Real and Imagined Women in British Romanticism uses feminist ideology and deconstructive
criticism to reconstruct the cultural context embedded in Romantic canonical texts. To achieve
this end the book undertakes a close textual study of these texts and places them in the
intellectual context of Mary Wollstonecraft's critique of culture. As a result of intellectual
contextualizing as well as theoretical applications the Romantic imagination as represented
by William Wordsworth and John Keats emerges as the place where gender division and gender
certitude break down. This book intervenes in the traditional critical debates about the
Romantic imagination to show that the Romantic imagination as set forth in these texts
registers the vigorous cultural politics of gender and aesthetics that defined the 1790s and
continued to exert influence for decades.
