The Poetry Of The Lancashire Cotton Famine (1861-65): Tracing Poetic Responses To Economic Disaster

摘要: Our project will make freely available a searchable webapp, built in eXist-db (http://exist-db. org/exist/apps/homepage/index. html), containing a database of poems responding to Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-65, along with audio recitations and musical performances drawing directly on these poems (Rennie, 2017). This poetic response is important in that it often represents labouring-class voices from the mid-nineteenth century, which, in spite of renewed academic interest in such material, remain underappreciated (Goodridge et al, 2012 provides a useful introduction and bibliography). The study of this material and its digital publication will significantly enrich literary scholarship and historical perspectives of this economic crisis, and provides the opportunity to draw public attention to an episode of history that is little known beyond the scholarly sphere. The project seeks to establish a much more detailed understanding of