Emma Clery: "Mary Wollstonecraft, Romanticism, and the Gothic"

Abstract:

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), is recognised today as an important Enlightenment philosopher. Why then did she turn to travel writing and fiction writing for the further development of her political ideas? This paper discusses the place of the ‘romantic’ and of affect and imagination in her oeuvre.

Speaker Biography

Emma Clery is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English at Uppsala University. Her publications include Mary Wollstonecraft: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025); Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister; Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: Poetry, Protest and Economic Crisis, (Cambridge University Press, 2017), winner of the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury; Women’s Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley; and The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800.