Mapping Mythologies

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.