Minervas Gothics

Between 1790 and 1820, William Lanes Minerva Press published an unprecedented number of circulating-library novels by obscure female authors. Because these novels catered to the days fashion for sentimental themes and Gothic romance, they were and continue to be generally dismissed as ephemera. Recently, however, scholars interested in historicizing Romantic conceptions of genius and authorship have begun to write Minerva back into literary history. By making Minerva novels themselves the centre of the analysis, Minervas Gothics illustrates how Romantic anxiety is better conceptualized as a mutual though not entirely equitable exchange, a dynamic interrelationship between Minerva novels and Romantic-era politics and poetics that started in 1780, when Lane began publishing novels with some regularity. Reading Minerva novels for their shared popular conventions demonstrates that circulating-library novelists collectively recirculate, engage and modify commonplaces about womens nature, the social order and, most importantly, the very Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature that render their novels not worth reading. By recognizing Minervas collaborative rather than merely derivative authorial model, a forgotten pathway is restored between first-generation Romantic reactions to popular print culture and Percy Shelleys influential conceptualization of the poet in A Defence of Poetry.