Whitehead, JR (2020) 'A song in the night': reconsidering John Clare's later asylum poetry. In: Kövesi, S and Lafford, E, (eds.) Advances in John Clare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 275-296.

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Abstract

This chapter considers the critical status of John Clare’s asylum poetry, especially the later poems of the Northampton asylum period. Drawing in particular on recent work from the social history of medicine and psychiatry, the chapter aims to challenge some widespread critical assumptions about Clare’s position in the Northampton asylum, which has sometimes been characterised as a benighted half-life of the deepest obscurity, and to reconsider the actual possibilities for social and sociable communication which it allowed his poetry. This is pursued via three areas which have been discussed recently as showing the kinder or more sociable side of the early Victorian asylum system: staff-patient friendship, cultures of patient writing, and the material and metaphorical significance of landscapes, clothing, and musical performance in the asylum. These topics are then discussed in relation to Clare’s lyric ‘To Jenny Lind’ (1849) as an illustrative example of the possibilities and limitations of sociability in Clare’s later asylum poetry.

Item Type:	Book Section
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Divisions:	Humanities & Social Science
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Date Deposited:	03 Jul 2019 08:17
Last Modified:	08 May 2024 09:34
DOI or ID number:	10.1007/978-3-030-43374-1_13
Editors:	Kövesi, S and Lafford, E
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/10957

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