Della Cruscan Poetry, Women and the Fashionable Newspaper

This book explores Della Cruscan poetry in the late eighteenth-century literary scene. A sociable, ornate, and deeply theatrical type of poetry, Della Cruscanism was associated with writers like Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Cowley. While Merry is the poet most commonly associated with the Della Cruscan school, this book argues that Della Cruscanism was a movement dominated by female poets and that this was one of the key reasons for the later disavowal and downgrading of its poetic accomplishments. It offers a close examination of these women writers and their role in shaping the poetic culture of the fashionable newspaper. In doing so, this study offers the first account of the feminization of the fashionable newspaper and of popular literary culture in the final years of the eighteenth century. Claire Knowles is Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University, Australia. She is author of Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780-1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith (2009) and edited Charlotte Smith: The Major Poems with Ingrid Horrocks. Claire is also the current President of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia.