
Contents
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Refiguring the Churchyard Refiguring the Churchyard
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‘Rude forefathers’: Breaking with Gray’s Elegy ‘Rude forefathers’: Breaking with Gray’s Elegy
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Written on the Body: The Hard Work of Feeling Written on the Body: The Hard Work of Feeling
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Introduction Churchyard Poetics, 1743–1821
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Published:January 2025
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Abstract
The Introduction sets up the stakes of the book’s argument and the methods with which this argument is made. A first section outlines the book’s contribution: providing a counter-tradition to the familiar category of eighteenth-century ‘graveyard school’ by reading churchyard poems by women and labouring-class poets. It introduces ‘graveyard poetry’ before offering an intervention shaped by cultural materialist literary criticism. If the churchyard is often solely scenic, churchyard poems by Robert Blair, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare recover this landscape as a contested space of social life—one where history is not suspended but rather felt in all its intensity by the working bodies pressed to earth in new regimes of work under capital. A second section introduces the genres that redefine the churchyard as a literary and social landscape. Georgic, pastoral, topographical poetry, elegy, and the long poem provide poets with aesthetic technologies for managing the difficult material of life under capital as its casualties are disclosed in the churchyard’s buried bodies. This section also provides a brief history of the churchyard, to orient readers to its social status in the eighteenth century. A third section makes a reading of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) to demonstrate how, even here, difficult feelings emerge as poets struggle with historical experiences of labour. A final section locates the book in studies of lyric poetry, the senses, affect, gender, and genre, explaining what this combination makes possible for a new reading of churchyard poetry.
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