Miscellanies, Poetry, and Authorship, 1680-1800

This book is a critical study of the ancestors of contemporary poetry anthologies:the poetic miscellanies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Itargues that miscellanies are a distinctive kind of literary collection and that theirpopularity in the period 1680-1800 had a far-reaching impact on authors,publishers, and readers of poetry. This study expands the definition of miscellanies to include single-authorcollections called miscellanies as well as the multiple-author collections thathave traditionally been the focus of scholarly attention. It shows how multiple-authormiscellanies fostered different kinds of literary community and exploresthe neglected role of single-author miscellanies in the self-fashioning ofeighteenth-century writers. Later chapters examine miscellanies' relationshipswith periodicals, their contribution to the formation of the literary canon, andtheir reception and transformation in the hands of readers. The book draws onnewly available digital data as well as evidence from hundreds of printedmiscellanies to shed new light on how poetry was written, published, and read inthe long eighteenth century.