Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–90

John Regan

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783087723
• eBook ISBN: 9781783087747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Progress by Prescription
• Chapter 2 Thomas Sheridan and the Divine Harmony of Progress
• Chapter 3 ‘There is a Natural Propensity in the Human Mind to Apply Number and Measure to Every Thing We Hear’: Monboddo, Steele and Prosody As Rhythm
• Chapter 4 ‘[C]‌UT INTO, Distorted, Twisted’: Thomas Percy, Editing and the Idea of Progress
• Chapter 5 ‘Manners’ And ‘Marked Prosody’: Hugh Blair and Henry Home, Lord Kames
• Afterword: Rude Manners, ‘Stately’ Measures: Byron and the Idea of Progress in the New Century
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index