Mapping mythologies: countercurrents in eighteenth-century poetry and cultural history Butler, Marilyn

Table of Contents

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.

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.

A distinguished scholar who changed the intellectual landscape of Romantic studies here offers a provocative view of an earlier period
Drawing on wide-ranging reading in social and political history, in anthropology, in political theory, this is a book that challenges disciplinary boundaries.

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