A Sonnet from Carthage


Book Description

"This is a beautiful book, a lucidly written and elegantly crafted scholarly and critical essay on the rise of a new poetry in the sixteenth century."--David Quint, Yale University




Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820-1845


Book Description

This volume of The Cornell Wordsworth contains eight collections of poems, mostly sonnets, published between 1820 and 1845. The River Duddon is a series of sonnets describing an imagined journey. Ecclesiastical Sketches, by far the largest group in the volume, consists entirely of sonnets and moves through historical time rather than topographical space. Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 is a record of an actual tour, containing when first published 23 sonnets and 15 other poems. In Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems, celebrating another tour, all but three of the 26 poems are sonnets. Memorials of a Tour in Scotland, 1833 originally consisted entirely of sonnets. Memorials of a Tour in Italy includes five poems that are not sonnets. The remaining two groups, Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death and Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty and Order, which are both quite short, move through neither space nor time, but are thematically linked.An account of the genesis, dates of composition, and publication of each series is followed by reading texts, including all available variants. The poems are followed by Wordsworth's own notes and by the editor's notes. Photographic reproductions of manuscript pages of special interest, with transcriptions, are included for all the collections except Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty and Order.




The Other East and Nineteenth-Century British Literature


Book Description

The Polish exile and the Russian villain were familiar figures in nineteenth-century British culture. This book restores the significance of Eastern Europe to nineteenth-century British literature, offering new readings of Blake's Europe , Byron's Mazeppa , and Eliot's Middlemarch , and recovering influential works by Thomas Campbell and Jane Porter.







Shorter Poems


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The Land Between Two Rivers


Book Description

"These essays recount Tom Sleigh's experiences working as a journalist during several tours in Africa and in the Middle Eastern region once called Mesopotamia, "the land between two rivers." Sleigh asks three central questions: What did I see? How could I write about it? Why did I write about it? The first essays focus on the lives of refugees in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, and Iraq. Under the conditions of military occupation, famine, and war, their stories can be harrowing, even desperate. But unlike their depiction in mass media, their stories are often laced with an undeluded hopefulness. The second part of this book explores how writing might be capable of honoring the texture of these individuals' experiences while remaining faithful to political emotions, rather than political convictions. The final essays meditate on youth, restlessness, illness, and Sleigh's motivations for writing his own experiences in order to move out into the world."--Back cover.







The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth


Book Description

Approaching Wordsworth’ writings from perspectives which have not been considered in critical literature, this book offers a multiangled reflection on the technicalities of the poet’s religious discourse, including the methodology of The Prelude revision, or Wordsworth’s patent art of "pious postscripts." The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with The Absent God in The Works of William Wordsworth, whose six chapters follow this book’s eight chapters like a sestet which complements the octave—becoming, thus, a tribute to Wordsworth as one of the most prolific sonneteers in history. Both monographs build their theses on Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre and embrace the whole of his wide lifespan. Their completion in 2020 coincides with several round anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, the 200th anniversary of The River Duddon, and the 170th anniversary of the publication of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude.