Charlotte Smith's Poetry As Sentimental Discourse‪.‬

IN THE FIELD OF ROMANTIC SCHOLARSHIP CHARLOTTE SMITH'S POETRY HAS in recent years come to be seen as one of the most paradigmatic literary sources revealing the artistic constructedness of gender. A lot of critical attention has been paid to the gender roles and meanings inscribed in her poetry in ways that not only illuminate their textuality but also display how modern critics read gender into Romantic texts, thereby contributing to the ongoing revision of the established norms of canonicity and tradition. In addition to the influence she had on the first male Romantics, notably Wordsworth and Coleridge, (1) Smith's enormous importance for literary history and criticism today seems to lie chiefly in the deconstructive potential of her work as detected by scholars exploring the gendered and generic constructions of subjectivity and poetic identity in the Romantic lyric. (2) Stuart Curran maintains that "Charlotte Smith was the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic." (3) It can be added that Smith is the major poet whose work reveals how deeply and inextricably the Romantic tradition is rooted in the sentimental. Embodying fusions and hybridizations of what modem literary criticism has come to differentiate as the sentimental and the Romantic traditions, Smith's poetry not only illustrates their common ground, but also their differential qualities with respect to each other, which, considering their continuity, should perhaps be reassessed under the categories of the sentimental and the sublime. As Stephen Behrendt writes, "we might consider to what extent Romanticism might fruitfully be delineated by the ways in which writers and citizens alike position themselves, at various points in the period, in relation to an axis whose poles are the Sentimental and the Sublime." (4)