Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century

This book offers a radical new theory of the role of poetry in the rise of cultural nationalism. With equal attention to England, Scotland, and Wales, the book takes an Archipelagic approach to the study of poetics, print media, and medievalism in the rise of British Romanticism. It tells the story of how poets and antiquarian editors in the British nations rediscovered forgotten archaic poetic texts and repurposed them as the foundation of a new concept of the nation, now imagined as a primarily cultural formation. It also draws on legal and ecclesiastical history in drawing a sharp contrast between early modern and Romantic antiquarianisms. Equally a work of literary criticism and history, the book offers provocative new theorizations of nationalism and Romanticism and new readings of major British poets, including Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Argues that through the collaboration of poets and antiquarians the English, Scottish, and Welsh nations came to imagine themselves the heirs to thousand-year-long cultural traditions that began with medieval bards Engages with nationalism in greater depth than most literary studies Complements several fields of study: the history of nationalism; Scottish and Welsh literatures; Romanticism across the British nations; ballad collecting; and historical poetics

Auteur
Jeff Strabone is Associate Professor of English at Connecticut College, USA, where he teaches the eighteenth century, British Romanticism, and African fiction. He received his PhD from New York University, USA.

Contenu

1. Introductio: Beowulf or Brutus of Troy?.- 2. Allan Ramsay and Thomas Ruddiman: Two Ways of Reviving Scotland's Dead Poets.- 3. The Fall and Rise of the Welsh Bards, or, How the English Became British.- 4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Other Bardic Poets: Thomas Chatterton, Edward Jones, Iolo Morganwg, and Odin.- 5. Christabel and the Metre of 'our oldest Writers in the most barbarous ages'.- 6 Epilogue: A Millennium of British Poetry?