Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology

By Christine Gerrard

Book Overview

Currently the definitive text in the field and now available in an expanded third edition, Eighteenth-Century Poetry presents the rich diversity of English poetry from 1700-1800 in authoritative texts and with full scholarly annotation.

Balanced to reflect current interests and "favorites" (including prominent poets like Finch, Swift, Pope, Montagu, Johnson, Gray, Burns, and Cowper) as well as less familiar material, offering a variety of voices and new directions for research and learning Includes 46 new poems with more texts by women poets and the inclusion of four additional poets (Mary Barber, Mehetabel Wright, Anna Seward, and Mary Robinson); poems reflecting new ecological approaches to 18th-century literature; and poems on the art of writing Accessible and user-friendly, with generous head notes, full foot-of-page annotations, an expanded thematic index, and a visually appealing text design

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 111882475X
• ISBN13: 9781118824757
• Release Date: December 2014
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 2.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.6" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

The best of its kind

I've been teaching 18th and 19th century poetry courses for a few years and this anthology is the best I've found. The editorial choices favor the canon, as an anthology should. Many full texts of major poems are included, but so are texts of poems often overlooked but vital to a comprehensive survey. There are long excerpts of Thompson's The Seasons, for example, which very few anthologies think to include because it is a somewhat mind-numbing read and *hard* to teach to undergraduates; it is by far one of the most important poems of the early c18 decades. Because the anthology accounts for both a poem's initial reception and its teachability, it surpasses the competition.

Reshaping the Eighteenth-Century Canon

In Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, David Fairer and Christine Gerrard have created an important portable library. The contents have been organized in a variety of useful ways (chronologically as well as thematically) and insightfully selected to cover a range of voices and topics. The annotations stand up to repeated readings; the scholarship displays a rare mixture of subtlety and depth of knowledge. Although it is an invaluable teaching tool for undergraduates, I keep it on my desk as an accessible and meticulously accurate reference resource. There is no finer work of its kind.