Introduction to Phenomenology

Nearly 1400 poets from labouring-class origins wrote and published in Great Britain between 1700 and 1900, yet much of their work has yet to be properly examined. This study focuses upon how these writers represented nature in their poetry and how they adapted and transformed the poetic genres available to them. Looking in turn at their treatment of different ecosystems, including farms, gardens, hills, rivers, seas and wetlands, the book argues that writing about the environment allowed labouring-class poets to explore important social and aesthetic questions. The book examines the works of numerous poets from Stephen Duck, William Falconer and Ann Yearsley in the eighteenth-century to Robert Bloomfield and John Clare in the nineteenth-century. The book expands the canon of British poetry and broadens the scope of environmental literary criticism by exploring the question of how an author's class background affects his or her engagements with the natural world.