Mapping Mythologies
Cambridge University Press, 8/31/2015
EAN 9781107116382, ISBN10: 1107116384
Hardcover, 250 pages, 23.5 x 15.9 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
In this groundbreaking work of revisionary literary history, Marilyn Butler traces the imagining of alternative versions of the nation in eighteenth-century Britain, both in the works of a series of well-known poets (Akenside, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, Blake) and in the differing accounts of the national culture offered by eighteenth-century antiquarians and literary historians. She charts the beginnings in eighteenth-century Britain of what is now called cultural history, exploring how and why it developed, and the issues at stake. Her interest is not simply in a succession of great writers, but in the politics of a wider culture, in which writers, scholars, publishers, editors, booksellers, readers all play their parts. For more than thirty years, Marilyn Butler was a towering presence in eighteenth-century and romantic studies, and this major work is published for the first time.
Preface Heather Glen
1. Mapping mythologies
2. Thomson and Akenside
3. Collins and Gray
4. The forgers
Macpherson and Chatterton
5. Popular antiquities
6. Blake
Coda.