المستخلص: |
This paper is an attempt to examine Anna Barbauld’s “A Mouse’s Petition to Dr. Priestley” (1773) and Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” (1785) as two highly significant poems. Though both poems were written before the French Revolution 1789 which promulgated the slogans of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and the subsequent war between Revolutionary France and the English Monarchy in 1793, they certainly prove Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicist claim that the relation between history and literature is one of reciprocal influence and intertextuality. Within the concept of cultural poetics, this study reveals that the two poems, among others, engage in a dialogue with historical moments and texts like The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and many other seminal works that shaped late eighteenth- century culture.
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