Romantic Devotion : Voice, Praise and Print Culture 1772–1811

Focusing on the radical writers Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Fairclough demonstrates the importance of religion for their creative practice, showing how, by harnessing innovations in form and genre, their works catalyse devotional feeling and centre the voices of women and girls.

Devotional forms and practices had a shaping influence on female authorship, economies of print, and cultures of reading during the Romantic period. Mary Fairclough analyses the work of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays to demonstrate how these aspects of Romantic literary culture can be traced back to devotional customs. These authors, she shows, sustain the religious force of such customs, but at the same time they make them new, by appropriating devotional models to produce affective, inclusive forms of authorship, print, and reading. In doing so they harness the most up to date technologies and trends in book production and publishing, enabling innovations in literary form and genre and producing new, hybrid modes of writing. Simultaneously, they centre acts of voicing to emphasise that literary texts are catalysts for embodied practices of vocal performance and the creation of community which centres women and girls.