Anna Letitia Barbauld

New Perspectives

William McCarthy, Olivia Murphy

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781611485509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Literature

Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the first collection of essays on poet and public intellectual Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825). By international scholars of eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, these new essays survey Barbauld's writing from early to late: her versatility as a stylist, her poetry, her books for children, her political writing, her performance as editor and reviewer. They explore themes of sociability, materiality, and affect in Barbauld's writing, and trace her reception and influence. Rooted in enlightenment philosophy and ethics and dissenting religion, Barbauld's work exerted a huge impact on the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and on education and ideas about childhood far into the nineteenth century. William McCarthy's introduction explores the importance of Barbauld's work today, and co-editor Olivia Murphy assesses the commentary on Barbauld that followed her rediscovery in the early 1990s. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives is the indispensible introduction to Barbauld's work and current thinking about it.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Anna Letitia Barbauld Today
• “Slip-shod Measure” and “Language of Gods”: Barbauld’s Stylistic Range
• Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print
• Anna Letitia Barbauld: A Unitarian Poetics?
• Materiality, Affect, Event: Barbauld’s Poetics of the Everyday
• “The Things Themselves”: Sensible Images in Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose
• “Hallowed by the Occasion of the Meeting”: Utility, Address and Meetings in Barbauld’s Work of the 1790s
• Lady Defender of the Revolution: Barbauld Among the British Radicals
• Stoic Patriotism in Barbauld’s Political Poems
• From Beauties to Selections: Barbauld’s Design for The Spectator
• Assuming Authority: Barbauld as Critic
• Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen’s Unseen Interlocutor
• “No Man Could Owe More”: John Ruskin’s Debt to Anna Barbauld’s Books for Children
• Riddling Sibyl, Uncanny Cassandra: Barbauld’s Recent Critical Reception
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors