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Mary Tighe and Literary History: The Making of a Critical Reputation
Author(s) -
Linkin Harriet Kramer
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00717.x
Subject(s) - psyche , legend , scholarship , poetry , epic , literature , reputation , history , art , psychoanalysis , psychology , sociology , law , social science , political science
This essay offers a survey of critical (and uncritical) responses to Mary Tighe from the initial private printing of her epic poem Psyche; or, the Legend of Love in 1805 to the present. It opens with a brief discussion of the problematic status of Tighe’s literary papers, reviews the curious fame she experienced before her death in 1810, and then provides a detailed analysis of her literary reception in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty‐first century after the 1811 publication of Psyche, with Other Poems . In addition to its extensive overview of the published scholarship that has shaped Tighe’s critical reputation, the essay also attends to the less prominent readers (or fans) who played a significant role in keeping what Thomas Moore once called Tighe’s ‘quiet fame’ alive.