read my work. When I visited recently, the only book in his house was the telephone book." "I do not know that my mother's mother ever acknowledged my college education except to ask me once, 'How can you live so far away from your people?'. Thus write two of the twenty women from working-class backgrounds whose voices are heard in this unique collection of essays. Each of the women has lived through the process of academic socialization - as both student and teacher - and each has thought long and deeply about her experience from an explicitly feminist perspective. Among the questions the contributors explore, What are the issues - pedagogical, theoretical, and personal - that affect the professional and private lives of these women? How do they resolve tensions between their roles as middle-class professionals and their roots in working-class families? How do class and gender intersect in the academy?