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Author Biography

Katarina O’Briain is Assistant Professor of English at York University, where she specializes in the literature and culture of the global eighteenth century. She is finishing a book project on the poetics of dispossession in georgic writing from the eighteenth century to today and has begun research on a second project on the British occupation of Manila. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and PMLA.

Abstract

This paper approaches the topic of intergenerational thinking by asking it what it might mean to stretch the conventional periodization of the long eighteenth century across generations. Reading Phillis Wheatley’s heroic couplet poems alongside Earl Wasserman’s mid-twentieth-century work on neoclassical poetics, it explores some of the surprising possibilities unleashed by revisiting the work of earlier critics. This mid-twentieth-century scholarship, the essay suggests, establishes a mode of eighteenth-century poetics that lends itself to more recent understandings of abolition and structural change. Earlier generations of critics trace an eighteenth-century poetic theory that resonates in the present moment; many generations before that, Phillis Wheatley takes up an established mode of neoclassical poetry to imagine and continue to demand something more.

Keywords

Phillis Wheatley, neoclassical poetics, periodization, intergenerational scholarship, abolition

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