Della Cruscan Poetry, Women and the Fashionable Newspaper

This book explores Della Cruscan poetry in the late eighteenth-century literary scene. A sociable, ornate, and deeply theatrical type of poetry, Della Cruscanism was associated with writers like Robert Merry, Mary Robinson, and Hannah Cowley. While Merry is the poet most commonly associated with the Della Cruscan school, this book argues that Della Cruscanism was a movement dominated by female poets and that this was one of the key reasons for the later disavowal and downgrading of its poetic ac