The Poetry of the Self-Taught: An Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon

The Poetry of the Self-Taught demonstrates the characteristic strengths of self-taught poetry and analyzes the factors that have caused most selftaught poets to disappear from anthologies and from literary history. Raising the question of whether or not their work should be read today and taken seriously - instead of being relegated to separate and unequal categories like women's or peasant poetry - the book highlights interesting contrasts between the poetry of eighteenth-century autodidacts such as Robert Burns, Mary Leapor, C.D.F. Schubart, and Anna Louise Karsch and the work of their contemporaries, mainstream poets like Alexander Pope, James Thomson, C.F. Gellert, and Barthold Heinrich Brockes. Self-taught poetry is often treated as an index to the lives and times of the poets, but this book explores it with a different purpose: to understand and illustrate the commonalities in autodidactic poetics, imagery, rhetorical strategies, and themes. Concurrent with a recent upturn of interest in laboring or self-taught poets both in England and in Germany, The Poetry of the Self-Taught will be useful for courses focusing on such poets or those dealing with eighteenth-century literature.

The Author: Julie Prandi earned her Ph.D. in German literature at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to co-editing a volume of essays, The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History (2002), Dr. Prandi has published a book on Goethe’s mature world view, Dare To Be Happy! A Study of Goethe’s Ethics (1993) as well as an analysis of classical German drama, Spirited Women Heroes: Major Female Characters in the Dramas of Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist (1983). Since 1993 she has been Professor of German Language and Literature at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois.