Fanny Forrester (1852-89) was a dye worker and poet who lived in Salford, near Manchester. As a house poet of the popular working-class periodical Ben Brierley's Journal between 1868 and 1882, ...Forrester addressed a wide regional audience, which enabled her to redefine the imaginative possibilities of the working-class pastoral poem. This essay illustrates how her newspaper poetry referenced the social tensions surrounding representations of working-class women. By writing urban pastorals, Forrester demonstrated how factory women could be integrated into a conservative, masculine poetic genre.
John Clare Storey, Mark
1973, 20020911, 1996, 2002-09-11
eBook
The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and ...researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels.The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation.Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects.
"3 For each edited ballad, Swinburne seems to have studied multiple different versions earlier published by ballad scholars from Bishop Thomas Percy (1765) to Scott and his successors in the ...nineteenth century, especially William Jamieson (1806), William Motherwell (1827), George R. Kinlock (1827), Peter Buchan (1828), and, most recently, the American scholar of early English literature Frances James Child, the second edition of whose initial collection of English and Scottish ballads, in eight small volumes, had just been published in London.4 Unlike his larger and better-known later collection of 1882-1898, Child's initial publication was part of a series intended to cover the whole history of English poetry; by including ballads and songs he extended that history from literary to popular traditions. Nor was the traffic simply one-way: poems by major poets, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Herrick, enjoyed an extensive popular life through broadsides or song sheets and were performed in homes, streets, and theaters (often without the name of the author attached).\n (ll. 5-8, p. 147)24 Lady Wariston's spoken comments draw attention to the perilously thin line between song and life-between what the ballad narrates and what, in her own tormented state, she might do to the fascinated, frightened children to whom she sings: "Then she killed them, Ethel, both, and put their blood in a little brass dish . . . in some pot or pan, with the blood of a little white chicken, like you . .
According to the familiar story, the Kantian revolution ensured the validity and coherence of our phenomenal experiences, but at the cost of transforming things in themselves into mere logical ...placeholders. According to Beiser, for thinkers like Schelling, intellectual intuition is not the merely indeterminate idea of a non-discursive mode of cognition or even, as it is for Fichte, an immediate knowledge of the I’s self-activity. Ultimately independent of any contingent act of intellection, the absolute must always exceed the mind that thinks it. ...in Schellingian terms, to intuit the absolute is to think “subjectivity on the verge of annihilation” (Toscano 53).23 This is not to realign the great outdoors with the ungraspable real. For Jonathan Israel, the “radical enlightenment” of the seventeenth century is defined by “combining immense reverence for science, and for mathematical logic, with some form of non-providential deism, if not outright materialism and atheism along with unmistakable republican, even democratic tendencies” (12). ...opposed to all traditional sources of authority, the radical enlightenment is distinct from later, more moderate expressions of enlightenment ideas.
Abstract There are growing and justifiable concerns about the degradation of the planet—the land, sea and atmosphere on which all life depends. While these problems unfold on a global scale they are ...not evenly distributed, either in terms of cause or effect. This has not stopped powerful and universalizing explanations about why ‘our planet’ is being exhausted, and how ‘we’ must respond with urgent action. One of the effects of this response is that environmental problems are naturalized as empirical facts around which new forms of governance and regulation must emerge. While this technical response might be effective at managing discrete environmental problems it can obscure important questions about the ways in which we produce and reproduce social and natural life. The 18th century was also a period in which the problem of scarcity gave rise to new ways of managing and organizing social and natural life. The naturalization of scarcity was a cornerstone of liberal economics, the intellectual justification for various forms of enclosure and ‘improvement’. One person who challenged this powerful narrative was the poet John Clare (1793-1864). Where liberal economics began with the abstraction of self-interested ‘man’ and finite ‘nature’, Clare began with his own experiences of the world around him. This commitment to the here and now is not to be confused with notions of a ‘pre-modern’ union of human and nature. Rather, Clare's poetry describes and reveals the many different natures which unfold through ongoing, negotiated and changing relations between people and things. Rather than a fear of limits, the excess of possibilities inherent in this vision of the ‘manifold commons’ provides him, and us, with a different way to imagine and enact alternative forms of social and natural life.
This essay seeks to revalue repetition in literary studies. Critics have often treated repetition—clichés, rules, norms, mechanization, monotony—as the painful or oppressive backdrop against which ...their best values emerge: originality, distinctiveness, resistance. But this critical tendency has carried its own repressive effects, including wresting our attention from collectivities and solidarities. A reading of John Clare’s 1820 poem “The Harvest Morning” shows that repetition is crucial to the exercise of political and economic power and that poetic forms, especially rhythm and rhyme, are well suited for theorizing the repetitions of political power through their own intrinsic repetitiveness.
The present essay examines how the extraordinarily itinerant lyric “I” of the late Romantic poet John Clare constitutes a historical revision of the critical narratives of lyric containment and ...immediacy that consolidated from Victorian era onward and have recently been contested by lyric theorists of address, apostrophe, and history. Yet because Clare’s poetry critiques a particular historical moment when Britain saw itself as an enclosed island of enclosed estates, his work presents speakers whose irrepressible, traveling energies are not easily defined by any of today’s current theories of lyric. Clare’s revisionary “I”s stem from his sense that he had become as displaced, forgotten, and superseded as the unenclosed common greens of his childhood. Yet Clare’s alienation from the present moment of his writing also results from the neglect of his peasant poetry and his emotional sufferings as a semi-literate subject who experienced mental illness and was committed to an asylum. Together, these intense struggles against the historical, poetic, and personal pressures of enclosure positioned his work as out of sync with the chronologies and concerns of modernity. Clare transforms the poetic “I” into a haunting anachronism, an untimely vehicle that equally unsettles our ideas about lyric enclosure, apostrophe, and address.
In this essay we explore the ways folk song collectors active in England in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods used and engaged with contemporary discourses relating to the terms peasant and ...peasantry. We look into the understandings and connotations that the words had for the collectors and their wider society, the historical ideas that became associated with notions of the peasant, its use as an insult and the consequent reluctance of some collectors to use the word, as well as idealizations that became associated with it. We also look critically at the ways collectors' usages of the terms have been understood (and misunderstood) by recent writers. In place of rather one-dimensional interpretations we propose a nuanced and complex understanding of highly significant but difficult and conflicted terms. Our broader aim is to make a contribution to a better historical understanding of the English folk song movement.
This is a jointly authored practice-led article by a poet and artist who have produced place-based work based on slow-walking practices for exhibition and publication since 2011. It is developed out ...of close reading of our own work, our key consideration being whether and how collaborative walking and art together might be conceived of as counter-cultural. We consider our walking inheritance, from the Romantics, via Thoreau to mid-century painters and poets and contemporary ecocritical theorists including Doreen Massey, Yi-fu Tuan, Deirdre Heddon and Richard Kerridge. We trace changes in theoretical and artistic approaches to walking, perception and making art together. We reference other contemporary poet and artist pairings including Frances Presley and Irma Irsara and Thomas A. Clark and Laurie Clark. Finally, we consider how walking and working collaboratively in different artistic media might produce work that challenges and affects viewers in gallery and book spaces.
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