Feminising Romantic Sexuality, Perverting Feminine Romanticism

This essay suggests that scholarship on transgressive sexuality in the field of Romantic studies has lagged behind comparable scholarship in the fields of eighteenth-century and Victorian studies. It shows how women’s writing in particular has come to be excluded from the conversation among Romanticists interested in the history of sexuality, in significant part because of the direction of early scholarship on female Romantic writers. This scholarship posited competing traditions of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ Romanticism, variously defined but with a combined effect of creating a two-sex model of Romanticism that has tended to gloss over the engagement of women writers with sexuality. The essay traces notable contributions to thinking about sexuality in relation the male Romantic writers since the eras of Mario Praz, Michel Foucault and Thomas Laqueur and gestures towards how female Romantic writers might be meaningfully brought into dialogue with the growing body of scholarship on transgressive sexuality in Romantic studies.