"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"-- Provided by publisher.

"The first surprise is that this is a book not about romanticism, but about the writings of the long eighteenth century. Butler had begun to consider the significance of myth, or 'paganism', in the writings of the second generation of romantic poets in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. She was to explore it further in a number of published essays; it was to be the subject of her next, unfinished book. In Mapping Mythologies, however, she presents her account of poets and myth in the eighteenth century not as the prelude to a later, more interesting story, but as having a distinctively different interest of its own. She does not avoid the linear model, but she does not look ahead to the long-deferred miracle. Whereas her work on the later romantics was to chart their attraction to eastern and classical pagan mythologies, the writers she considers in Mapping Mythologies invoke or invent myths native to the British isles"-- Provided by publisher.