Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–90
Product details
- ISBN 9781783087723
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 153 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Apr 2018
- Publisher: Anthem Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790 explores under-examined relationships between poetry and historiography in the eighteenth century, deepening our understanding of the relationship between poetry and ideas of progress with sustained attention to aesthetic, historical, antiquarian and prosodic texts from the period. Its central contention is that the historians and theorists of the time did not merely instrumentalize verse in the construction of narratives of human progress, but that the aesthetics of verse had a kind of agency – it determined the character of – historical knowledge of the period. With numerous examples from poems and writing on poetics, Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790 shows how the poetic line became a site at which one could make assertions about human development even as one experienced the expressive effects of metred language.
John Regan is a research fellow in English literature at the University of Cambridge, UK. His research interests centre on the cultural dialogue between poetics and historical writing in the long eighteenth century.
