Charlotte Smith – författare

Charlotte Smith's life was the stuff of romantic anguish; upon marriage she felt exiled in "personal slavery", and began publishing poems to earn money while in debtor's prison with her extravagant husband. They subsequently resided in France and lived on subscriptions to her poems and translation work, but she eventually left her husband, "fearing my life was not safe", and began publishing novels annually in order to provide for her children. Smith was the first English poet whom, in retrospect, we could call Romantic, and was particularly influential on Wordsworth's style and ideas. Her poetry, beginning with the first edition of Elegaic Sonnets in 1784, was well received by her contemporaries; her final masterpiece, Beachy Head, published posthumously in 1807, powerfully illustrates the impulse to resolve the self into nature. Today, Smith is known primarily as a novelist (her previously un-reprinted novel, The Banished Man, will appear in the series), but this volume will be the first complete collection of her poems. It promises to revolutionize our ideas about the development of English Romanticism. This unprecedented new series reintroduces women's writings of cultural and literary interest, from the Medieval period through the early nineteenth century, often for the first time since their original publication. Derived from the Brown University Women Writers Project, the series unearths a wide range of neglected gems, dispelling the myth that women wrote little of real value before the Victorian period. Each volume includes an introduction putting the work in its historical and literary context and helpful explanatory notes.

In The Young Philosopher, George Delmont embraces an agrarian life and devotes himself to the pursuit of knowledge. But it is George's love Medora Glenmorris and her mother Laura who provide the emotional core of the novel. Contrasting the pain and suffering of individuals with the idealism of the French Revolution and the hope provided by glimpses of life in America, Smith exposes philosophical enlightenment as an ineffective weapon for fighting the widespread corruption of English society. The early novels of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) were precursors of the gothic tradition that came to dominate the Romantic period. Her later fiction, including The Young Philosopher (1798), were more political in nature and influenced both the form and substance of works by nineteenth-century novelists such as Austen and Dickens.

While challenges to authority are generally perceived as destructive to legal order, this original collection of essays, with Magna Carta at its heart, questions this assumption. In a series of chapters concerned with different forms of challenges to legal authority - over time, geographical place, and subject matters both public and private - this volume demonstrates that challenges to authority which seek the recognition of rights actually change the existing legal order rather than destroying it. The chapters further explore how the myth of Magna Carta emerged and its role in the pre-modern world; how challenges to authority formed the basis of the recognition of rights in particular areas within England; and how challenges to authority resulted in the recognition of particular rights in the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany. This is a uniquely insightful thematic collection which proposes a new view into the processes of legal change.

While challenges to authority are generally perceived as destructive to legal order, this original collection of essays, with Magna Carta at its heart, questions this assumption. In a series of chapters concerned with different forms of challenges to legal authority - over time, geographical place, and subject matters both public and private - this volume demonstrates that challenges to authority which seek the recognition of rights actually change the existing legal order rather than destroying it. The chapters further explore how the myth of Magna Carta emerged and its role in the pre-modern world; how challenges to authority formed the basis of the recognition of rights in particular areas within England; and how challenges to authority resulted in the recognition of particular rights in the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany. This is a uniquely insightful thematic collection which proposes a new view into the processes of legal change.