Summary: Publisher Summary 1 Integrates two new developments in British Romantic studies--the recovery of women Romantic writers and the revaluation of gender politics in Gothic fiction. Hoeveler (English and Women's Studies, Marquette U.) argues that a female-created literary ideology arose as the Gothic novel helped create a new social role of professional victim for women adjusting to the new bourgeois order. She examines how representations of both men and women in these novels moved from the purely psychosexual into social and political representations, and how the writers of these novels constructed a series of ideologies that would allow their female characters fictitious mastery over an oppressive social and political system. The novelists whose work is studied include Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Charlotte Dacre Byrne, Mary Shelley, and the Bronte sisters. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.