Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries (Issue 6)

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Daniel Defoe Society

Digital Defoe ISSUE 6.1

Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries is accepting submissions for Issue 6.1 which will be published in October 2014. Submissions are due by May 1, 2014. The overarching theme of this issue is the poetry of the years c.1690-c.1720, which, as J. Paul Hunter has pointed out in an article of 2008, lacked a clear poetic figurehead and therefore may be considered the "in-between years" of the history of poetry, or the "missing years" between the conventionally conceived Ages of Dryden and Pope. This is not to say that the three decades or so in question had no prominent producers of verse: Defoe was arguably England's leading poet during the first ten years of the new century and writers such as Richard Blackmore, John Dennis, Anne Finch, Matthew Prior, and Elizabeth Singer Rowe, to name but a few, made noteworthy contributions to the landscape of verse during period. To be sure, there has been a growing critical interest in non-canonical versifiers, but much research remains to be undertaken to offer a more balanced view of the history of poetry between 1690-1720.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

*(Re-)assessments of Defoe's poetry and/or individual poems;
* Defoe in relation to other poets;
* Critically neglected bestselling poems, 1690-1720;
* Eighteenth-century fame, twenty-first century oblivion: eighteenth-century writers of verse who were well-known, even acclaimed, in their own time, but neglected in later centuries;
* Constructing a history of poetry c.1690-c.1720;
* The marketplace of cultural reputation;
* The material culture of poetry;
* Verse or poetry? Notions of poetry and poetic variety;
* Conceptions of verse and the poet;
* The cultural and ideological hegemony of the Major Authors in criticism;
* Literary and critical elitism then and now;
* The relationship between Major Authors and marginalised writers;
* Once a poetaster, always a poetaster: in defence of Major Authors and good poetry;
* Non-canonical poems and teaching eighteenth-century literature.

This issue will be edited by Dr. Andreas Mueller, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Worcester. Dr. Mueller is the Director of the Daniel Defoe Society and the author of A Critical Study of Daniel Defoe's Verse.

Inquiries about and submissions for this issue should be sent to Dr. Andreas Mueller (a.mueller@worc.ac.uk), Dr. Katherine Ellison (keellis@ilstu.edu), and Dr. Holly Faith Nelson (hollyfaithnelson@gmail.com).