Borderlines

Opening with the revolution-era debates of the 1790s, Borderlines reads Romantic genders across a mobile syntax, tuned to such figures as the stylized "feminine" poetess, the aberrant "masculine" woman, male poets deemed "feminine" or "unmanly," the campy male "effeminate," and hapless or strategic cross-dressers of both sexes. With fresh readings of the works, careers, and volatile receptions of Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, M. J. Jewsbury, Lord Byron, and John Keats, Susan Wolfson shows how senses (and sensations) of gender shape and get shaped by sign systems that prove arbitrary, fluid, and susceptible of lively transformation.