Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.

This chapter argues that Shelley’s laughter – as outburst and affect, and as comedy and satire – is both a way for him to put his aspirations for poetry to the test, and of giving humorous expression to them. For Shelley, laughter is attuned to the pains his poetry confronts and seeks to redress, and seems at once an obstacle to the radical energies of the imagination and a vehicle for his own ecstatic, prophetic strains. Shelley is a writer of restive, divided instincts, and his impulse for the laughable is as complex and contradictory as his feelings towards poetry. His laughter is by turns scornful and sympathetic, while at other times it bursts from anarchic desires and discloses the elusive and seemingly unknowable. The laughable, then, often appears like what he conceives poetry to be, while his native ambivalence towards laughter is borne of his doubts about where art comes from, and its influence.

This chapter examines some of the most important poetic influences on Shelley’s writing from the tradition of poetry in English published before his birth in 1792. In particular, it focuses on Shelley’s inheritance of works by Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare while acknowledging the breadth of his reading and its influence on his own poetic practice (the chapter also acknowledges that Shelley’s inheritance from English poetry must be considered in the context of his inheritance of work in Greek, Latin, and a range of modern European languages, which is discussed elsewhere in this volume). The chapter attempts to tease out some of the ambivalences in Shelley’s relation to his poetic forebears, taking Spenser – royalist and imperial apologist, which Shelley emphatically was not – as a crucial example here.

Percy Shelley was a poet of fiery politics who recognised the power of language to surprise and even shock. Across three centuries and around the globe, politicians and activists have turned to Shelley’s poetry for help furthering their political causes. With specific attention to poems like ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, ‘Song to the Men of England’, ‘England in 1819’, and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, as well as to critical prose pieces like ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ and ‘A Defence of Poetry’, this chapter situates Shelley’s views on revolution and reform in their historical context and takes some tentative steps towards exploring why Shelley’s poems have so frequently been put to political purpose.

This essay examines the literary interchange between Percy Shelley and John Keats through a comparative reading of their poems, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and ‘To Autumn’, both of which were written in explicit (Shelley) or implicit (Keats) response to the Peterloo Massacre. Drawing special attention to the formal and stylistic differences between these two poets, I argue that each demonstrates a distinctive attitude towards argument. More particularly, I suggest that Keats and Shelley are uniquely interested in the question of whether or not a poem can make a political claim and, more broadly, in the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium as The Banquet, composed with great speed over ten days in July 1818, radically transformed the poet’s thoughts on love, translation, originality, and ancient philosophy. Shelley became Shelley through Plato. Rather than an arbiter of forms and banisher of poets from his ideal republic, Shelley’s Plato is himself a poet, as he claims in ‘A Defence of Poetry’. Through his reading and translation of the ancients – and particularly Plato – philosophy and poetry become concomitant for Shelley. Ultimately, Shelley is indebted to the philosopher’s use of literary forms over any straightforward adoption of his philosophy of forms. This chapter looks before and after Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium to trace the poet’s reading of the ancients from 1812 until his accidental death in 1822, revealing the lasting, shifting influence of ancient philosophy on Shelley’s poetry.

While most of Johnson’s paid professional writing was in prose, he wrote accomplished poetry from the age of 15 until the last month of his life, and often poured into it his most personal feelings – especially those poems and verse prayers which he wrote in Latin. Most celebrated are Johnson’s two imitations of satires by Juvenal. In London, the first of these, Johnson adopted the light personification (‘unrewarded science toils in vain’) which became his trademark. The second, The Vanity of Human Wishes, is the quintessential Johnsonian work, a meditation on false hope whose conclusion can be read as either tragic or optimistic. The same theme runs through Johnson’s fictional writing – the shorter tales as well as his longest, Rasselas. This gently comic work, much of it merely episodic, follows the Abyssinian Prince, Rasselas, as he seeks the answer to life – and ends on another ambiguous conclusion.

