Romantic Passions

The essays collected in this volume of Praxis are intended to begin a dialogue that draws together the issues raised by women writers through their consciousness about gender and their tradition-inscribed relation to love. These issues work as a counter to the transcendence of love implicit in theories of the sublime. Not every area of recent scholarship could be represented by the essays that follow, however readers familiar with seminal works such as Joan DeJean's study of Sapphism, Eve Sedgwick's article on sensibility as sexuality in Austen, Louis Crompton's study of Byron and homosexuality, Lillian Faderman's study of lesbianism and "Romantic friendship," and Elizabeth Mavor's study of the Ladies of Llangollen, will be able to realize how we can even begin thinking about love and passion within the context of what had previously been an ascetic Romanticism.