The Poetics of the Working Classes

Boos, Florence S.

doi:10.1353/vp.2001.0008

Cited by 11 publications

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“…Hayden Ward, the editor of Victorian Poetry , also permitted me to edit and assemble an extensive collection of essays for a special issue of the journal devoted to "The Poetics of the Working Classes," which included sections on women poets, Chartist poetry and "Language, Criminality and Gender." 8 In addition to Mike Sanders' aforementioned study of the shifting aesthetic and political registers of Chartist poetry, the collection includes Ellen O'Brien's examination of the ambiguous tonalities of populist resentment in execution ballads, Stephanie Kuduk's comparison of Purgatory of Suicides with the defiant speech which led to Cooper's imprisonment, Kelly Mays's study of Chartist poets' views of race, "wage slavery," and black chattel slavery, and Larry McCauley's examination of the interrelations between dialect poetry, regional solidarity, and claims for a national working-class identity. 9 The special issue also includes references to a supplementary website of recordings of Scottish and English working-class poems, read by Clare Hodgkinson and members of the Edwin Waugh Society.…”

Section: Recoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Class and Victorian Poetics

Boos

2005

Literature Compass

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In this essay, I consider three aspects of recent studies of working-class class poetry: the tasks and rewards of its recovery, the complexities of critical attempts to interpret "non-canonical" verse, and wider insights which have emerged from efforts to integrate such attempts into more traditional studies of nineteenth-century literature. Recovery has been necessary because most working-class poets could only hope to publish their work in broadside or periodical form, and few of their works have been reprinted. Accidents of preservation have further foreshortened our understanding of the range of working-class poetry, which extended from Thomas Cooper's dignified epic verse to Isobel Chisholm's gypsy "curses" and Mary McPherson's Gaelic incantations. Interpretative studies of the range just mentioned have benefited from willingness to consider unfamiliar rhetorical models; search out historical antecedents of "simple" appeals to direct emotion; and admit that there might be more to poetry than has been dreamt of in our received interpretations and well-worn critical commonplaces. Finally, integration of an appreciation of working-class poetry into studies of Victorian literature reveals that much of the history of mid-century poetry -

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Section: Recoverymentioning

confidence: 99%

Class and Victorian Poetics

Boos

2005

Literature Compass

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“…The work of Vicinus, Maidment and Thomas began to revaluate what Vicinus terms Manchester’s ‘forgotten man of letters – an articulate figure who can tell us much about the Victorian city’ (739). Critics such as Boos and Sanders have continued to document the 19th‐century poetic production of industrial cities such as Manchester, with the 2001 special issue of Victorian Poetry , ‘The Poetics of the Working Classes’, edited by Boos, bringing together a range of scholarship which recognises the cultural significance of ‘people’s poetry’ (109), whose insights into the ‘nineteenth‐century imagination are as lyrical, sonorous, trenchant, and reflective in their ways as middle‐class meditations in formal verse meters are in theirs’ (109). More recently, Sanders’ study of poetry published in the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star , traces the relationship between poetry and political revolution through the work of more than 350 poets contributing to the newspaper between 1838 and 1852.…”

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Manchester and Early Victorian Literary Culture

Bark

2011

Literature Compass

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Early Victorian Manchester is most readily identified as a centre for industrial fiction through the realist novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. Centred on the human consequences of Manchester’s industrial expansion during the 1830s and 1840s, Mary Barton and North and South engage with the all too obvious divisions between labour and capital in the city, in particular the plight of the working poor. Whilst interest in Gaskell puts Manchester on the literary map, the city’s vibrant poetic community which emerged out of unprecedented industrial development is less well known. In opening out the discussion of Manchester’s literary culture to include the emergence of the Manchester Poets, an interesting disjunction between external perceptions of Manchester’s literary potential and the reality of its creative output is revealed. For in terms of the contemporary critical response to Manchester literature in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the overriding image of the city as a centre of manufacturing and commerce obscured the city’s reality as an abundant producer of imaginative literature, as 19th‐century commentators connected the growth of industry and commerce in Manchester to an absence of literary potential, or in the potential for literature produced in Manchester to be considered seriously. By exploring the ways in which both prose and poetry written in Manchester responded to, and formed, perceptions of the city during the 1830s and 1840s, this article discusses early Victorian Manchester’s literary culture through the critical response to Gaskell’s ‘Manchester novels’ and through the emergence of the community of Manchester Poets. The article discusses recent critical responses to Manchester’s literary culture and suggests possible directions for future research.

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Working-Class Poetry

Boos¹

2008

A Companion to Victorian Poetry

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The Poetics of the Working Classes

Cited by 11 publications

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Class and Victorian Poetics

Class and Victorian Poetics

Manchester and Early Victorian Literary Culture

Working-Class Poetry

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