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This volume reassesses working-class poetry and poetics in Victorian Britain, using Scotland as a focus and with particular attention to the role of the popular press in fostering and disseminating working-class verse cultures. It studies a very wide variety of writers who are unknown to scholarship, and assesses the political, social, and cultural work which their poetry performed.During the Victorian period, Scotland underwent unprecedented changes in terms of industrialization, the rise of the city, migration, and emigration. This study shows how poets who defined themselves as part of a specifically Scottish tradition responded to these changes. It substantially revises our understanding of Scottish literature in this period, while contributing to wider investigations of the role of popular verse in national and international cultures.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: The Work of Verse
- 2: Reforming the Social Circle: Nursery Verse, Poetic Community, and the Politics of Whistle-Binkie
- 3: Stands Scotland Where it Did? Nostalgia, Improvement, and the Uses of the Land
- 4: The Measure of Industry
- 5: Humour, Satire, and the Rise of the Bad Poet
- Afterword
- Bibliography
About the author
Kirstie Blair holds a Chair in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She previously worked at the universities of Stirling, Glasgow, and Oxford. She is author of two monographs on Victorian poetry, both published with Oxford University Press, and a wide selection of articles and book chapters, largely focused on aspects of Victorian literature and culture. She recently published an anthology of working-class newspaper verse, The Poets of the People's Journal, with the Association for Scottish Literary Studies. From 2018 to 2021, Professor Blair is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project 'Piston, Pen & Press: Literary Cultures in the Industrial Workplace.' She is also the current Director and the founder of the collaborative Scottish Centre for Victorian and Neo-Victorian Studies.
Summary
This monograph reassesses working-class poetry and poetics in Victorian Britain, using Scotland as a focus and with particular attention to the role of the popular press in fostering and disseminating working-class verse cultures.
Additional text
Kirstie Blair's paradigm-shifting monograph Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community should put a stop to any remaining critical skepticism about the "value" of studying laboring-class poets and their poetry... Blair's erudite, engaging, and truly paradigm-shifting study ensures that these poets—many of whom remain to be fully recovered—can no longer be ignored. There are rich rewards to be reaped by taking working-class poets and their poetry seriously, and Blair's book will be generative of new work and new approaches that will continue to enrich the study of laboring-class literature.
Report
Blair more than succeeds in making these interventions; her thoroughly impressive revisionist study is a crucial and much-needed contribution to each of these intersecting areas. Taryn Hakala, California State University Channel Islands, VICTORIAN STUDIES
