Tracing Womens Romanticism Gender History And Transcendence Kari E Lokke by Kari E. Lokke instant download after payment.

This book explores a cosmopolitan tradition of nineteenth-century idealist novels written in response to Germaine de Staël’s originary novel of the artist as heroine, Corinne, or Italy. The author discusses the Bildungsromane of Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim and George Sand, as responses to Staël’s portrait of the artist as abandoned woman, victim of betrayed love. The first study to consider these major figures from European Romanticism as members of a coherent tradition, Tracing Women’s Romanticism argues that Staël, Shelley, Arnim, and Sand create proto-feminist visions of spiritual and artistic transcendence that constitute a critique of Romanticism from within. In novels such as Valperga, Die Günderode and Consuelo, disappointment with Romantic love becomes a catalyst for heightened spiritual, historical and political awareness. This awareness leads to disillusionment with Romanticism’s privileging of melancholy, Byronic will and masculinist conceptions of history and Bildung. For these women Romanticists, the search for self-transcendence means rejection of the socially defined limits of individual identity. This abandonment or dissolution of the individual self comes about through historical, artistic, and meditative efforts that culminate in the revelation of the divinity of a collective and potentially revolutionary self.