Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in eighteenth-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve–'Let me be a
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 t
Are works of art imitations? If so, what exactly do they imitate? Should an artist remind his audience that what it is perceiving is in fact artifice, or should he try above all to persuade it to accept the illusion as reality? Questions such as these, which have dominated aesthetic theory since the Greeks, were debated with extraordinary vigour and ingenuity in eighteenth-century France. In this book Dr Hobson analyses these debates, focusing in turn on painting, the novel, drama, poetry and music. In each case she relates theory to contemporary works of art by Watteau, Chardin, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Gluck and many others. She shows that disputes within the theory of each art centred upon the nature of the perceiver's attention. Dr Hobson provides a method of mapping the changes in artistic style which took place as the century advanced. In discussing such conceptual transformations Dr Hobson opens an important perspective for the study of Romanticism and Realism.
The study of Jonathan Swift's works has most often focused on print publication, with less scholarly attention devoted to manuscript circulation. Based on extensive research into the manuscript versions of Swift's poetry, Stephen Karian's analysis suggests new ways of interpreting the different choices Swift made to circulate his texts in either print or manuscript form. He explains Swift's relationships with his publishers in England and Ireland; the ways in which his writings circulated in hand-written form; and the effect that political censorship had on the manner in which his most outspoken political poems were published. Working at the intersection of book history, bibliography, and textual and literary criticism, this book will open up new areas of study for Swift scholars, as well as developing an important methodology for the study of the distribution and reception of literary texts in the eighteenth century.
William Cowper (1731–1800) is one of the most interesting of late eighteenth-century poets. His poetry is notable as heralding a simpler and more natural style than the classical style of Pope and his imitators, and thus prefiguring the profound innovations of Romanticism. Though Cowper himself has attracted attention as either a religious maniac or a lovably domestic character, his most important poetry has been neglected. This book, which was originally published in 1983, is the first complete critical study of his major long poem The Task. Furthermore, by carefully examining the procedures whereby an autobiographical element is introduced into the poem, the author shows how the concerns and techniques of The Task influenced the major autobiographical poem of the Romantic period, Wordsworth's The Prelude. The connection between the two poems had often been acknowledged in passing, but prior to this work The Task had not been surveyed in sufficient detail to establish the full weight
