"This book offers the fullest critical account to date of the literary career of Mark Akenside (1721-1770). In the course of the discussion, Akenside's literary achievements and his contributions to the vibrant cultural scene of the mid-eighteenth century are amply demonstrated, as well as his intellectual originality, his inventive use of source material, and his influence on poets and philosophers in the late eighteenth century and the Romantic period."--Publisher's website.

"This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed." "The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century." "Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation." "Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Mark Akenside (1721–1770) was a medical doctor and literary man whose influence on the history of ideas was profound. Born the son of a butcher in Newcastle Upon Tyne in 1721 Mark Akenside was awarded a degree in medicine from Edinburgh and Leyden Universities. He settled in London in 1743 where he was successful both as a doctor and in medical research. Above all, he was the author of The Pleasures of Imagination1744, an epic length poem in blank verse which broke many conventions of the time, exploring ideas about human perception and the natural world. Akenside had a European reputation and became a national celebrity. He was a major influence on first- and second-generation Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, etc. He also made an impact on the development of landscape painting in the early 19th century through his influence on J.M.W. Turner. This book examines these issues, as well as the controversy and speculation about Akenside's relationship with his origins, his sexuality, and changing political affiliations in a period of economic crisis and great social change.

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers. For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl

Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–1832 examines the ramifications of Scottish medicine for literary culture within Scotland, throughout Britain, and across the transatlantic world. The contributors take an informed historicist approach in examining the cultural, geographical, political, and other circumstances enabling the dissemination of distinctively Scottish medico-literary discourses. In tracing the international influence of Scottish medical ideas upon literary practice they ask critical questions concerning medical ethics, the limits of sympathy and the role of belles lettres in professional self-fashioning, and the development of medico-literary genres such as the medical short story, physician autobiography and medical biography. Some consider the role of medical ideas and culture in the careers, creative practice and reception of such canonical writers as Mark Akenside, Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth. By providing an important range of current scholarship, these essays represent an expansion and greater penetration of critical vision. Megan J. Coyer is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Medical Humanities within the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. David E. Shuttleton is Reader in Literature and Medical Culture within the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow.

In 1818 Michael Faraday and a handful of other London artisans formed a self-help group with the aim of teaching themselves to write like gentlemen. For a year and a half the essay-circle met regularly to read aloud and criticize one another's writings. The 'Mental Exercises' they produced are a record of the life, literary tastes, and social and political ideas of dissenting artisans in Regency London. This complete corpus of the essay-circle's writings is accompanied by detailed annotations, extracts from key sources, and a full-length introduction explaining the biographical, historical and literary context of the group.