Adapting the Saints: Romantic Hagiography in Felicia Hemans's Records of Woman

Throughout Records of Woman: With Other Poems (1828), Felicia Hemans repurposes biographies of female saints, prosopographies of exemplary women, and sacred art to interrogate women's domestic roles across cultures. By merging secular and religious emotions, Hemans constructs a distinctly Roman...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period 2013-11, Vol.20 (4), p.496-517
Main Author: Laird, Karen E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biographies
Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne (1793-1835)
Literary criticism
Saints
Women
Writers
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Throughout Records of Woman: With Other Poems (1828), Felicia Hemans repurposes biographies of female saints, prosopographies of exemplary women, and sacred art to interrogate women's domestic roles across cultures. By merging secular and religious emotions, Hemans constructs a distinctly Romantic brand of hagiography that venerates exemplary women who embrace suffering and death for a noble cause. Hemans's critics imposed a more traditional model of hagiography onto her biography after her death, thereby shaping the Romantic poet's posthumous reputation into that of a saintly Victorian poetess.
ISSN:0969-9082
1747-5848
DOI:10.1080/09699082.2012.747254