The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Volume VIII. A Supplement of New Letters


Book Description

None of the letters in this volume has appeared in the original edition of the Letters, and most have never previously been published at all. They throw striking and unexpected new light on Wordsworth's imaginative and emotional life, his career as a poet, his activities and friendships, and his relationships within his own circle.







James Hogg


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This book sheds new light on James Hogg, the Scottish poet (1770-1835), going beyond the 'Ettrick Shepherd' stereotype. By focussing on Hogg's poetry (Scottish Pastorals, The Queen's Wake, Jacobite Relics, Queen Hynde, Pilgrims of the Sun) it shows that his work, and the critical response to it, was significantly shaped by the concept of the autodidact: a working-class writer who was considered to be a poet of 'Nature's Making'. The image of the autodidact is pursued from its beginnings - Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd, Macpherson's Ossian, Burns as 'ploughman poet' - through its development in the nineteenth century, to its last gasps in the twentieth. Poets considered include Isobel Pagan, Janet Little, William Tennant, Allan Cunningham, Robert Tannahill, Janet Hamilton, Ellen Johnston, Elizabeth Hartley, Alexander Anderson, David Gray, David Wingate and James Young Geddes. Despite facing difficulties, autodidacts produced some of the most innovative and exciting poetry of the nineteenth century. The author argues that the autodidactic tradition, exemplified by Hogg, nurtured the creative vigour manifested in twentieth-century Scottish poetry. While Scotland's autodidacts shared poetic concerns and techniques, they were characterised, above all, by diversity of poetic voice.







Letters of Literary Men


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Sir Walter Scott: Landscape and Locality


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Scott was the first British novelist to discover in landscape a literary as well as a pictoral medium, an insight which he exploits to powerful effect in his Scottish novels. Mr Reed's book breaks new ground by demonstrating the originality of Scott's landscapes, in which romantic nature takes its place in a realistic context of people, history, architecture and traditions. The author shows how, as poet and novelist, Scott explores the notion of place to a depth where it operates not merely as dramatic background but as a force which shapes and directs the minds of its inhabitants. This study adds a new dimension to the understanding of Scott's work.




The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Book Description

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 illuminating Coleridge's rich and varied accomplishments, as well as offering an authoritative guide to the most up-to-date thinking about his achievements.




The Regency Revisited


Book Description

The Regency Revisited reconfigures Romantic Studies through a neglected timeframe. It demonstrates how politics and culture of the Regency years transformed literature. By co-opting authors, the Regency provoked opposition, and brought new genres and modes of writing to the fore. Key figures are Robert Southey and Leigh Hunt: The Regency Revisited shows their pivotal roles in transforming Romanticism. Austen and Byron also feature as authors who honed their satire in response to Regency culture. Other topics include Blake and popular art, Regency science (Humphry Davy), Moore and parlour songs, Cockney writing and Pierce Egan, and Anna Barbauld and the collecting and exhibiting that was so popular an aspect of Regency London.




The Best Books


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William Wordsworth


Book Description

In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life--1770 to 1850--tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.