Class and the canon : constructing labouring-class poetry and poetics, 1780-1900

✍ Scribed by Gorji, Mina; Blair, Kirstie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 229
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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. Read more...

Abstract:

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets. Read more...

✦ Table of Contents

Content: Introduction
K. Blair --
Was Burns a Labouring-Class Poet?
N. Leask --
Constructing the Ulster Labouring-Class Poet: The Case of Samuel Thomson
J. Orr --
Sociable or Solitary? John Clare, Robert Bloomfield, Community and Isolation
J. Goodridge --
John Clare and the Triumph of Little Things
M. Gorji --
'No more than as an atom 'mid the vast profound: Conceptions of Time in the Poetry of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley
K. Andrews --
The Pen and the Hammer: Thomas Carlyle, Ebenezer Elliott, and the 'active poet'
M. Waithe --
Samuel Ferguson's Maudlin Jumble
M. Campbell --
Courtly Lays or Democratic Songs? The Politics of Poetic Citation in Chartist Literary Criticism
M. Sanders --
Edwin Waugh: The Social and Literary Standing of a Working-Class Icon
B. Hollingworth --
William Barnes's Place and Dialects of Connection
S. Edney --
Index.

✦ Subjects

English poetry -- 18th century -- History and criticism. English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism. Working class in literature. Political poetry. POETRY -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Literary studies: poetry & poets -- English. Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 -- English. Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 -- English.