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A study of John Clare in his historical and political context
No full textAs the title indicates, the basis of the thesis is to set John Clare’s life and work within the context of the social and political history of his time. It is a study that is long overdue. The manner in which topical and political matters were mediated to him and were reflected in his work are analysed. His introduction to the literary and social worlds of Stamford and London is evaluated, and the advantages and disadvantages of patronage assessed. The active and complex political culture of Stamford has been taken into account as this may have affected his later political statements and a growing awareness of his audience. His antagonism to enclosure and the social changes that it engendered are considered. Three major questions that arise from this are addressed. The two local newspapers that Clare is known to have read are used throughout. His correspondence with friends, colleagues and casual correspondents has provided valuable insights as have his poetry and prose writings. Research in the Northamptonshire Record Office has revealed important new information in the form of one book of Enclosure Commissioners’ Minutes dated 1809-14, the first five years of the enclosure of Helpstone, Clare’s native village
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Identity, authenticity, class: John Clare and the mask of Chatterton
No full textProgress and Distress on the Stratford Estate in Clare during the Eighteen Forties
Get PDFIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, the author acquired about 30,000 letters written mainly in the 1840s. These pertained to estates throughout Ireland managed by James Robert Stewart and Joseph Kincaid, hereafter denoted SK. Until the letters - called the SK correspondence in what follows - became the author’s property, they had not seen light of day since the 1840s. Addressed mainly to the SK office in Dublin, they were written mainly by landlords, tenants, the partners in SK, local agents, etc. After about 200 years in operation as a land agency, the firm in which members of the Stewart family were the principal partners - Messrs J. R. Stewart & Son(s) from the mid-1880s onwards -- ceased business in the mid-1980s. Since 1994 the author has been researching the SK correspondence of the 1840s. It gives many new insights into economic and social conditions in Ireland during the decade of the great famine, and into the operation of Ireland’s most important land agency during those years. It is intended ultimately to publish details on several of the estates managed by SK in book form. The proposed title is Landlords, Tenants, Famine: Business of an Irish Land Agency in the 1840s, a draft of which has now been completed. A majority of the letters in the larger study from which the present article is drawn are on themes some of which one might expect - rents, distraint (seizure of assets in lieu of rent) ; ‘voluntary’ surrender of land in return for ‘compensation’ upon peacefully quitting; formal ejectment (a matter of last resort on estates managed by SK); landlord-assisted emigration (on a scale much more extensive than most historians of Ireland in the 1840s appear to believe); petitions from tenants; complaints by tenants, both about other tenants and local agents; major works of improvement (on almost all of the estates managed by SK); applications by SK, on behalf of proprietors, for government loans to finance improvements; recommendations of agricultural advisers hired by SK, ete. Thus, most of the SK correspondence is about aspects of estate management. It seems, in the 1840s, that the only estate in Clare managed by SK was that of the elderly Col. Stratford. Although the files on the relatively small Stratford estate are much less extensive than those on some of the estates investigated in detail in the draft of Landlords, Tenants, Famine, they do refer to most of the core aspects of estate management mentioned above. But in the case of the Clare estate, the material on some of those themes is extremely thin.
