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The last major work by Marilyn Butler, leading literary critic of the late twentieth century, on imaginative ideas of nationhood.
List of contents
Preface Heather Glen; 1. Mapping mythologies; 2. Thomson and Akenside; 3. Collins and Gray; 4. The forgers: Macpherson and Chatterton; 5. Popular antiquities; 6. Blake; Coda.
About the author
Marilyn Butler (1937-2014) was a prominent scholar in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, a groundbreaking practitioner and theorist of the historicist criticism of literary texts, and pioneering scholarly editor of hitherto marginalized women writers. Her widely acclaimed publications include Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972), Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context (1979), Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 (1981), and seminal scholarly editions of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. She was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1986 to 1993, and Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1993 to 2004. Mapping Mythologies, finished in 1984, but never hitherto published, is the first volume of a never-completed larger project on literary mythologies between 1730 and 1830.
Summary
Witty, informative, full of sharp and provocative insights, this study by leading scholar, Marilyn Butler, offers a compelling account of the varied, ambitious 'mythologies' of the nation developed by writers in eighteenth-century Britain who felt themselves to be marginalized or excluded from centres of power.
