Book Description

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), one of the most distinctive writers of the Victorian period. The first selection to place Clough's poetry alongside his prose, it allows readers to explore how his poems are connected to his literary criticism and his lectures on literary history, to his letters and diaries, and to his writing on politics and economics. A political radical and religious sceptic, Clough emerges as a strikingly modern Victorian: he writes honestly and directly about sexuality, and his work is informed by a cosmopolitan perspective that views Victorian society in the context of other national, political, and cultural traditions. Clough's innovative poems incorporate a diverse range of voices and styles, borrowing and reimagining aspects of the epic, the drama, and the novel. And they reveal a side of Victorian culture—irreverent, iconoclastic, and self-aware—that is often ignored today. Detailed notes identify and explain Clough's comments on major political events such as the European revolutions of 1848, and his allusions to a wide array of different writers and texts. The edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Clough, and a Chronology, which enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works.