Class and the Canon—Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1780-1900

This essay collection focuses on a continuous tradition of labouring-class poetics, from burns in the eighteenth century to the mid-late century Victorian dialect poets who saw themselves, and were seen as, his direct heirs. It speaks to recent scholarly interest in and recovery of labouring-class writing from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By focusing on how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a 'canon', how they situated their work in relation to peers and contemporaries, as well as more established poets from their own and earlier periods, the essays here highlight the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities and practices across this period. The poets and critics discussed, coming from diverse backgrounds in terms of regional idntity, level of education, and involvement in established literary culture, complicate our understanding of what labouring-class poets might do and might achieve.

KIRSTIE BLAIR is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, UK. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and is the author of two monographs on Victorian poetry, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion and Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart.

MINA GORJI is a Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, UK. She has published widely on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and her monograph John Clare and the Place of Poetry appeared in 2008.