In the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, forty-four authorities from six countries survey the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity—serious and satirical, public and private, by men and women, nobles and peasants, whether published in deluxe editions or sung on the streets. The contributors discuss poems in social contexts, poetic identities, poetic subjects, poetic form, poetic genres, poetic devices, and criticism. Even experts in eighteenth-century poetry will see familiar poems from new angles, and all readers will encounter poems they've never read before. The book is not a chronologically organized literary history, nor an encyclopaedia, nor a collection of thematically related essays; rather it is an attempt to provide a systematic overview of these poetic works, and to restore it to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.

List of members in v. 4-5, 7-10.

Are legal concepts of intellectual property and copyright related to artistic notions of invention and originality? Do literary and legal scholars have anything to learn from each other, or should the legal debate be viewed as separate from questions of aesthetics? Bridging what are usually perceived as two distinct areas of inquiry, this interdisciplinary volume begins with a reflection on the "origins" of literary and legal questions in the Enlightenment to consider their ramifications in the post-Enlightenment and contemporary world. Tying in to the growing scholarly interest in connections between law and literature, on the one hand, and to the contemporary interrogation of "originality" and "authorship," on the other hand, the present volume furthers research in the field by providing a dense study of the legal and historical context to re-examine our current assumptions about supposed earlier Enlightenment and Romantic ideals of individual authorship and originality.

The Genius of Scotland: The Cultural Production of Robert Burns, 1785-1834 explores the wide-ranging reception history of Robert Burns by examining the sources of his reputation as the ‘Genius of Scotland’ in the Scottish Enlightenment and beyond. Evaluating his changing stature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book investigates the figure of Burns as a ‘cultural production’ that was constructed by warring cultural forces in the literary marketplace. The critical promotion of Burns as the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’ greatly influenced his legacy as a labouring-class ‘genius’ and national icon, both of which relied on blatant censorship and distortion of his biography and works. The Genius of Scotland debunks both the hagiographic and vituperative representations of the poet from this period, revealing not only how (and why) he was culturally produced as a national ‘genius’ but also how the process continues to influence our understanding of Burns into the present day.

Compiles 70 of the key terms most frequently used or discussed by authors of the Romantic period – and most often deliberated by critics and literary historians of the era. Offers an indispensable resource for understanding the ideas and differing interpretations that shaped the Romantic period Includes keywords spanning Abolition and Allegory, through Madness and Monsters, to Vision and Vampires Features in-depth descriptions of each entry's direct meaning and connotations in relation to its usage and thought in literary culture Provides deep insights into the political, social, and cultural climate of one of the most expressive periods of Western literary history Draws on the author’s extensive experience of teaching, lecturing, and writing on Romantic literature

This is an impressive and lucid survey of eighteenth-century intellectual life, providing a real sense of the complexity of the age and of the cultural and intellectual climate in which imaginative literature flourished. It reflects on some of the dominant themes of the period, arguing against such labels as 'Augustan Age', 'Age of Enlightenment' and 'Age of Reason', which have been attached to the eighteenth-century by critics and historians.

"This book very conclusively debunks the over two-hundred-year-old conventional wisdom that Wheatley owes her poetic sensibilities to Alexander Pope. ... It will help rejuvenate the study of Wheatley and will be an exciting contribution to scholarly discourse on Wheatley's poetry."--Cedrick May, author of Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835. Phillis Wheatley was the first African American to publish a book. Born in Gambia in 1753, she came to America aboard a slave ship, the Phillis. From an early age, Wheatley exhibited a profound gift for verse, publishing her first.

The Poetry of the Self-Taught demonstrates the characteristic strengths of self-taught poetry and analyzes the factors that have caused most selftaught poets to disappear from anthologies and from literary history. Raising the question of whether or not their work should be read today and taken seriously - instead of being relegated to separate and unequal categories like women's or «peasant» poetry - the book highlights interesting contrasts between the poetry of eighteenth-century autodidacts such as Robert Burns, Mary Leapor, C.D.F. Schubart, and Anna Louise Karsch and the work of their contemporaries, mainstream poets like Alexander Pope, James Thomson, C.F. Gellert, and Barthold Heinrich Brockes. Self-taught poetry is often treated as an index to the lives and times of the poets, but this book explores it with a different purpose: to understand and illustrate the commonalities in autodidactic poetics, imagery, rhetorical strategies, and themes. Concurrent with a recent upturn of interest in «laboring» or self-taught poets both in England and in Germany, The Poetry of the Self-Taught will be useful for courses focusing on such poets or those dealing with eighteenth-century literature.