| dc.description | This dissertation advances the study of an author famous in her own time but only recently rediscovered by literary criticism. My three main objectives are to supply a thorough critical heritage of Charlotte Smith, to examine the processes involved in her gradual disappearance and her more sudden revival, and to secure her place in the literary history of early British Romanticism by showing in detail her influence on her younger contemporaries, primarily Jane Austen and William Wordsworth. In my introductory chapter I suggest some of the more problematic implications of Smith's recanonization and propose a method for examining her influence in the present critical moment, when influence (anxious or otherwise) is under pressure from the broader notion of intertextuality. Chapter two focuses on biographical matters, including the autobiographical tendency in Smith's writing and the disproportionate emphasis sometimes placed on her "life" at the expense of her "work." This chapter also surveys Smith's surprisingly extensive literary acquaintance. Chapter three is a critical history, beginning with Smith's earliest general evaluations as a writer and following her critical fortunes through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter four examines the influence Smith exerted, through her fiction and her poetry, on the young Jane Austen. Chapter five is a deconstructive exercise analyzing Samuel Taylor Coleridge's admiration of William Lisle Bowles and the role this relationship has played in obscuring Charlotte Smith's significance for early Romanticism. My final three chapters explore various aspects of Smith's extensive and yet subdued influence on William Wordsworth. These three chapters are closely inter-related, but they are distinguished by differing thematic clusters as well as differing generic and chronological centres. By stressing concrete allusions on one hand and the complex background of national and sexual politics on the other, I hope to combine two methodologies--old-fashioned source-hunting and feminist New Historicism--to arrive at a single conclusion: Smith's work in poetry and in fiction played an important, if occluded, role in early British Romanticism. | en_US |
