Talking Revolution: Edward Rushton's Rebellious Poetics, 1782-1814

This book is the first academic study dedicated to Liverpool laboring-class poet and activist Edward Rushton (1756-1814). It explores his commitment to the Age of Revolution, questioning naval impressment, British repression in Ireland, the Napoleonic wars, and the transatlantic traffic in human beings and slavery. Rushton's work is the object of new and long-due critical enquiry, highlighting the systemic discursive interaction of culture, politics, and society.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 02 February 2021
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

This book is a groundbreaking academic exploration of Liverpool's labor-class poet and activist Edward Rushton (1756-1814), whose name was long associated solely with the establishment of the Royal School for the Blind in 1791. A former sailor, tavern keeper, and editor of a paper, Rushton owned a bookshop that served as a vibrant hub for networking with numerous radical writers and intellectuals during the turbulent 1790s. His unwavering dedication to the most pressing debates of the Age of Revolution led him to question naval impressment and British repression in Ireland, the devastating Napoleonic wars that ravaged Europe, and, most notably, the transatlantic traffic in human beings and the institution of slavery itself. A passionate and relentless campaigner at the dawn of the human rights discourse, Rushton was a keen analyst of power and repression, as well as a remarkably complex poetic voice that fully reflected his political beliefs. In this book, his work undergoes a new and long-overdue critical examination, particularly fitting in the year commemorating the bicentennial of his death. The opening up of eighteenth-century and Romantic studies to cross-disciplinary interchange enables a more nuanced historical and critical investigation of previously erased or neglected individual and collective experiences. This expanding critical space, which highlights the systemic discursive interplay of culture, politics, and society, serves as the conceptual and methodological framework for a comprehensive critical re-evaluation of the writer.

Weight: 414g
Dimension: 165 x 233 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800348981