Literature Network » William Blake

"The order of time": nationalism and literary anthologies, 1774-1831.

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From: Papers on Language & Literature
Date: 19970922
Author:Wright, Julia M.

Literary anthologies put together at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries used literature as a means of promoting a unified, political identity for all those living in Great Britain. One type of the anthology focussed on the increasingly literate middle and lower classes, presenting a genealogy of good literature that began and ended with the English. Other anthologies were produced for the educated, discussing how poetry created by the unschooled was inferior.

In Jerusalem, William Blake declares, "Nations are Destroy'd, or Flourish, in proportion as Their Poetry ...

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