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  • New Directions on Mary Leapor and Ann Yearsley
  • Kerri Andrews

This special topics issue on the poetry of Mary Leapor (1722-1746) and Ann Yearsley (1753-1806) adds to a steadily growing collection of work on previously forgotten, ignored, or neglected poets of eighteenth-century Britain, many of whom were laboring-class or otherwise considered by posterity to sit outside the mainstream literary culture of the period. While the debt to earlier recovery work by feminist, Marxist, and cultural-materialist critics will be evident, this issue represents an intervention in the kinds of discussions we have about laboring-class poets, women writers, the direction of recovery research now, and the progress that has been made.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, and especially since the publication of Roger Lonsdale’s field-changing anthologies in 1984 and 1989, previously neglected poets have enjoyed increasing critical, and indeed popular, attention.1 Two groups in particular—laboring-class male writers and middle-class women writers—benefited early from the opening up of literary criticism of the long eighteenth century. During the last thirty or forty years, there has been a wealth of studies that have radically reshaped the literary landscape. Mary Poovey, in her 1984 The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, makes the case for the importance of cultural-materialist approaches to female writers:

only by expanding our interpretive perspectives, only by seeing imaginative creation in relation to social and psychological behavior and conditions, will we begin to grasp the complex relationship between the ways we are socially and psychologically constituted, between what we are taught to be and what we feel we are, between what we do and what we dream.2

John Barrell and Raymond Williams led the way in the decade before Poovey in establishing the means by which critics might “expand” their “interpretive perspectives” in relation to laboring-class male writers, especially John Clare. In The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (1972), Barrell is keenly interested in the social, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped Clare’s work, focusing particularly on the effects of enclosure and the influence of landscape painting, which are brought together as a means to better understand Clare’s artistic concerns; this approach enables Barrell to offer wider-reaching discussions of how ideas such as place, meaning, identity, and self were constructed in the long eighteenth century. A year after [End Page 9] Barrell’s study was published, Raymond Williams’s crucial and wide-ranging monograph The Country and the City (1973) appeared, bringing together canonical and noncanonical writers from across the long eighteenth century and beyond on equal terms. Williams’s approach has come to underpin the ways in which critics discuss many noncanonical writers.

The influence of Williams, Barrell, and also E. P. Thompson’s pioneering work can be seen in John Goodridge’s Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (1995) and, most recently, his John Clare and Community (2013). Simon Kövesi, Mina Gorji, Kelsey Thornton, Ronald Blythe, Jonathan Bate, and many others have made use of related methodologies in their discussions of Clare’s poetry and his relationship with place and in reconstructing the material circumstances of his life. The result has been to recover Clare so successfully that he has been “canonised in Poet’s Corner and the National Curriculum [in English schools], quoted approvingly in government reports on the environment, and vigorously argued over in the scholarly and broadsheet press.”3 It is now difficult to discuss Romantic-era literary culture without reference to Clare, and while Clare’s life continues to fascinate, the quality and importance of his poetry are so firmly established that the poet is in no danger of being subsumed by the man.

Goodridge has also been crucial, along with Tim Fulford, Tim Burke, Simon White, Bridget Keegan, and others, in bringing the writings of Robert Bloomfield to wider notice; all these critics have paid close attention to various aspects of the historical, social, and, crucially, literary contexts that helped shape Bloomfield’s work. Stephen Duck, the progenitor, perhaps, of the laboring-class poetic tradition, has recently benefited from the application...

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