Mapping Mythologies
Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry and Cultural History

In this groundbreaking work of revisionary literary history, Marilyn Butler traces the imagining of alternative versions of the nation in eighteenth-century Britain, both in the works of a series of well-known poets (Akenside, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, Blake) and in the differing accounts of the national culture offered by eighteenth-century antiquarians and literary historians. She charts the beginnings in eighteenth-century Britain of what is now called cultural history, exploring how and why it developed, and the issues at stake. Her interest is not simply in a succession of great writers, but in the politics of a wider culture, in which writers, scholars, publishers, editors, booksellers, readers all play their parts. For more than thirty years, Marilyn Butler was a towering presence in eighteenth-century and romantic studies, and this major work is published for the first time.

Preface Heather Glen; 1. Mapping mythologies; 2. Thomson and Akenside; 3. Collins and Gray; 4. The forgers: Macpherson and Chatterton; 5. Popular antiquities; 6. Blake; Coda.

Marilyn Butler (1937–2014) was a prominent scholar in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, a groundbreaking practitioner and theorist of the historicist criticism of literary texts, and pioneering scholarly editor of hitherto marginalized women writers. Her widely acclaimed publications include Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972), Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context (1979), Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (1981), and seminal scholarly editions of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. She was King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge from 1986 to 1993, and Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, from 1993 to 2004. Mapping Mythologies, finished in 1984, but never hitherto published, is the first volume of a never-completed larger project on literary mythologies between 1730 and 1830.
Heather Glen was Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge until 2012, and is an Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College.