William McCarthy is professor of English emeritus at Iowa State University.Olivia Murphy is lecturer in English at Murdoch University.

• ContentsList of Illustrations List of Tables Preface Gillian Dow and Felicity JamesAcknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction: Anna Letitia Barbauld Today William McCarthy1“Slip-shod Measure” and “Language of Gods”: Barbauld’s Stylistic Range Isobel Grundy2 Barbauld’s Poetic Career in Script and Print Michelle Levy3 Anna Letitia Barbauld: A Unitarian Poetics? Isobel Armstrong4 Materiality, Affect, Event: Barbauld’s Poetics of the Everyday Sonia Hofkosh5 “The Things Themselves”: Sensory Images in Lessons for Children and Hymns in ProseJoanna Wharton6 “Hallowed by the Occasion of the Meeting”: Priestley, Meetings, Utility and Address in Barbauld’s Work of the 1790s Stephen Bygrave7 Lady Defender of the Revolution: Anna Letitia Barbauld among the British Radicals ... Rachel Trethewey8 Stoic Patriotism in Barbauld’s Political Poems E. J. Clery9 From Beauties to Selections: Barbauld’s Design for The SpectatorScott Krawczyk10 Assuming Authority: Barbauld as Critic Sabine Volk-Birke11 Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen’s Unseen Interlocutor Jocelyn Harris12 “No Man Could Owe More”: John Ruskin’s Debt to Anna Barbauld’s Books for Children Naomi Lightman13 Riddling Sibyl, Uncanny Cassandra: the Recent Critical Reception of Anna Letitia Barbauld Olivia MurphyBibliography Works of Anna Letitia BarbauldSecondary WorksAbout the Contributors Index

In the introduction, McCarthy announces that this volume allows one to see Barbauld (1743-1825) as she was seen in her own time–as a major author–with the result that critics need no longer focus single-mindedly on issues of gender. Accordingly, the papers collected here–which emanate from a conference on Barbauld's most important political poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (though only one paper focuses on that work)–engage a great range of issues: manuscript versus print publication; abolitionism and republican politics; the invention of a distinctly Unitarian rhetoric by Barbauld and her mentor, Joseph Priestley; Barbauld as editor, anthologist, critic, writer for children, utilitarian moralist, and influence on Jane Austen; Barbauld and the world of things. The contributors (among whom are many of the best critics of 18th- and early-19th-century literature, most notably Isobel Armstrong, Isobel Grundy, and Jocelyn Harris) write with a clarity and vigor that will appeal to nonspecialists and make this book genuinely useful for a broad range of readers. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.