Author: Rowan Boyson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107023300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The surprising idea of pleasure as communal provides a new way of understanding Wordsworth's poetry and the Enlightenment's critical legacy.
Author: Alexander Freer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599038
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Wordsworth has traditionally been understood as the 'poet of memory'. This book argues that 'unremembered pleasure', an idea Wordsworth formulates in 'Tintern Abbey' but is often overlooked by modern readers, is central to understanding his writing. Wordsworth's poems discover and articulate a broad range of previously unfelt, unnoticed, and unconscious satisfactions. As well as providing new interpretations of major and under-studied writing by Wordsworth, this volume challenges a long tradition of psychoanalytic reading of romanticism, which uses trauma to explain the limits of literary memory. The book contests key psychoanalytic concepts in literary criticism including repression, sublimation, mourning, and pleasure. It asks what it would mean for us to be 'surprised by joy'.
Author: Tim Fulford
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
The later poetry of William Wordsworth, popular in his lifetime and influential on the Victorians, has, with a few exceptions, received little attention from contemporary literary critics. In Wordsworth's Poetry, 1815-1845, Tim Fulford argues that the later work reveals a mature poet far more varied and surprising than is often acknowledged. Examining the most characteristic poems in their historical contexts, he shows Wordsworth probing the experiences and perspectives of later life and innovating formally and stylistically. He demonstrates how Wordsworth modified his writing in light of conversations with younger poets and learned to acknowledge his debt to women in ways he could not as a young man. The older Wordsworth emerges in Fulford's depiction as a love poet of companionate tenderness rather than passionate lament. He also appears as a political poet—bitter at capitalist exploitation and at a society in which vanity is rewarded while poverty is blamed. Most notably, he stands out as a history poet more probing and more clear-sighted than any of his time in his understanding of the responsibilities and temptations of all who try to memorialize the past.
Author: Peter J. Kitson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107513375
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
The first major cultural study to focus exclusively on this decisive period in modern British-Chinese relations. Based on extensive archival investigations, Peter J. Kitson shows how British knowledge of China was constructed from the writings and translations of a diverse range of missionaries, diplomats, travellers, traders, and literary men and women during the Romantic period. The new perceptions of China that it gave rise to were mediated via a dynamic print culture to a diverse range of poets, novelists, essayists, dramatists and reviewers, including Jane Austen, Thomas Percy, William Jones, S. T. Coleridge, George Colman, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, William and Dorothy Wordsworth and others, informing new British understandings and imaginings of China on the eve of the Opium War of 1839–42. Kitson aims to restore China to its true global presence in our understandings of the culture and literature of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Author: Ross Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107435609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Percy Bysshe Shelley, in the essay 'On Life' (1819), stated 'We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life'. Ross Wilson uses this statement as a starting point to explore Shelley's fundamental beliefs about life and the significance of poetry. Drawing on a wide range of Shelley's own writing and on philosophical thinking from Plato to the present, this book offers a timely intervention in the debate about what Romantic poets understood by 'life'. For Shelley, it demonstrates poetry is emphatically 'living melody', which stands in resolute contrast to a world in which life does not live. Wilson argues that Shelley's concern with the opposition between 'living' and 'the apprehension of life' is fundamental to his work and lies at the heart of Romantic-era thought.
Author: Olivia Ferguson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009274260
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
A counter-intuitive history of literary caricature, exploring how caricature helped make the realist novel in the Romantic period.
Author: Jonathan Mulrooney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316877396
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
Bringing together studies in theater history, print culture, and literature, this book offers a new consideration of Romantic-period writing in Britain. Recovering a wide range of theatrical criticism from newspapers and periodicals, some of it overlooked since its original publication in Regency London, Jonathan Mulrooney explores new contexts for the work of the actor Edmund Kean, essayist William Hazlitt, and poet John Keats. Kean's ongoing presence as a figure in the theatrical news presented readers with a provocative re-imagining of personal subjectivity and a reworking of the British theatrical tradition. Hazlitt and Keats, in turn, imagined the essayist and the poet along similar theatrical lines, reframing Romantic prose and poetics. Taken together, these case studies illustrate not only theater's significance to early nineteenth-century Londoners, but also the importance of theater's textual legacies for our own re-assessment of 'Romanticism' as a historical and cultural phenomenon.
Author: Jamison Kantor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009123017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
This rich cultural history shows how honor, as much as freedom, inspired poets, novelists, and abolitionists of the nineteenth century.
Author: Ewan James Jones
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316061833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
Ewan James Jones argues that Coleridge engaged most significantly with philosophy not through systematic argument, but in verse. Jones carries this argument through a series of sustained close readings, both of canonical texts such as Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and also of less familiar verse, such as Limbo. Such work shows that the essential elements of poetic expression - a poem's metre, rhythm, rhyme and other such formal features - enabled Coleridge to think in an original and distinctive manner, which his systematic philosophy impeded. Attentiveness to such formal features, which has for some time been overlooked in Coleridge scholarship, permits a rethinking of the relationship between eighteenth-century verse and philosophy more broadly, as it engages with issues including affect, materiality and self-identity. Coleridge's poetic thinking, Jones argues, both consolidates and radicalises the current literary critical rediscovery of form.
Author: Jeremy Davies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135016739
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Shortlisted for the University English Early Career Book Prize 2016 Shortlisted for the British Association for Romantic Studies First Book Prize 2015 When writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries explored the implications of organic and emotional sensitivity, the pain of the body gave rise to unsettling but irresistible questions. Urged on by some of their most deeply felt preoccupations – and in the case of figures like Coleridge and P. B. Shelley, by their own experiences of chronic pain – many writers found themselves drawn to the imaginative scrutiny of bodies in extremis. Bodily Pain in Romantic Literature reveals the significance of physical hurt for the poetry, philosophy, and medicine of the Romantic period. This study looks back to eighteenth-century medical controversies that made pain central to discussions about the nature of life, and forward to the birth of surgical anaesthesia in 1846. It examines why Jeremy Bentham wrote in defence of torture, and how pain sparked the imagination of thinkers from Adam Smith to the Marquis de Sade. Jeremy Davies brings to bear on Romantic studies the fascinating recent work in the medical humanities that offers a fresh understanding of bodily hurt, and shows how pain could prompt new ways of thinking about politics, ethics, and identity.
