“But Genius is the special Gift of God!” : The Reclamation of “Natural Genius” in the Late Eighteenth-Century Verses of Ann Yearsley and James Woodhouse
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19309675
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1017/9781108105392.006
- Book title
- A History of British Working-Class Literature
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- ISBN
- 978-1-107-19040-5
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The chapter is part of a collection that examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. It charts the twin notions of ‘natural’ and ‘original’ genius as specific and articulate concepts with a distinct history subsumed into modern conceptions of literary genius that fail to adequately represent their complexity, and also the agency of laboring class poets.
In 18th Century working class literature, the phenomenon of the ‘peasant-poet’ was perceived as a species of natural genius, a kind of home-grown noble savage, whose poetry miraculously emerged from a rustic lifestyle, specifically without benefit of formal training and thus untainted with classicism or learned sophistry. This chapter offers a typology and case study of this ideology of ‘natural genius’ and its variants, closely examining its development through the eighteenth-century period. In so doing, the chapter argues for the re-appropriation and reclamation of ‘natural genius’ in the late-century poems of Ann Yearsley (1753–1806) and James Woodhouse (1735–1820).
Scholars have used the concept of natural genius to assimilate laboring class poets into 18th Culture, on the basis that as they were unable to take advantage of patronage they would otherwise be lost to history. This has the effect of denying such poets their own agency and compromises their record of achievement, and neglects the resistance to such tropes that is clearly exhibited in their works.
This chapter demonstrates that, by the century’s end, laboring class poets unhesitatingly manipulated and answered back to the conventions of ‘natural genius’ for their own political, religious, aesthetic, and ethical ends.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
