Overview
- Makes the case that a distinctive kind of collection flourished in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known to contemporaries as the miscellany
- Focuses on key aspects of the miscellany tradition that intersect with and illuminate wider literary culture
- Demonstrates how investigating the connections between poems in miscellanies and poems in periodicals can uncover hidden areas of crossover between literary and musical culture in the eighteenth century
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print (PERCP)
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About this book
This book is a critical study of the ancestors of contemporary poetry anthologies: the poetic miscellanies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that miscellanies are a distinctive kind of literary collection and that their popularity in the period 1680–1800 had a far-reaching impact on authors, publishers, and readers of poetry.
This study expands the definition of miscellanies to include single-author collections called miscellanies as well as the multiple-author collections that have traditionally been the focus of scholarly attention. It shows how multiple-author miscellanies fostered different kinds of literary community and explores the neglected role of single-author miscellanies in the self-fashioning of eighteenth-century writers. Later chapters examine miscellanies’ relationships with periodicals, their contribution to the formation of the literary canon, and their reception and transformation in the hands of readers. The book draws on newly available digital data as well as evidence from hundreds of printed miscellanies to shed new light on how poetry was written, published, and read in the long eighteenth century.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Miscellanies, Poetry, and Authorship, 1680–1800 is the first comprehensive study of the miscellany as a quintessentially eighteenth-century print form. Watson demonstrates the new avenues of investigation opened up by resources like the Digital Miscellanies Index, while balancing distant reading with striking case studies of overlooked authors who exploited the form. This is an important contribution to the fields of eighteenth-century literary studies and book history, reorienting what we think we know about poetry, authorship, and the marketing of literature in the period.” (Betty A. Schellenberg, author of Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790 (2016))
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Carly Watson is a lecturer at the University of Oxford, UK. She teaches and researches eighteenth-century literature and book history, and she has published articles on verse miscellanies, Shakespearean textual criticism, manuscript culture, and amateur theatricals in this period.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Miscellanies, Poetry, and Authorship, 1680–1800
Authors: Carly Watson
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37066-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37065-7Published: 27 March 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37068-8Published: 29 March 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-37066-4Published: 26 March 2021
Series ISSN: 2634-6516
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6524
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 293
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Eighteenth-Century Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Literary Theory, History of the Book