( 2 reviews )
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( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jun 10 2003
In Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, David Fairer and Christine Gerrard have created an important portable library. The contents have been organized in a variety of useful ways (chronologically as well as thematically) and insightfully selected to cover a range of voices and topics. The annotations stand up to repeated readings; the scholarship displays a rare mixture of subtlety and depth of knowledge. Although it is an invaluable teaching tool for undergraduates, I keep it on my desk as an accessible and meticulously accurate reference resource. There is no finer work of its kind.
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( 6 of 7 found this review helpful ) Posted: Feb 26 2000
Good anthologies of eighteenth-century poetry are hard to come by, so when I taught a course on the subject I naturally leaped at this book. But while its coverage is admirable, reflecting new interest in both women poets (Leapor, Barbauld, Seward) and underread male poets (Chatterton, Dyer, Parnell), the book nevertheless was difficult to teach. Annotation and historical backgroud proved inadequate even for advanced English majors, particularly given the classics-heavy subject matter. Too, some editorial policies proved frustrating, particularly the decision to delete or sharply abridge the original footnotes from Gay's *The Shepherd's Week* and Pope's *The Dunciad*--omissions that fatally obscure both poems' satiric intentions. Nevertheless, the emphasis on full-length poems over excerpts is welcome (one area in which the book notably improves on its primary competition, Lonsdale's two Oxford anthologies). It's hardly a bad book--quite the contrary--but it could stand some thoughtful revision.
