Writing the Poetry of Place in Britain, 1700–1807

Elizabeth R. Napier is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Middlebury College. She has published on, among other subjects, eighteenth-century English Gothic fiction, problems of embodiment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English fiction, and narrative strategies in the work of Daniel Defoe.

"This exemplary study of eighteenth-century landscape poetry explores the complex relationship of self and place to present new, original, and intelligent readings of a range of authors from the period." -Dr Carol Bolton, Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough University, UK.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroductionI. Pervious Landscapes: Pope, Wordsworth, CowperChapter One The Weather Underground: Pope in "Ode on Solitude"Chapter Two Bearing It Away: "The Solitary Reaper"Chapter Three "What Can It Signify?": Finding the Subject in "On the Ice-Islands Floating in the Germanic Ocean"II. Landscapes of Loss: Duck, Goldsmith, CrabbeChapter Four "Lost, drown'd": The Problem of the Imagination in "The Thresher's Labour"Chapter Five Road to Nowhere: The Poetics of Absence in "The Deserted Village"Chapter Six Lost Cause: The Village and the Place of the Manners TributeIII. Vanishings: Thomson, Gray, SmithChapter Seven "Conning Nature's Book": Body, Soul, Self, and Poetic Vision in The SeasonsChapter Eight Vanishing Point: Gray in the Eton OdeChapter Nine "Bearing the Cor’se to Land": Beachy HeadEpilogueWorks Cited