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After situating the genesis of Romanticism and Gender within the academic and political debates of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and summarizing the book's distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” Romanticism, this essay turns to the book's impact on more recent academic monographs, articles, anthologies, and curricula. The essay ends by outlining a program of what remains to be done to ensure that the question “What difference does gender make to our understanding of Romantic-era literature?” is more fully answered.

Lucy Aikin was the most eminent feminist historian and poet of her day. As the product of two of the leading dissenting Unitarian families in England, she fully embraced the principles of the Enlig...

When can the term “cosmopolitan” legitimately be applied to political theories or literary texts? After surveying recent theoretical discussions of cosmopolitanism in the fields of political science, philosophy and literary studies, this essay argues for a more restrictive definition of cosmopolitanism, one that found expression in the writings of Romantic‐era British women. To explore the theoretical implications of what I am calling an “embodied cosmopolitanism,” I turn to a detailed analysis of Marianna Starke's play, The Widow of Malabar. Together with Elizabeth Inchbald's Such Things Are, Hannah Cowley's A Day in Turkey, and Charlotte Smith's late novels, these texts suggest provocative new ways to give substance to Kant's demand for global “cosmopolitan rights.”

(2002). Interracial Sexual Desire In Charlotte Dacre'S Zofloya. European Romantic Review: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 169-173.

(2001). Frankenstein, racial science, and the yellow peril. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1-28.

(2000). Making an exhibition of her self: Mary “Perdita” Robinson and nineteenth‐century scripts of female sexuality. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 271-304.

(1997). Romanticism, gender and the anxieties of empire: An introduction. European Romantic Review: Vol. 8, British Romanticism: Global Crossings, pp. 148-154.

(1996). Righting the wrongs of woman: Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 19, Writing women/writing power, pp. 413-424.

Since a gender‐free society has never existed historically, feminist thinking that posits the equality of the sexes is inherently Utopian. Feminist Utopian writers, working within the traditional genre of science‐fiction, a genre particularly well‐suited to revolutionary theoretical discussions, have explored three types of feminist utopias: all‐female societies, biological androgyny, and genuinely egalitarian two‐sex societies. This essay examines examples of feminist utopias in each of these three paradigms to determine to what extent they are “abstract” (in Ernst Bloch's terminology), ie. merely wish‐fulfillment fantasies, and to what extent “concrete” and thus viable blue‐prints for future political and social organization.