University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press
Pages: 404
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼
978-1-61148-549-3 • Hardback • December 2013 • $143.00 • (£110.00)
978-1-61148-712-1 • Paperback • December 2015 • $72.99 • (£56.00)
978-1-61148-550-9 • eBook • December 2013 • $69.00 • (£53.00)
William McCarthy is professor of English emeritus at Iowa State University.
Olivia Murphy is lecturer in English at Murdoch University.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
Gillian Dow and Felicity James
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Anna Letitia Barbauld Today
William McCarthy
1“Slip-shod Measure” and “Language of Gods”: Barbauld’s Stylistic Range
Isobel Grundy
2 Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print
Michelle Levy
3 Anna Letitia Barbauld: A Unitarian Poetics?
Isobel Armstrong
4 Materiality, Affect, Event: Barbauld’s Poetics of the Everyday
Sonia Hofkosh
5 “The Things Themselves”: Sensory Images in Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose
Joanna Wharton
6 “Hallowed by the Occasion of the Meeting”: Priestley, Meetings, Utility and Address in Barbauld’s Work of the 1790s
Stephen Bygrave
7 Lady Defender of the Revolution: Anna Letitia Barbauld among the British Radicals ...
Rachel Trethewey
8 Stoic Patriotism in Barbauld’s Political Poems
E. J. Clery
9 From Beauties to Selections: Barbauld’s Design for The Spectator
Scott Krawczyk
10 Assuming Authority: Barbauld as Critic
Sabine Volk-Birke
11 Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen’s Unseen Interlocutor
Jocelyn Harris
12 “No Man Could Owe More”: John Ruskin’s Debt to Anna Barbauld’s Books for Children
Naomi Lightman
13 Riddling Sibyl, Uncanny Cassandra: the Recent Critical Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld
Olivia Murphy
Bibliography
Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld
Secondary Works
About the Contributors
Index
In the introduction, McCarthy announces that this volume allows one to see Barbauld (1743-1825) as she was seen in her own time–as a major author–with the result that critics need no longer focus single-mindedly on issues of gender. Accordingly, the papers collected here–which emanate from a conference on Barbauld's most important political poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (though only one paper focuses on that work)–engage a great range of issues: manuscript versus print publication; abolitionism and republican politics; the invention of a distinctly Unitarian rhetoric by Barbauld and her mentor, Joseph Priestley; Barbauld as editor, anthologist, critic, writer for children, utilitarian moralist, and influence on Jane Austen; Barbauld and the world of things. The contributors (among whom are many of the best critics of 18th- and early-19th-century literature, most notably Isobel Armstrong, Isobel Grundy, and Jocelyn Harris) write with a clarity and vigor that will appeal to nonspecialists and make this book genuinely useful for a broad range of readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews
This stunning collection of new essays immediately (re)establishes Anna Letitia Barbauld as one of the most important and influential authors of the earlier Romantic era in Britain. It reminds today’s readers that Barbauld was not only a writer of extraordinary intellectual range and capacity but also a masterful stylist in prose and poetry alike. Neglected and misrepresented for nearly two centuries of conventional literary-historical commentary, Barbauld emerges from this collection of compelling essays as a protean writer whose obligations to her readers, her literary contemporaries, and her fellow citizens were never far from view and who committed herself with remarkable self-effacement to the moral and civic duty that were crucial to her as a Dissenting writer, thinker, teacher, and loyal British citizen.
— Stephen C. Behrendt, University Professor and George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nebraska