A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
Edited by Christine Gerrard
This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism.
The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s ‘Stella’ poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume.
The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).
Table of Content
Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Christine Gerrard
Part I Contexts and Perspectives 5
1 Poetry, Politics, and the Rise of Party 7
Christine Gerrard
2 Poetry, Politics, and Empire 23
Suvir Kaul
3 Poetry and Science 38
Clark Lawlor
4 Poetry and Religion 53
Emma Mason
5 Poetic Enthusiasm 69
John D. Morillo
6 Poetry and the Visual Arts 83
Robert Jones
7 Poetry, Popular Culture, and the Literary Marketplace 97
George Justice
8 Women Poets and Their Writing in Eighteenth-Century Britain 111
Charlotte Grant
9 Poetry, Sentiment, and Sensibility 127
Jennifer Keith
Part II Readings 143
10 John Gay, The Shepherd’s Week 145
Mina Gorji
11 Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock and ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ 157
Valerie Rumbold
12 Jonathan Swift, the ‘Stella’ Poems 170
Ros Ballaster
13 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Six Town Eclogues and Other Poems 184
Isobel Grundy
14 James Thomson, The Seasons 197
Christine Gerrard
15 Stephen Duck, The Thresher’s Labour, and Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour 209
John Goodridge
16 Mary Leapor, ‘Crumble-Hall’ 223
David Fairer
17 Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination 237
Adam Rounce
18 Samuel Johnson, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes 252
David F. Venturo
19 William Collins, ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ 265
John Sitter
20 Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 277
Suvir Kaul
21 Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno 290
Chris Mounsey
22 Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, and George Crabbe, The Village 303
Caryn Chaden
23 William Cowper, The Task 316
Freya Johnston
24 Robert Burns, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ 329
Murray Pittock
Part III Forms and Genres 339
25 Rhyming Couplets and Blank Verse 341
Richard Bradford
26 Epic and Mock-Heroic 356
Richard Terry
27 Verse Satire 369
Brean Hammond
28 The Ode 386
Margaret M. Koehler
29 The Georgic 403
Juan Christian Pellicer
30 The Verse Epistle 417
Bill Overton
Part IV Themes and Debates 429
31 The Constructions of Femininity 431
Kathryn R. King
32 Whig and Tory Poetics 444
Abigail Williams
33 The Classical Inheritance 458
David Hopkins
34 Augustanism and Pre-Romanticism 473
Thomas Woodman
35 Recovering the Past: Shakespeare, Spenser, and British Poetic Tradition 486
Carolyn D. Williams
36 The Pleasures and Perils of the Imagination 500
Paul Baines
37 The Sublime 515
Shaun Irlam
38 Poetry and the City 534
Markman Ellis
39 Cartography and the Poetry of Place 549
Rachel Crawford
40 Rural Poetry and the Self-Taught Tradition 563
Bridget Keegan
41 Poetry Beyond the English Borders 577
Gerard Carruthers
Index 590
About the author
Christine Gerrard is Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. She is the author of Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (2003) and The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (1994), and editor of The Cambridge Edition of The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson: Correspondence with Aaron Hill and the Hill Family (2013). She is the co-editor, with David Fairer, of Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).
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