Thomas Gray among the disciplines /
edited by Ruth Abbott and Ephraim Levinson.
- New York, NY : Routledge, 2025.
- 1 online resource (xiv, 324 pages) : illustrations.
- Routledge studies in eighteenth-century literature .
- Routledge studies in eighteenth-century literature. .
Preface. The organisation of knowledge in Thomas Gray's manuscripts, 1716-1771 / Ruth Abbott -- Introduction. Literature, scholarship, and the disciplines in the reception of Thomas Gray, 1771-2021 / Ephraim Levinson -- Thomas Gray, Menippean satire, and the antiquarian method / Charlotte Roberts -- New manuscript material from Thomas Gray's grand tour / Stephen Clarke -- Thomas Gray as music collector / Nathalie Dupuis-Désormeaux -- Lucretius, Locke, and Latinitas in Thomas Gray's De Principiis Cogitandi / Estelle Haan -- Thomas Gray's oriental scholarship / Kelsey Jackson Williams -- Thomas Gray's geographic imagination / Joshua Swidzinski -- Thomas Gray among the Medievalists / Lotte Reinbold -- Queering Thomas Gray's celticism / Rhys Kaminski-Jones -- Thomas Gray's understanding and reviving of historical architecture / Peter N. Lindfield -- Thomas Gray, authorship, and a catalogue of the antiquities, houses, parks, plantations, scenes, and situations in England and Wales / Ephraim Levinson -- Thomas Gray and meteorology / Tess Somervell -- Thomas Gray and the art of transcribing historical manuscripts / Ruth Abbott -- Thomas Gray as reader and writer of the natural world / Scott Mandelbrote and Edwin Rose.
"Throughout the 250 years that have passed since Thomas Gray's death, he has primarily been celebrated as a poet. This makes sense because, although he published relatively little verse, he published less - indeed, precisely nothing - of his abundant polymathic writing in other fields. His place within the history of scholarship has therefore been obscured. Like many eighteenth-century antiquaries, however, he shared his learning through correspondence and manuscript circulation, and thereby influenced intellectual as well as literary life. This book explores Gray's scholarship within the changing norms of eighteenth-century disciplines, at once locating him within histories of specialisation and examining the ways in which he challenges their narratives. Scholars from across the humanities reveal his methods and global interests, and analyse many newly uncovered manuscripts. Offering fresh understanding of broader fields through focused investigation of Gray's multidisciplinary writings, the book will appeal to scholars of eighteenth-century literary, intellectual, and scientific history"--