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The social construction of gender in Britain during the Romantic era—in which males were consigned to the public sphere and females to the private sphere under the laws of couverture—produced an all-important difference between the writings of men and women, what we might call masculine as opposed to feminine Romanticism. Male writers tended to celebrate the development of an autonomous self, the divinity of the creative imagination, a political revolution leading to democratic freedom, and the elevation of poetry as the highest genre. Female writers, in contrast, embraced an ideology grounded in family politics; the equality of the sexes and races; the value of rationality, prudence, and self-discipline; a relational self; and the genre of the novel as the form best suited to represent the gradual evolution of the community over time. The Gothic novel offers a compelling example of the difference that gender can make.

Why did Mary Shelley create THE myth of modern science on June 16, 1816? This essay explores the autobiographical and scientific origins of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, focusing on the ways in which the sexual division of labor in 19th Century Britain shaped the novel. Victor Frankenstein’s project – to have a baby without a woman (and thus eliminate the biological necessity for females) – points to the myriad ways in which the women in the novel, from Elizabeth Lavenza, Caroline Beaufort, and Justine Moritz to the female creature, are de-valued or destroyed. But in Mary’s feminist novel, Mother Nature fights back, killing Victor and transforming his creature into a monster. Shelley’s novel implicitly argues that human beings must co-operate with rather than dominate the natural order of reproduction.

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.”

From February 1796 until May 1797, The Monthly Magazine, the dissenting journal, edited by John Aikin, ran a series of seventeen questions posed by an anonymous ‘The Enquirer’. It is the third of these questions, published with a lengthy answer and appearing in the third issue of the journal in April 1796, that I wish to take up here. The question was this: ‘Are literary and scientific pursuits suited to the female character?’ The Enquirer, defining himself as a ‘lover of wisdom’, first observes

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

Anne K. Mellor is Professor Above Scale of English and Women's Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Blake's Human Form Divine (1974), English Romantic Irony (1980),Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988),Romanticism and Gender (1993), and Mothers of the Nation: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (2000).

(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.