Verse in English from Eighteenth-century Ireland


Book Description

This pioneering anthology introduces many previously neglected eighteenth-century writers to a general readership, and will lead to a re-examination of the entire canon of Irish verse in English. Between 1700 and 1800, Dublin was second only to London as a center for the printing of poetry in English. Many fine poets were active during this period. However, because Irish eighteenth-century verse in English has to a great extent escaped the scholar and the anthologist, it is hardly known at all. The most innovative aspect of this new anthology is the inclusion of many poetic voices entirely unknown to modern readers. Although the anthology contains the work of well-known figures such as John Toland, Thomas Parnell, Jonathan Swift, Patrick Delany, Laetitia Pilkington and Oliver Goldsmith, there are many verses by lesser known writers and nearly eighty anonymous poems which come from the broadsheets, manuscripts and chapbooks of the time. What emerges is an entirely new perspective on life in eighteenth-century Ireland. We hear the voice of a hard working farmer's wife from county Derry, of a rambling weaver from county Antrim, and that of a woman dying from drink. We learn about whale-fishing in county Donegal, about farming in county Kerry and bull-baiting in Dublin. In fact, almost every aspect of life in eighteenth-century Ireland is described vividly, energetically, with humor and feeling in the verse of this anthology. Among the most moving poems are those by Irish-speaking poets who use amhran or song meter and internal assonance, both borrowed from Irish, in their English verse. Equally interesting is the work of the weaver poets of Ulster who wrote in vigorous and energetic Ulster-Scots. The anthology also includes political poems dating from the reign of James II to the Act of Union, as well as a selection of lesser-known nationalist and Orange songs. Each poem is fully annotated and the book also contains a glossary of terms in Hiberno-English and Ulster Scots.




Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain


Book Description

The poetry of the mid- and late-eighteenth century has long been regarded as primarily private and apolitical; in this wide-ranging study Dustin Griffin argues that in fact the poets of the period were addressing the great issues of national life--rebellion at home, imperial wars abroad, an expanding commercial empire, an emerging new British national identity. Taking up the topic of patriotic verse, Griffin shows that poets such as Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper were engaged in the century-long debate about the nature of true patriotism.




War, State, and Society in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland


Book Description

The middle of the 18th century was a period of continuous warfare as Britain, and therefore Ireland, was involved in conflict with Spain and France. This text explores the impact of these wars and the consequences for the economy, society, politics, religious divisions, and attitudes to empire.




A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry


Book Description

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).




Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies


Book Description

'This book convincingly challenges both the extremely short historical memory of most postcolonial work and the all-too-insularly English world still conjured by period specialists. Hogarthian whores and Grub Street hacks, coffee houses and fashionable pastimes, and the burgeoning of print culture all stand revealed as intimately bound to portents of plantation insurgency, agitation for abolition, and the vast fortunes produced by the labouring bodies of the poor, the colonized, and the enslaved. Eighteenth-century studies has never appeared in a more engaged and fascinating light.'Professor Donna Landry, University of KentIn this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cultural relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland. The formal innovations and practices characteristic of eighteenth-century English literature were often responses to the worlds brought into view by travel writers, merchants, and colonists. Writers (even those suspicious of mercantile and colonial expansion) worked with a growing sense of a 'national literature' whose achievements would provide the cultural capital adequate to global imperial power, and would distinguish Great Britain for its twin success in 'arms and arts'. The book ranges from Davenant's theatre to Smollet's Roderick Random to Phillis Wheatley's poetry to trace the impact of empire on literary creativity.Key Features*An introduction to the impact of mercantilism and empire on the crafting of eighteenth-century British literature*Encourages students to examine the key formal innovations that define eighteenth-century British literary history as they were produced by writers who redefined




Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland


Book Description

An edited collection examining the construction of popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.




Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century


Book Description

This book offers a radical new theory of the role of poetry in the rise of cultural nationalism. With equal attention to England, Scotland, and Wales, the book takes an Archipelagic approach to the study of poetics, print media, and medievalism in the rise of British Romanticism. It tells the story of how poets and antiquarian editors in the British nations rediscovered forgotten archaic poetic texts and repurposed them as the foundation of a new concept of the nation, now imagined as a primarily cultural formation. It also draws on legal and ecclesiastical history in drawing a sharp contrast between early modern and Romantic antiquarianisms. Equally a work of literary criticism and history, the book offers provocative new theorizations of nationalism and Romanticism and new readings of major British poets, including Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.




The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing


Book Description

This study, first published in 2000, examines the role of language as an instrument of empire in eighteenth-century British literature.




Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne


Book Description

Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne is the first detailed study of the final Stuart succession crisis. It demonstrates for the first time the centrality of debates about royal succession to the literature and political culture of the early eighteenth century. Using previously neglected, misunderstood, and newly discovered material, Joseph Hone shows that arguments about Anne's right to the throne were crucial to the construction of nascent party political identities. Literary texts were the principal vehicle through which contemporaries debated the new queen's legitimacy. This book sheds fresh light on canonical authors such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison by setting their writing alongside the work of lesser known but nonetheless important figures such as John Tutchin, William Pittis, Nahum Tate, John Dennis, Henry Sacheverell, Charles Leslie, and other anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Through close historical analysis, it shows how this new generation of poets, preachers, and pamphleteers transformed older models of succession writing by Milton, Dryden, and others, and imbued conventional genres such as panegyric and satire with their own distinctive poetics. By immersing the major authors in their milieu, and reconstructing the political and material contexts in which those authors wrote, Literature and Party Politics demonstrates the vitality of debates about royal succession in early eighteenth-century culture.