Charlotte Smith in British Romanticism (The Enlilghtenment World)

Famously commemorated by William Wordsworth as a poet 'to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered', Charlotte Smith is an originating voice of 'the Romantic' whose centrality is at last being recognized, 170 years after Wordsworth's double-edged encomium. Her early sonnets established the genre as a Romantic form; her novels advanced sensibility as a trope beyond its two-dimensional reliance on emotional facility; and her blank verse initiated one of the most familiar of Romantic verse forms. As an innovator, she reflects the Romantic concern with energizing the familiar, while her interests in science and philosophy, apparent in her paratexts, reveal her ambitions to understand her place in the quotidian. This volume draws together the best of current Smith scholarship. Essays are organized according to genre, and contextualized by a substantial introduction.