Details

ISBN-10: 1421416964
ISBN-13: 9781421416960
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publish Date: 06/30/2015
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.70" H

Writings of the Luddites

Paperback

Price: $32.00

Overview

An invaluable collection of texts written between 1811 and 1816 by members of the Luddite movement and their sympathizers.

Named for their probably mythical leader, Ned Ludd, the Luddites were a group of social agitators in nineteenth-century Britain who tried to prevent the mechanization of cloth factories, which they blamed for increased unemployment, poverty, and hunger in industrial centers. Though famous for their often violent protests, the Luddites also engaged in literary resistance in the form of poems, proclamations, petitions, songs, and letters. In Writings of the Luddites, Kevin Binfield collects complete texts written by Luddites or Luddite sympathizers between 1811 and 1816, adds detailed notes, and organizes the documents by the three primary regions of origin: the Midlands, Northwestern England, and Yorkshire.

Binfield’s extensive introduction provides a historical overview of the Luddites and their activities, explores their rhetorical strategies, and illuminates their literary context. Written for the most part from a collective point of view, the texts themselves range from judicious to bloodthirsty in tone and reveal a fascination both with legal forms of address and with the more personal forms of Romantic literature, as well as with the recent political revolutions in France and America.

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Reviews
The first anthology of its kind, this collection is meticulously edited and carefully documented. . . . Writings of the Luddites is a welcome addition to the corpus of scholarly work that addresses machine-breaking in England.
–Ben P. Robertson, Keats-Shelley Journal
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Details

ISBN-10: 1421416964
ISBN-13: 9781421416960
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Publish Date: 06/30/2015
Dimensions: 9.00" L, 6.00" W, 0.70" H
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