New Essays on John Clare
Poetry, Culture and Community

Essays by leading scholars offer new insights into a remarkable poet and early advocate of environmental ethics and aesthetics.

Simon Kövesi (Edited by), Scott McEathron (Edited by)

9781107031111, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 July 2015

252 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.51 kg

'Simon Kövesi's and Scott McEathron's collection represents an engaging and timely contribution to Clare studies, one most rewarding for the way it testifies to Clare's 'ongoing status as an uncategorizable literary and social misfit'.' Daniel Westwood, The Keats-Shelley Review

John Clare (1793–1864) has long been recognized as one of England's foremost poets of nature, landscape and rural life. Scholars and general readers alike regard his tremendous creative output as a testament to a probing and powerful intellect. Clare was that rare amalgam ? a poet who wrote from a working-class, impoverished background, who was steeped in folk and ballad culture, and who yet, against all social expectations and prejudices, read and wrote himself into a grand literary tradition. All the while he maintained a determined sense of his own commitments to the poor, to natural history and to the local. Through the diverse approaches of ten scholars, this collection shows how Clare's many angles of critical vision illuminate current understandings of environmental ethics, aesthetics, Romantic and Victorian literary history, and the nature of work.

Introduction Simon Kövesi and Scott McEathron
Part I. Poetry: 1. John Clare's colours Fiona Stafford
2. John Clare, William Cowper and the eighteenth century Adam Rounce
3. John Clare's conspiracy Sarah M. Zimmerman
Part II. Culture: 4. John Clare and the new varieties of enclosure: a polemic John Burnside
5. Ecology with religion: kinship in John Clare Emma Mason
6. The lives of Frederick Martin and the first Life of John Clare Scott McEathron
7. John Clare's deaths: poverty, education, and poetry Simon Kövesi
Part III. Community: 8. John Clare's natural history Robert Heyes
9. 'This is radical slang': John Clare, Admiral Lord John Radstock and the Queen Caroline affair Sam Ward
10. John Clare and the London Magazine Richard Cronin.

Subject Areas: Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Popular culture [JFCA], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]