Susanne Kord, Women Peasant Poets in Eighteenth-Century England, Scotland, and Germany. Milkmaids on Parnassus. 2003

Abstract

Germanists will welcome the comparative approach of Susanne Kord's study, being used to see this featured more in the work of social, economic or art historians than in literary criticism. Her concern is neither with biography as such – though she usefully includes succinct biobibliographical entries for each of the poets featured – nor even work interpretation except to illustrate her central thesis. Women Peasant Poets is a pioneering systemtheoretical work on how eighteenth-century bourgeois aesthetics, successfully defending its claims to normative status both at the time and subsequently, created the critical discourse by which the work of peasant poets was judged and categorised, and, moreover, their work shaped. What she has to say has relevance for the reception of working-class poets and women writers well beyond the confines of 1800, as also for the modern history of taste and of literary historiography. In her programmatic concern to “question the processes by which judgements about literary quality are made” (p. 6), aesthetic theory is grounded in its social context.