Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

This book seeks to rewrite assumptions about the Augustan era through an exploration of Jacobite ideology. The author studies canonical and noncanonical literature and uncovers a new "four nations" literary history defined in terms of a struggle for control of the language of authority between Jacobite and Hanoverian writers. Sources explored include ballads in Scots, Irish, Welsh and Gaelic. The author concludes that the literary history of the Augustan age is built on the history of the victors in the Revolution of 1688.