'Behindhand with their countrymen': Literary culture and economic decline in eighteenth-century Exeter

Abstract

This article investigates the history of writing and printing in eighteenth-century Exeter. Writing in Exeter flourished during the same decades in which the city itself underwent a serious decline; and local authors, proud of belonging to what had, historically, been one of Britain’s greatest cities, had to operate within a marketplace dominated by a metropolitan literary culture contemptuous of provincialism. Surveying the literary works written and printed in eighteenth-century Exeter, this article explores the ways in which these authors addressed the creative and logistical challenges which confronted eighteenth-century writers who lived and worked within ‘provincial’ contexts.