Book review: Jack Lynch (ed.). "The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800."

There is a lot going on in Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry studies at present and now feels like a good time to have a major essay collection to celebrate it. Historically minded formalist work is challenging the way we think about the use of poetic tropes and devices at particular points in history by particular people. The materialist turn in (especially) bibliographical studies has encouraged attention to the lives of eighteenth-century books as objects and the odd contingent forces that come together to make a printed poem look the way it does. New work in eco-criticism, genre studies, the history of science and the history of institutions is busy shaping the approaches we take to Restoration and eighteenth-century writing and the contexts we place it in. Poets (particularly female ones) who over the past 200 years have been mentioned only in passing, or in scorn, are being revisited to challenge the small canon of writers and their works enshrined by twentieth-century criticism. Editorial work is flourishing, both in the production of landmark new editions of ‘major’ poets and in more experimental projects devoted to the recuperation of miscellanies and manuscript collections