Regional Writing in a Time of Nation-Building

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My project's core objective is to bring a greater understanding of the life and works of William Barnes.William Barnes is best known today as an obscure, retrospective, nineteenth-century Dorset dialect poet, but this does him and his works a great disservice. Barnes did not just write dialect poetry, but standard English poetry, and wrote non-fiction on a diverse range of subjects including archaeology, philology, history, economics and social commentary. Moreover, he wrote these works concurrently. To fully understand Barnes, then, we must recognise the inherent interconnectedness of his works. When we see the interconnectedness of his works, we see the extent of his influence beyond south west dialect poetry.The first dimension of my study is designed to demonstrate the interconnectedness of Barnes' writing by carrying out analysis on Barnes' scrapbooks, supported by the biography of Barnes written by his daughter. These resources have only ever been used by academics to provide biographical background to support to focused studies on specific Barnes topics. Engaging with these materials as primary texts will reveal a great deal about the proximity of Barnes' eclectic writings and the circumstances of their composition.The second dimension of my study builds on the first by looking at the cultural ecology of Barnes' Dorset. Barnes was a central figure in the communities he served as a teacher and a rector, so was actively engaged with the people and their environment which is reflected in his poetry but also his non-fiction, particularly his archaeological and philological writing that was published in and out of Dorset. This section will refute the idea that Barnes was solely a nostalgic, localised writer, showing how his works chart the changing relationship of people, language and the environment throughout time and space. We are used to talking about Hardy's Dorset, and Hardy was a mentor and friend of William Barnes. I am excited to examine how the cultural and physical spaces were explored by the two writers, too.The final section of my study will evaluate how Barnes' writing has been received and reconceived during and after his lifetime and how his writing has contributed to perceptions of west country culture. Reflecting on the findings of the previous sections, and our new interconnected understanding of Barnes' writing, I will conclude my study by asking: * Who, or what, has influenced encounters with Barnes and his writing? * What do these influences reveal about the propensity of Barnes' writing to represent notions of regional and national identity? * How will a more holistic understanding of Barnes and his writing alter these notions?