The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry / Edition 1

by John Sitter

Overview

This volume analyzes major premises, preoccupations, and practices of a wide range of English poets writing from 1700 to the 1790s, including Pope and Thomson, Anna Seward and Erasmus Darwin. Specially commissioned essays by leading scholars avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to consider such large poetic themes as nature, the city, political passions, the relation of death to desire and dreams, the rise of a national tradition, appeals to an imagined future, and the meanings of "sensibility." The essays are supported by a chronology and guides to further reading.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521658850
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2001
Series:	Cambridge Companions to Literature
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.91(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Chronology; 1. Introduction: the future of eighteenth-century poetry John Sitter; 2. Couplets and conversation J. Paul Hunter; 3. Political passions Christine Gerrard; 4. Publishing and reading poetry Barbara M. Benedict; 5. The city in eighteenth-century poetry Brean Hammond; 6. 'Nature' poetry Tim Fulford; 7. Questions in poetics: why and how poetry matters John Sitter; 8. Eighteenth-century women poets and readers Claudia Thomas Kairoff; 9. Creating a national poetry: the tradition of Spenser and Milton David Fairer; 10. The return to the ode Ralph Cohen; 11. A poetry of absence David B. Morris; 12. The poetry of sensibility Patricia Meyer Spacks; 13. 'Pre-Romanticism' and the ends of eighteenth-century poetry Jennifer Keith; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"The essays in this volume provides useful and accessible background material for students of 18th-century poetry...Recommanded for all academic collections, undergraduate and graduate." CHOICE Jan 2002

From the Publisher