18th-century Literature

Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712–1812 explores the complex and fascinating relationship between women, Protestantism, and nationhood. Opening with a history of Britannia, this book argues that Britannia becomes increasingly popular as a national emblem from 1688 onwards. Over the eighteenth century, depictions of Britannia become exemplary as well as emblematic, her behaviour to be imitated as well as admired. Britannia takes life during the eighteenth century, stepping out of iconic representation on coins, out of the pages of James Thomson’s poetry, down from the stage of David Mallett’s plays, the frames of Francis Hayman and William Hogarth’s paintings, and John Flaxman’s monuments, to enter people’s lives as an identity to be experienced. One of the key strands explored in this book is Britannia’s relationship to female personifications of the Church of England, which themselves often drew on key Protestant Queens such as Elizabeth I and Anne. During the eighteenth century, Britannia also gained cultural status by being a female figure of nationhood at a time when Enlightenment historians developed conjectural histories that placed women at the centre of civilisation. Women’s religion, conversation, and social practice thus had a new resonance in this new, self-consciously civilised age. In this book, Emma Major looks at how narratives of faith, national identity, and civilisation allowed women such as Elizabeth Burnet, Elizabeth Montagu, Catherine Talbot, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Hannah More to see themselves as active agents in the shaping of the nation.

Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) is one of the founding texts of English literature, an epoch-making collection of historical and lyrical ballads that defined the canon of popular poetry. It dramatically influenced Romanticism and the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Scott, and even Lewis Carroll. This book is devoted to Percy's seminal work. The book reconstructs pioneering antiquarianism and its processes of collecting, transcribing, and collating. It unravels Percy's working methods, examining his correspondence, library, and papers, as well as his friendships with scholars like Samuel Johnson. This micro-bibliographical analysis takes literary history and critical theory in significant new directions. As the book shows, the creation of historical sources and the origins of Englishness, and the practices of 18th-century editing were intertwined with themes as diverse as gardening, nightingales, forgery, and cannibalism.

This is a study of a genre of poetry that flourished in English, French, and German literature from the early eighteenth to the mid‐nineteenth century. Although some of the texts discussed are canonical and familiar, the relations among them have not been noticed. There is a well‐known genre of mock‐heroic poetry which parodies epic. Mock epic differs in being written at a time when serious epic, though still a highly respected genre with many writers and readers, was also in a state of stasis or stagnation, failing to produce any acknowledged masterpiece after Paradise Lost (1667). Epic was often criticized as depending on supernatural machinery and barbarous heroic values that were unsuitable for the modern world. Mock epic therefore both satirizes the epic genre and expands its scope beyond mock heroic to address satirically a wide range of ambitious themes. It includes satire on pedantic scholarship (Pope's Dunciad), anticlerical satire (Voltaire's La Pucelle, Blumauer's travesty of the Aeneid), satire on religion (Parny's La Guerre des dieux), a liberal, but not necessarily libertine, exploration of the relation between the sexes (Wieland's Oberon, Byron's Don Juan), and the relation between Europe and its Oriental ‘other’ (Wieland and Byron again). Besides mock heroic, it draws on other literary traditions, notably the Italian romance epic (especially Ariosto), but also traditions of parody and travesty, and it foregrounds its relation to prior texts—including earlier mock epics—through an elaborate display of intertextuality. By 1847, when the last text discussed, Heine's Atta Troll, was published, the elements that composed the mock‐epic genre were dispersing, but the genre has (as the Epilogue shows) an afterlife in early twentieth‐century modernism.

A publishing phenomenon began in Glasgow in 1765. Uniform pocket editions of the English Poets printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis formed the first link in a chain of literary products that has grown ever since, as we see from series like Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics. In this book, the author explores the origins of this phenomenon, analysing more than a dozen multi-volume poetry collections that sprang from the British press over the next half century. Why such collections flourished so quickly, who published them, what forms they assumed, how they were marketed and advertised, how they initiated their readers into the rites of mass-market consumerism, and what role they played in the construction of a national literature are all questions central to the study. The collections played out against an epic battle over copyright law, and involved fierce contention for market share in the ‘classics’ among rival publishers. It brought despair to the most powerful of London printers, William Strahan, who prophesied that competition of this nature would ruin bookselling, turning it into ‘the most pitiful, beggarly, precarious, unprofitable, and disreputable Trade in Britain’. Based on work with archival materials, newspapers, handbills, prospectuses, and above all the books themselves, the author's findings shed light on all aspects of the book trade. Valuable bibliographical data is presented regarding every collection, forming an indispensable resource for future work on the history of the English poetry canon.

Nuns as Historians introduces women's contributions to a discourse generally considered to be the province of men: history writing. It examines the tradition of history writing and chronicles in Catholic convents in the German Empire during the early modern period, which is overlooked even in most studies of monastic historiography. The study analyses a wide range of little-known primary sources from convents, some of which are only available in manuscript form. They include the Denkwürdigkeiten by the abbess Caritas Pirckheimer, a defence of her convent during the Reformation. Several accounts of nuns' lives during the Thirty Years' War are examined, such as the diary of the prioress Clara Staiger from Eichstätt, and a history of the Swedish War by Maria Anna Junius from Bamberg. A history of Oberschönenfeld by the Cistercian abbess, Elisabeth Herold, criticises her predecessor for allowing the convent to be pillaged in the Thirty Years' War, while Juliana Ernst's biography of the visionary Ursula Haider from Villingen is an attempt to renew convent spirituality in the Counter Reformation. All the chronicles are placed in the context of the broader traditions of reading and writing in early modern convents, as well as the social history of the convents from the monastic reforms of the fifteenth century until the Counter Reformation. This book traces the changing functions of history writings for a convent as an institution and the way in which individual nuns took ownership of works, sometimes by writing short works of autobiography.

Concentrating on the period 1660-1781, this book explores how the English literary past was made. It charts how antiquarians unearthed the raw materials of the English (or more widely) British tradition; how scholars drafted narratives about the development of native literature; and how critics assigned the leading writers to canons of literary greatness. It also analyses the various kinds of occasion on which the contents of the literary past are rehearsed. Discussed, for example, is the rise of Poets' Corner as a national shrine for the consecration of literary worthies. The book also considers a wide range of poetic genres that lent themselves to recitals of the literary past: the funeral elegy, the progress-of-poesy poem, and the session-of-the-poets poem. The book concludes that the opening up and ordering of the English literary past occurs earlier than is generally supposed; and the same also applies to the process by which women writers achieve their own distinctive form of canonical recognition.