John Clare, Robert Burns, Ann Yearsley, and Susan Fenimore Cooper
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2025
This chapter explores the significance of class and gender for the landscape of genius. While laboring-class and women authors were often celebrated for their genius, that genius was almost always defined and delimited by their specific social identities rather than becoming associated with nature or the nation in general. As a result, landscapes of genius rarely formed around such authors. The English laboring-class poet, John Clare, thus failed to generate a literary landscape despite his strong identification with nature and local place. Robert Burns’s use of Scots dialect and wider identification with Scottish nature and identity, by contrast, established him as a central figure for Scottish nationalism and produced the “Land of Burns” as an early prototype of the landscape of genius. The chapter concludes by exploring the intersection of class and gender. It engages with the English laboring-class women poet, Ann Yearsley, whose proud self-assertion of independent genius precluded her identification with nature; and the genteel American women writer, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who presented herself in Rural Hours (1850) in a social and domestic relation to nature that deliberately dissociated her from any claims to genius or a landscape of genius.
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