‘Imaginary circles round the human mind’: Bias and Openness in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

Abstract

Christoph Bode offers a fresh reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), one of the most celebrated and best-known British romantic-period engagements with Scandinavia. Bode focuses on the generic tension in Letters between an attempt to provide credible witness to Scandinavia and the attempt to forge a ‘romantic’ persona. Wollstonecraft’s narrative, Bode concludes, involves less a description than an aesthetics of appropriation, an aesthetics which marks Wollstonecraft’s Letters as surprisingly and distinctly unrepresentative of the larger cultural patterns of exchange which we discern in this volume.