Historical Poetics

In the wake of New Historicism’s powerful reshaping of literary studies, certain works have challenged the accepted relationship among culture, history, and poetic form. This special issue highlights those works, focusing on British poetry from the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century in order to expand the concentration on later poetry that has typified American study of British poetics. The articles represent multiple approaches to the complex—perhaps even internally contradictory—moniker of “historical poetics.”