Elations : the poetics of enthusiasm in eighteenth-century Britain

Elations rewrites the history of early-18th-century English literature around the politics and poetics of "Enthusiasm." It examines the aesthetic theory of the period, traces the evolution and differentiation of a poetic enthusiasm from religious enthusiasm, and reassesses the poetry of two poets very popular in their time: James Thomson and Edward Young. "Elations rewrites the history of early-eighteenth-century English literature around the politics and poetics of "Enthusiasm." It examines the aesthetic theory of the period and reassesses the poetry of two poets seldom read today but very popular in their time. James Thomson and Edward Young. The book also explores the genesis and construction of moral authority through a variety of competing discourses appropriated by poetry, and it traces the rehabilitation of languages of sentiment and Enthusiasm between the English Civil War and the American Revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

“Irlam’s readings are deft and judicious, and this study makes a large and . . . brilliant contribution to the field.”—Journal of English and Germanic Philology
“Like Derrida and Paul de Man, what Irlam does is not “scholarship,” but textual reading yoked to a priori metaphysical argument. . . . Irlam’s readings [of Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition], and in his chapters on Thomson, make Elations a book worth inspecting.”—Modern Philology

Seeking "to discover what happens inside that black hole of English poetry between neoclassicism and romanticism", Irlam (comparative literature, State U. of New York-Buffalo) excavates the now seldom read poetry of two poets popular in 18th century England, James Thomson and Edward Young.