Richard J. Hand

Eric Robinson

Seamus Heaney

Ronald Blythe

Richard Mabey

Edward Strickland

Victoria Leatham

Simon Rae

Mark Storey

John Wain

Alan Brownjohn

John Barrell

Trevor Hold

Edward Storey

Gavin Ewart

Sean Street

Lotte Kramer

Greg Crossan

George Dixon

Tom Bates

Bob Heyes

E.P. Thompson

William Westwood

Brian Blade

Andrew Motion 

Roger Frith

R.S. Thomas

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

John Clare Society Journal, 12 (1993)

The Rural Poor in English Painting 17301840 (Cambridge Paperback Library)

The Dark Side of the Landscape

This 1972 text takes John Clare as the focus of different attitudes to landscape as something to have a 'taste' for.

An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare

The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840

How was the social and cultural life of Britain affected by the fear that the French Revolution would spread across the channel? In this brilliant, engagingly written, and profusely illustrated book, John Barrell, well-known for his studies of the history, literature, and art of the period, argues that the conflict between the ancien regime in Britain and the emerging democratic movement was so fundamental that it could not be contained within what had previously been thought of as the 'normal' arena of politics. Activities and spaces which had previously been regarded as 'outside' politics suddenly no longer seemed to be so, and the fear of revolution produced a culture of surveillance and suspicion which penetrated every aspect of private life. Drawing on an unusually wide range of sources, including novels, poems, plays, newspapers, debates in parliament, trials, political pamphlets, and caricatures, The Spirit of Despotism focuses on a number of examples of such invasions of privacy. It shows how the culture of suspicion affected how people spoke and behaved in London coffee-houses; how it influenced attitudes to the king's behaviour in private, especially during his summer holidays in Weymouth; how it infiltrated the country cottage, previously idealized as a protected haven of peace and retirement from political life; and how it influenced the fashion of the period, so that even the way people chose to style their hair came to be seen as a political issue.

Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s

The Spirit of Despotism

Jon Mee

The trial of Thomas Hardy for high treason (1794).

Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792-1794

Professor of English and Co-Director Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies John Barrell

In recent years the study of British art, especially of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been transformed. This has been the result of a general awareness of the theoretical issues involved in the study of culture and society, and the new emphasis given to questions of class, race, and gender, which has produced a new, inter-disciplinary approach to the study of British art. The essays in this book, all previously unpublished, are written by distinguished scholars from various disciplines, several of whom have been at the forefront of this transformation. There are essays on Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby, Turner, and Benjamin Robert Haydon; on the teaching of art to women, on eighteenth-century social theories of painting, and on the representation of industrial landscape, of femininity, and of 'exotic' and oriental cultures. The result is a book which is of equal interest to scholars and students of the history of art, literature, social history, cultural studies and women's studies.

New Essays on British Art, 1700-1850

Painting and the Politics of Culture

John Barrell

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