The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

This collection includes essays that consider how Bloomfield's poetry contributes to an understanding of the predominant issues, forms, and themes of literary Romanticism.

The present volume, number VIII in the series Groningen Studies in Cultural Change, offers a selection of papers presented at a workshop organised by Amanda Gilroy and Wil Verhoeven entitled Green and Pleasant Land: English Culture and the Romantic Countryside. The contributions in this volume illuminate the ideological investments of particular ways of experiencing the English countryside of the Romantic era. While their analyses of cultural change are historically specific, they explore, too, the conflicted present-day legacies of romantic landscapes.

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

Part of a series providing an authoritative history of the book in Ireland, this volume comprehensively outlines the history of 20th-century Irish book culture. This book embraces all the written and printed traditions and heritages of Ireland and places them in the global context of a worldwide interest in book histories.

This book presents a series of essays that examine the ideological, personal, and political difficulties faced by the group variously termed the Anglo-Irish, the Protestant Ascendancy, or the English in Ireland, a group that existed in a world of contested ideological, political, and cultural identities. At the root of this conflicted sense of self was an acute awareness among the Anglo-Irish of their liminal position as colonial dominators in Ireland who were viewed as other both by the Catholic natives of Ireland and by their English kinsmen. The work in this volume is highly interdisciplinary, bringing to bear examination of issues that are historical, literary, economic, and sociological. Contributors investigate how individuals experienced the ambiguities and conflicts of identity formation in a colonial society, how writers fought the economic and ideological superiority of the English, how the cooption of Gaelic history and culture was a political strategy for the Anglo-Irish, and how literary texts contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. In seeking to understand and trace the complex process of identity formation in early modern Ireland the essays in this volume attest to its tenuous, dynamic, and necessarily incomplete nature. David A. Valone is an Assistant Professor of History at Quinnipiac University. Jill Marie Bradbury is an Assistant Professor of English at Gallaudet University.

With an Essay on Hogg's Literary Friendships by Janette Currie and an Appendix on the Popular Context by Suzanne GilbertScottish popular tradition includes a group of stories about a King who has adventures - amorous and otherwise - as he wanders in disguise among his people. Many of these stories focus on James V and in Walter Scott's long narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) the King encounters a mysterious lady while he is wandering alone and unrecognised in the Highlands. At first sight Scott's heroine seems to be a simple country girl, but she turns out to be a daughter of the great aristocratic house of Douglas, living for the time being in a rural exile.Scott's romantic and aristocratic version of the old 'wandering King' stories was hugely popular in its day, but Hogg subverts and questions this tale in Mador of the Moor (1816). The name 'Mador' suggests 'made o'er', 'made over', and Mador of the Moor is in effect a makeover of The Lady of the Lake. Hogg's poem, like Scott's, tells how a deer-hunt in the Highlands leads a disguised King of Scots into a love-adventure with a young woman. However Hogg's heroine, Ila Moore, is not a chaste aristocrat but a girl of low social standing who is made pregnant by the wandering King. Ila's inherent resourcefulness and strength of character suggest that a peasant girl pregnant out of wedlock can be a heroine fully worthy of respect, and Mador (rejected as shocking and ridiculous by its original readership), now re-emerges as a flowing and immensely readable narrative that eloquently challenges the deeply-ingrained class and gender prejudices of Hogg's society.

Responding to the resurgence of interest in the Scottish working-class writer James Hogg, Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson offer the first edited collection devoted to an examination of the critical implications of his writings and their position in the Edinburgh and London literary marketplaces. Writing during a particularly complex time in Scottish literary history, Hogg, a working shepherd for much of his life, is seen to challenge many of the aesthetic conventions adopted by his contemporaries and to anticipate many of the concerns voiced in discussions of literature in recent years. While the essays privilege Hogg's primary texts and read them closely in their immediate cultural context, the volume's contributors also introduce relevant research on oral culture, nationalism, transnationalism, intertextuality, class, colonialism, empire, psychology, and aesthetics where they serve to illuminate Hogg's literary ingenuity as a working-class writer in Romantic Scotland.

A controversial self-taught shepherd who violated the rules of literary decorum to reveal the dark side of the Scottish margins. Through a strategic use of nineteenth-century stereotypes of femininity and masculinity he lays bare the intersection with class and ethnicity in Scotland.