Richard Polwhele and Romantic Culture

The Politics of Reaction and the Poetics of Place
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-0-367-65159-6
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 216 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 323 g

Reihe: Routledge New Textual Studies in Literature

Richard Polwhele was a writer of rare energies. Today known only for The Unsex’d Females and its attack on radical women writers, Polwhele was a historian, translator, memoirist, and poet. As an indigent Cornish gentleman clergyman and JP, his extensive written output encompassed sermons, open letters, and even headstone verse. This book recovers the lost Polwhele, locating him within an archipelagic understanding of the vitality and complexity inherent in the loyalist tradition with British Romantic culture via a range of previously unexamined texts and manuscript sources.

Torn between a desire for sociability and an appetite (and capacity) for a good argument, Polwhele’s outspoken contributions across a range of disciplines testify to the variety and dynamism of what has previously been considered provincial and reactionary. This book locates Polwhele’s work within key preoccupations of the age: the social, economic, and political valences of literary sociability in the age of print; the meaning of loyalism in an age of revolution; the meaning of place and belonging; enthusiasm, religious or otherwise; and the self-fashioning of the provincial man of letters. In doing so it argues for a broader definition of Romanticism than the one that has typed Polwhele as an unpalatable embarrassment and the anachronistic voice of provincial High Tory reaction.

This volume will be of interest to those working in the field of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British Literature, with a particular focus on politics and on the nature of literary production and identity across the non-metropolitan areas of the British Isles.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moore, Dafydd

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien Jüdische Studien: Literatur & Kunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations



Introduction: Locating Richard Polwhele

1. Loyalist Sociability and its Discontents in the Eighteenth-Century Province

2. Loyalism and the Patriotic Poem in an Age of Revolution

3. Archipelagic Attachments: Politics and Place

4. Archipelagic Anglicanism: Controversialism and Loyalist Paranoia

5. Provincial Oracles and Acknowledged Prophets: Epistolary Memoir and Romantic Self-Fashioning

6. Conclusion



Select Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Dafydd Moore is currently Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Plymouth, England. He has published extensively on James Macpherson, including Enlightenment and Romance in the Poems of Ossian (2003), Ossian and Ossianism (4 vols, 2004), and The International Companion to James Macpherson and Ossian (2017).