Author interview: considering Emma Goldman with Professor Clare Hemmings
Get PDFWe speak to Professor Clare Hemmings about her new book, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (Duke UP, 2018), which examines Goldman’s significance as an anarchist activist and thinker to the past and present of feminist theories and activism. Hemmings shows that the contradictions and tensions within Goldman’s approach to race, gender and sexuality speak to unresolved questions that continue to shape feminist practices and politics today
Junkets and Clarissimus: The Clare - Keats Dialogue
Get PDFAlthough Clare and Keats never met or directly corresponded, they were close contemporaries with much in common, including a publisher and overlapping literary circles and interests. Moreover, they passed messages to each other via their publisher John Taylor, and the evidence suggests a significant level of literary and personal engagement between them. In particular, Clare took a keen interest in Keats's poetry and person in the last year of the latter's life, responding richly and enthusiastically to the 1820 volume, and following Keats's failing health and final journey to Rome with increasing concern and sadness. All this is documented in the correspondence between Clare and Taylor, much of it unpublished, including three hitherto unrecorded letters from Clare to Taylor. This essay, drawing on transcripts of these unpublished materials by Bob Heyes and Emma Trehane, offers a detailed, chronological study of this under-examined but invaluable correspondence between two key Romantic poets
Why feminist stories matter: Katy Deepwell interviews Clare Hemmings
No full textClare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory and Director of the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics. She is the author of Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Duke University Press, 2011). For this volume, Katy Deepwell interviewed her about her views on feminist historiography and feminist theory, which Hemmings has defined in terms of three dominant narratives about the direction of feminism’s past, present and future
"Mild health I seek thee": Clare and Bloomfield at the limits of pastoral
Get PDFIn The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams dismantled the “pastoral assumption” that the rural laboring class were pictures of health and vitality, uncovering instead the reality of embodied suffering in laboring-class poetry. This essay considers how Robert Bloomfield and John Clare interrogated this “pastoral assumption” of rural health, suggesting that to claim they merely rejected it risks losing sight of their subtle forms of poetic critique. The body, mind, and verse of laboring-class poets were subject to simultaneous cultural narratives of robust health and sickly weakness, within which Bloomfield and Clare had to forge their own distinctive poetic voices. They wrote poems, I argue, that ostensibly upheld a pastoral ideal of health emanating from the natural world, but also critiqued this ideal through an artful hesitancy, especially in their use of apostrophe. I consider the influence of Bloomfield’s “To My Old Oak Table” (1806), and “Shooter’s Hill” (1806) on Clare’s early poem “To Health” (1821) and one of his middle-period sonnets in particular. Far from being uncomfortable or under-confident in the pastoral mode, Bloomfield and Clare brought their own aesthetic experiments and experiences of precarious health to bear on some of its key tropes
The life and works of Osbert of Clare
No full textOsbert of Clare was an English monastic writer, whose works extended from
the mid-1120s to the mid-1150s. His Latin hagiography reflects a deep admiration for
Anglo-Saxon saints and spirituality, while his letters provide a personal perspective
on his turbulent career. As prior of Westminster Abbey, Osbert of Clare worked to
strengthen the rights and prestige of his monastery. His production of forged or
altered charters makes him one of England's most prolific medieval forgers. At times
his passion for reform put him at odds with his abbots, and he was sent into exile
under both Abbot Herbert (1121-c.1136) and Abbot Gervase (1138-c.1157). Also
Osbert, as one of the first proponents of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, wrote
about the feast, worked to legitimize its celebration, and provided us with the only
significant narration of its introduction to England.
This thesis is divided into two sections. The first section is principally
historical and the second is principally literary. In the first section, I provide an
overview of Osbert of Clare's career and examine in greater detail two of his most
significant undertaking: his promotion of Westminster Abbey and his attempted
canonization of Edward the Confessor. In the second section, I give a philological
study of Osbert Latin style and examine themes that nm throughout his writings, such
as virginity, exile and kingship. Osbert's promotion of the feast of the Immaculate
Conception is included in the second section of the thesis because of its ties to the
themes of virginity and femininity within his writings. There are also two appendices:
the first is a survey of the extant manuscripts of Osbert's writings, and the second is
an edition of Osbert's unpublished Life of St Ethelbert from Gotha,
Forschungsbibliothek MS Memb. i. 8l
Review : Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom by Dan Taylor and Spinoza's Religion by Clare Carlisle
No full textBook Reviews: Spinoza and the Politics of Freedom, By Dan Taylor, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, pp. 304, ISBN: 978-1-4744-7839-7. Spinoza’s Religion: a New Reading of the Ethics, By Clare Carlisle, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2021, pp. 288, ISBN: 978-0-691-17659-8
Prompt interventions improve outcomes in conduct disorders
Get PDFDr Clare Taylor, and Professors Stephen Pilling and Stephen Scott explain the importance of early identification and care of children and young people with conduct disorders
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