English 300L

Blake's combination of verse and design invites interdisciplinary study. The essays in this collection approach his work from a variety of perspectives including masculinity, performance, plant biology, empire, politics and sexuality.

The Wordsworth volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the most comprehensive selection currently available of the poetry and prose of one of the finest poets in the English language. The familiar poems from Wordsworth's 'Great Decade' are all included, but they are complementedby a more than usually generous selection of the best poems from his later years. The extracts from the Guide to the Lakes will be a revelation to many readers, as will the political prose of the Convention of Cintra. All of the material is presented in chronological sequence, so that the readercan see how Wordsworth's changing concerns were expressed in prose as well as poetry. Work which Wordsworth published is separated from that which he did not reveal, which will enable the reader to trace through successive published volumes the development of Wordsworth's public poetic self, whilealso being able to follow the growth of the body of poetry which, for whatever reason, Wordsworth did not choose to make public when it was written - The Prelude being the greatest and most obvious example.

At age 28, William Wordsworth had neither a settled income nor the professional qualifications needed to secure one. He had no home, and he could not support the illegitimate child he had fathered during an impetuous love affair in France. The major part of a slim, anonymously issued volume of Lyrical Ballads was all he had to show for the years since he had left Cambridge, and yet he was convinced that he was called to be a major poet. Recognition came slowly, but by age 70 he was revered as a cultural icon, the Poet Laureate of England, and the most celebrated native of the Lake Country, where he was visited by royalty and many of the great poets of his day. Based on an intimate knowledge of the poet's manuscripts, on a fresh look at contemporary records, and a careful analysis of the vast amount of research that has appeared in the last two decades, this vividly written volume is the first serious biography of Wordsworth to appear in over twenty-five years. Stephen Gill, a leading authority on Wordsworth's work, reveals that in many ways this giant of English literature lead a heroic life. Persisting against critical condemnation, numbing blows from the death of friends and family, including three of his own children, and his inability to make enough money from his writings to support himself, his dedication to his art did not waver. Moreover, Gill corrects the image of the older Wordsworth as a stodgy betrayer of his radical youth. While his politics certainly did change, and his poetic power waned, from 1799 almost to his death in 1850, Wordsworth single-mindedly shaped his own life in submission to an imaginative possession whose importance he never doubted. Illustrated with over twenty halftones--including portraits, manuscript pages, and places important to Wordsworth and his family--this is an authoritative account of one of literature's great innovators, a writer who permanently enlarged the range of English poetry, both in subject matter and in treatment, and left a body of work that has enjoyed an enormous and lasting popularity. Providing considerable insight into Wordsworth's poetic achievement, Gill illuminates what was most essential to Wordsworth himself: his life as a writer.

Nothing was more important to Wordsworth than tracing the evidence that affinities had been preserved between all the stages of the life of man. In this beautifully written and thoughtful book Wordsworth's biographer and editor Stephen Gill explores the ways in which the poet attempted as anartist to maintain such continuities and shows how revisitings of various kinds are at the heart of his creativity. Habitually reviewing all of his work, both published and that still in manuscript, Wordsworth painstakingly revised at the level of verbal detail or recast it more largely.New poems frequently emerged from re-engagement with old, often serving as a sequel to or commentary from the maturer poet on his own earlier creation, and acts of self-borrowing and self-reference are plentiful. These linkings provide insights into the powerful vision the poet maintained that hisimaginative creation was one evolving unity and reveal much about the obsessions and drives of the great poet.Combining textual analysis, critical commentary, and biographical narrative, Gill explores what binds Wordsworth's later, less well-known poems to his earlier work. At the centre of the book is an account of the evolution of The Prelude from 1804 to 1839, in which it is argued that Wordsworth'smasterpiece must be followed through all its versions, seen as a poem growing old alongside its creator.

The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to a literary culture in which he sought to define and defend all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it.

A practical and comprehensive reference work, the Oxford Handbook provides the best single-volume source of original scholarship on all aspects of Coleridge's diverse writings. Thirty-seven chapters, bringing together the wisdome of experts from across the world, present an authoritative,in-depth, and up-to-date assessment of a major author of British Romanticism. The book is divided into sections on Biography, Prose Works, Poetic Works, Sources and Influences, and Reception.The Coleridge scholar today has ready access to a range of materials previously available only in library archives on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bollingen edition, of the Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forty years in production was completed in 2002. The Coleridge Notebooks(1957-2002) were also produced during this same period, five volumes of text with an additional five companion volumes of notes. The Clarendon Press of Oxford published the letters in six volumes (1956-1971). To take full advantage of the convenient access and new insight provided by these volumes,the Oxford Handbook examines the entire range and complexity of Coleridge's career. It analyzes the many aspects of Coleridge's literary, critical, philosophical, and theological pursuits, and it furnishes both students and advanced scholars with the proper tools for assimilating and illuminatingColeridge's rich and varied accomplishments, as well as offering an authoritative guide to the most up-to-date thinking about his achievements.

This edition of Coleridge's poem, Rime of the Ancient Mariner contains both the 1798 and 1817 texts along with critical essays focused on reader response, Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, and new historical.

Series Editors: Kinley E. Roby, Northeastern University; Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University; Joseph Bartolomeo, University of Massachusetts; George Economou, University of Oklahoma; Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts. TWAYNES UNITED STATES AUTHORS, ENGLISH AUTHORS, and WORLD AUTHORS Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works. Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an authors work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writers work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives. Each volume features: a critical, interpretive study and explication of the authors works; a brief biography of the author; an accessible chronology outlining the life, work, and relevant historical background of the author; aids for further study -- complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index; and a readable style presented in a manageable length.

