Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century: Imagined Antiquities (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

This book offers a radical new theory of the role of poetry in the rise of cultural nationalism. With equal attention to England, Scotland, and Wales, the book takes an Archipelagic approach to the study of poetics, print media, and medievalism in the rise of British Romanticism. It tells the story of how poets and antiquarian editors in the British nations rediscovered forgotten archaic poetic texts and repurposed them as the foundation of a new concept of the nation, now imagined as a primarily cultural formation. It also draws on legal and ecclesiastical history in drawing a sharp contrast between early modern and Romantic antiquarianisms. Equally a work of literary criticism and history, the book offers provocative new theorizations of nationalism and Romanticism and new readings of major British poets, including Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Front Matter ....Pages i-xv Introduction: Beowulf or Brutus of Troy? (Jeff Strabone)....Pages 1-76 Allan Ramsay and Thomas Ruddiman: Two Ways of Reviving Scotland’s Dead Poets (Jeff Strabone)....Pages 77-121 The Fall and Rise of the Welsh Bards, or, How the English Became British (Jeff Strabone)....Pages 123-214 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Other Bardic Poets: Thomas Chatterton, Edward Jones, Iolo Morganwg, and Odin (Jeff Strabone)....Pages 215-260 Christabel and the Metre of “our oldest Writers in the most barbarous ages” (Jeff Strabone)....Pages 261-297 Epilogue: A Millennium of British Poetry? (Jeff Strabone)....Pages 299-307 Back Matter ....Pages 309-351