This chapter considers poetry of the 1870s in the aftermath of the previous boom decade in magazine verse, with the flowering of shilling monthlies and popular literary weeklies, when periodical publishers became firmly established as the era’s primary poetry publishers, and when most readers accessed poems in ephemeral print. Literary accounts of the Victorian era conventionally consider poetry book publication as defining the era’s poetics, and certainly in the 1870s there were no shortage of prominent poetry volumes. But this decade also saw poetry defined in relation to magazine verse, and the value of poetry was integral to associated issues of ephemerality and modernity. This chapter focuses in particular on the place of poetry in two new periodicals of the 1870s: The Dark Blue and The Nineteenth Century.

This chapter explores the potential of Construction Grammar for analyzing literary texts. First, it investigates typical features of literary language from a constructional point of view. Fairy tales, for example, are characterized by their opening lines like “Once upon a time …,” analyzed as a concrete, complex construction. Similarly, many authors, styles, and genres are characterized by particular constructions, or the use of particular words and phrases. The second section deals with creative, innovative, and seemingly ‘rule-breaking’ language in a constructional framework, suggesting that Construction Grammar as a usage-based and cognitively plausible model offers the perfect toolkit to analyze seemingly unruly linguistic behavior. The third part deals with literary genres as linguistic units beyond the sentence, arguing that literary texts are also learned form–meaning pairings and can be treated as constructions. Genres as constructions may change dynamically over time and be subject to prototypeeffects. Drawing on numerous examples, this chapter thus demonstrates that literary language and texts can be productively analyzed using concepts and methods of Construction Grammar.

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.

Literary historians have long envisioned the 1870s as a turning point in the invention of a specifically Victorian literary age only because they have taken American Edmund Clarence Stedman at his word. Treating his Victorian Poets (1875) as an unprecedented critical project responsible for popularizing, even introducing, the very adjective Victorian, such historians have — by extension — interpreted the latter as a primarily literary term always already suggesting inadequacy and obsolescence. Considering the evolution of Stedman’s work over time and for different audiences, and in relation to earlier and later critical efforts including George L. Craik’s Compendious History of English Literature (1861) and Alfred Austin’s The Poetry of the Period (1870), this chapter offers a fuller, more nuanced account of the role of the 1870s in consolidating a Victorian age and a Victorian literature, partly by demonstrating how Stedman’s account worked to assert America’s primacy in a contested transatlantic field.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper work has helped reshape Civil War literary studies and illustrates the field’s larger preoccupations. This chapter centers on “Bury Me in a Free Land,” a poem that demonstrates the craft of a writer uniquely adept at using and subverting expectations in a literature that was highly conventional, thus illustrating for contemporary readers both the patterns and their breach. Harper’s poem speaks to the core preoccupations that scholars have been tracing as they identify an ever-broadening archive of Civil War literature, namely the importance of slavery and abolition, the role of death and suffering in the context of spirituality and sentimentality, the shifting understandings of race and gender, and the exploration of how the conflict would be remembered. Poetry was the period’s predominant genre, and this example points to current scholarly interest in works that are ephemeral, conventional, and written to appeal to a broad popular audience. Instead of asking what great works of literature writers in general and combatants in particular produced, as previous scholars had done, recent inquiries have considered a greater diversity of writers and taken an expansive approach to this large question: What is Civil War literature, and what cultural, social, and political contributions did it make?

One trend in recent nineteenth-century American studies has been the rising critical status of poetry, which has gone from being widely neglected by C19 scholars to being a vibrant and diverse field of scholarship. Yet, while this scholarship has recovered major authors and recuperated long-derided aspects of nineteenth-century poetics, it has also maintained an old narrative about C19 poetry, namely that the status of poetry declined during the postbellum period. The career of William Cullen Bryant is emblematic of these trends: while there has been some fascinating recent work on his poetry, it has been informed exclusively by his early poetry of the 1810s and 1820s. This essay argues that Bryant’s career looks different when viewed from the end, rather than the beginning. In so doing, it revises recent critical accounts of Bryant, and C19 American poetry more broadly, by examining his translation of the Iliad, which he published in 1870. Bryant’s Iliad was one of the most celebrated poems of the postbellum era and was considered his masterpiece by contemporary readers. This essay examines the translation and discuss some of the ways in which it engages the politics and poetics of the Reconstruction period

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.