This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its "place" - in multiple ways - in literary history as a work celebrated for "making it new", yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith's sonnets are constituted by threeintertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith's sonnets - across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers - are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smith's verse engages more deeplywith tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith's career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England.The book also illuminates Smith's place in posterity, as a popular poet - influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable - who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith's reception and paradoxical position from the lateeighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

What is 'Wordsworthian' Romanticism and how did it evolve? This book argues that only by reading Charlotte Smith's poetry in tandem with William Wordsworth's can this question be answered, demonstrating their mutual contribution to the creation of the 'Wordsworthian', through literary analysis and historical contextualizing of their writings.

The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present day.Each volume includes: -- An introduction providing the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginnings -- illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches and sorting out the schools of thought-- The most influential reviews and the best reprinted scholarly essays-- A section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries-- Original essays, new translations and revisions commissioned especially for the series-- Previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters and manuscript fragments-- A bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews-- A name and subject index

"Recognition of Mary Shelley's systemic dual focus on public and domestic power as the means to interrogate traditional norms and propose alternatives materially alters parochial perceptions of her objectives and her achievements. Her novels, outside of Frankenstein, and recently, The Last Man, have been dismissed as simple, mutual dissociated "romances" or experiments in genre solely to intersect with a market niche; they are neither. Rather, they and all of Mary Shelley's major works voice a cosmopolitan, socio-political reformist ideology that evolved as their author's acute awareness of world events enabled her to calibrate her literary voice to deal with unfolding rather than past societal issues. Her multidisciplinary fusion of literature, political philosophy, and history calls for a commensurate multidisciplinary reading in order to understand the complexities of both the author and her works." -- Betty T. Bennett In this book, Betty T. Bennett offers an extensively expanded version of the introduction she wrote for Pickering and Chatto's eight volume set, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley. Along with her insightful retelling of Mary Shelley's eventful life story, Bennett gives us a fresh reading of Frankenstein in the context of its author's full career. She also discusses a variety of Mary Shelley's lesser known works, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, Falkner, and her travel books. The result is a compelling portrait of Mary Shelley as she saw herself -- an inventive, irreverent writer whose desire for political and social reform was at the heart of her literary expression for three decades.

Drawing especially on the many scholarly discoveries of recent years, this biography examines the life - and death ‒ of one of the greatest Romantic poets. Based on sceptical historical investigation and featuring an in-depth look at Shelley's personal, financial and familial situation, it builds a compelling narrative about a controversial writer and thinker whose personal and philosophical convictions caused much turmoil during his short yet extraordinarily influential life. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals sides of the author not often studied. It looks at Shelley as an intensely loving, thoughtful and responsible man and father, who (except in one case) took exemplary care of the women he loved and who fell in love with him. It shows how significant his status as a gentleman was; it examines his poetry, letters, notebooks  and discursive prose so that readers can comprehend the most important concerns of his life; it explores the financial and medical grounds for his years of exi≤ it is also the first biography to take account of his  recently discovered early long poem  the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things. This biography offers readers a unique look at a famous poet, scholar, gentleman, democrat, atheist and tragic icon of English Romanticism.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling students and researchers to read for themselves, for example, comments on early performances of Shakespeare's plays, or reactions to the first publication of Jane Austen's novels. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to journalism and contemporary opinion, and little published documentary material such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included, in order to demonstrate the fluctuations in an author's reputation. Each volume contains an introduction to the writer's published works, a selected bibliography, and an index of works, authors and subjects. .

'Romanticism and Consciousness' is a comprehensive collection of essays on Romanticism-its intellectual and political backgrounds, its place in literary history, its continued relevance to the present age, its relation to psychoanalysis and other modern trends of thought-and on the major English Romantic poets. The topics covered include the relations between nature and consciousness, nature and revolution, and nature and literary form; the principal poets studied are Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

"A penetrating account not simply of the poems themselves but of the theoretical positions that have informed their reading during the past forty years. . . . [O'Rourke] is particularly shrewd in suggesting the dialogue between New Criticism and post-structuralism that has been played out in their lines."--Frances Ferguson, Johns Hopkins University James O'Rourke examines the ways in which the modern reception to Keats's major odes reveals the investments made in these poems by successive generations of critical schools, particularly New Criticism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and New Historicism. O'Rourke's reading of the odes locates them within the contexts of literary and cultural history and recovers the innovative force of the poems in a way that speaks to the aesthetics and the politics of the present.  While the themes of Keats's odes are characteristically Romantic, they are also very modern. O'Rourke's analysis shows how such familiar Romantic themes as the pathos of solitude ("Ode to a Nightingale"), the inaccessibility of the past ("Ode on a Grecian Urn"), the excess of melancholia ("Ode on Melancholy"), and the beneficence of nature ("To Autumn") become culturally coded as "female," and he demonstrates how the poems confront the reader with familiar ideas in surprisingly fresh forms. This original study does much to illuminate what Keats's most virtuosic work has to say about history, nature, gender, ourselves, and each other. James O'Rourke is associate professor of English at Florida State University. His work on British Romanticism has appeared in English Literary History, Genre, Criticism, Studies in Romanticism, and the Keats-Shelley Journal.

A reassessment of the historical dimension of Keat's poetry that addresses the influence on his work of the immediate post-Waterloo period and traces his source materials. A new reading of Keat's major poems is presented, as well as of many less-studied pieces.

-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers