Screen LibraryMary Wollstonecraft in context /
"An article that appeared in the April 1797 edition of the Monthly Magazine entitled "On Artificial Taste" offered readers a meditation on two of the most widely noted dimensions of this popular theme: "a taste for rural scenes" and the more "natural" quality of po...
Saved in:
| Group Author: | ; |
|---|---|
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press,
|
| Publisher Address: | Cambridge, United Kingdom : |
| Publication Dates: | 2020. |
| Literature type: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Summary: |
"An article that appeared in the April 1797 edition of the Monthly Magazine entitled "On Artificial Taste" offered readers a meditation on two of the most widely noted dimensions of this popular theme: "a taste for rural scenes" and the more "natural" quality of poetry that had been "written in the infancy of society." In some ways, both of these were standard topics, frequently discussed in the literary magazines of the day, though the article addressed them with compelling rigour and clarity, and with a refreshing impatience for empty poses and cultural double standards. It was curious, the author suggested, given people's widely professed love of nature, "how few people seem to contemplate nature with their own eyes. I have 'brushed the dew away' in the morning; but, pacing over the printless grass, I have wondered that, in such delightful situations, the sun was allowed to rise in solitary majesty, whilst my eyes alone hailed its beautifying beams." Having offered a no-nonsense reflection on the state of people's real interest in nature beyond the sort of "romantic kind of declamation" that was so much in vogue, the author moved on to offer a fairly standard list of the age's assumptions: poetry is a "transcript of immediate emotions" transfigured by the effects of those "happy moment[s]" in which the poet is enriched by images "spontaneously bursting on him" without the need for any recourse to "understanding or memory." This account of creativity, like the article's definition of the poet as "a man of strong feelings" giving "us a picture of his mind when he was actually alone, conversing with himself, and marking the impression which nature made on his own heart" seemed to converge with William Wordsworth's ideas about poetry in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Its related insistence on the higher spiritual worth of those moments when the poet worshipped "in a temple not made with hands, and the world seems to contain only the mind that formed and contem |
| Carrier Form: | xxxiii, 358 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: |
9781108416993 1108416993 9781108404235 1108404235 |
| Index Number: | PR5841 |
| CLC: | K835.615.1 |
| Call Number: | K835.615.1/W864 |
| Contents: | Part I. Life and Works. Biography / Kate Chisholm -- Correspondence / Andrew McInnes -- Family / Julie Carlson -- Joseph Johnson / David Fallon -- Part II. Critical Fortunes. Early critical reception / Nancy E. Johnson -- Nineteenth-century critical reception / Eileen Hunt Botting -- 1970s critical reception / Julie Murray -- Recent critical reception / Eliza O'Brien -- Part III. Historical and Cultural Contexts. Writing the French Revolution / Mary A. Favret -- Radical societies / David O'Shaughnessy -- Radical publishers / Jon Mee -- British conservatism / Paul Keen -- Jacobin reformers / Mary Fairclough -- Liberal reformers / Michelle Levy -- Conservative reformers / Claire Grogan -- French philosophes / Sylvana Tomaselli -- Dissenters / Andrew McKendry -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau / Laura Kirkley -- Edmund Burke / Frans de Bruyn -- William Godwin / Pamela Clemit -- Political theory / Lena Halldenius -- Feminist theory / Jane Moore -- The constitution / Ian Ward -- Property law / Catherine Packham -- Domestic law / Rebecca Probert -- Slavery and abolition / Katie Donington -- The Bluestockings / Betty A. Schellenberg -- Conduct literature / Vivien Jones -- Theories of education / Frances Ferguson -- Sentimentalism and sensibility / Alex Wetmore -- English Jacobin novels / April London -- Anti-Jacobin novels / Gary Kelly -- Children's literature / Andrew O'Malley -- Gothic literature / Michael Gamer -- Travel writing / Pamela Perkins -- History writing / Jonathan Sachs - Periodicals / Jacqueline George -- Translations / Alessa Johns. |