A companion to eighteenth-century poetry

This broad-ranging Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry in all its rich variety. * An up-to-date and wide-ranging guide to eighteenth-century poetry. * Reflects the dramatic transformation which has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. * Opens with a section on contexts, discussing poetry's relationships with patriotism, politics, science, and the visual arts, for example. * Discusses poetry by male and female poets from all walks of life. * Includes numerous close readings of individual poems, ranging from Pope's The Rape of the Lock to Mary Collier's The Woman's Labour. * Includes more provocative contributions on subjects such as rural poetry and the self-taught tradition, British poetry 'beyond the borders', the constructions of femininity, women as writers and women as readers. * Designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard's Eighteenth-century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Blackwell Publishing, Second Edition, 2003).