Romanticism Discourses

Romanticism. Comparative Discourses is a new volume of the Nineteenth Century Series published by Ashgate Publishing last month. The editors are Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. The book contains an analysis of Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey.

Exploring how discourse is figured in the texts of key European Romantic authors such as Wackenroder, Coleridge, Byron, and Hugo, this volume offers nuanced readings of the under-explored syntactic, semantic, and ideological structures of Romantic works. Rather than proposing a new theoretical position on the issue of what constitutes Romantic discourse studies, the editors have commissioned essays that seek to capture aspects of this discursive field, building on previous scholarship to offer fresh ways of seeing how Romantic discourse matrices work.

The volume is organized into three sections: Language and Romantic Discourse Systems; Women Writers and Romantic Constructions of Power; and Varieties of Revisionist Discourse in Romanticism. Each section features individual essays providing critical re-readings of nine Romantic texts and four Romantic topoi. Whether writing on Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House or Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, on rescue operas or criminal drama, the contributors, who include Marjean Purinton, Kari Lokke, Rodney Farnsworth, and Jeffrey Cass, expand our understanding of Romantic modes of argumentation.

The second part, Women Writers and Romantic Constructions of Power, contains this chapter:

• The discourse of religious Bildung in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey by Larry H. Peer. (143-154)

Categories: Books, Scholar, Anne_Brontë, Agnes_Grey