William Cowper

Religion, Satire, Society

Conrad Brunström

2004
107 pages
ISBN 1611481914
LC 2003060722
Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

This book re-examines the literary significance of poet and translator William Cowper (1731-1800). Too often, Cowper is pigeonholed as an eccentric, a hopeless depressive, or even as a religious lunatic. Often regarded as an "early" Romantic, Cowper is reconsidered in this book in light of a rich eighteenth-century political and religious culture. Rather than read him as an old-fashioned Calvinist stranded in an increasingly secularized society, Cowper can be read as someone who well understood the increasingly imprecise and emotionalist quality of eighteenth-century religious discourse and who expressed this dominant tendency with uncanny insight.

About the author:

Conrad Brunström was born in London, England in 1968, and educated at the University of Cambridge, where he received his PhD in 1994. Since 1995 he has been Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He has published on authors such as Samuel Johnson, james Beattie, Thomas Sheridan the Younger, and Charles Churchill in boks and journals including The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-century Ireland, Romanticism, and New Hibernia Review. His research interests include religious poetry, literature and nationalism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and ideas of eighteenth-century masculinity.