Overview
Of all the Victorian poets, Edward Lear has a good claim to the widest audience: admired and championed by critics and poets from John Ruskin to John Ashbery, he has also been read, heard, and loved by generations of children. As a central figure in the literature of nonsense Lear has also shaped the evolution of modern literature, and his work continues to influence and inspire writers and readers today. This collection of essays, the first ever devoted solely to Lear, builds on a recent resurgence of critical interest and asks how it is that the play of Lear's poetry continues to delight, and to challenge our sense of what poetry can be. These seventeen chapters, written by established and emerging critics of poetry, seek to explore and appreciate the playfulness embodied in the poems, and to provide contexts in which it can be better understood and enjoyed. They consider how Lear's poems play off various inheritances (the literary fool, Romantic lyric, his religious upbringing), explore particular forms in which his playful genius took flight (his letters, his queer writings about love), and trace lines of Learical influence and inheritance by showing how other poets and thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played off Lear in their turn (Stein, Eliot, Auden, Smith, Ashbery, and others).
Full Product Details
Author: James Williams (University of York) ,
Matthew Bevis (Keble College, Oxford)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 17.30cm
, Height: 2.40cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.808kg
ISBN: 9780198708568
ISBN 10: 0198708564
Pages: 402
Publication Date: 25 August 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
An admirable new collection ... Rarely does a collection of essays published by an academic press carry such emotional nuance, or tune it to the requirements of literary analysis so deftly and consistently ... This collection will swiftly become one of the first ports of call for Lear scholars, but some of its essays deserve to be read by anyone with an interest in the ways we might turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us, as Matthew Arnold put it. Times Literary Supplement Almost every page contained pleasurable surprises. Paris Review
Author Information
James Williams is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of York. His publications include essays on Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Beckett, and Victorian comic verse. He is currently completing a short monograph, Edward Lear, in the Writers and Their Work series (Northcote House). Matthew Bevis is a Lecturer in English at Oxford University, and a Fellow of Keble College. He is the author of The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (OUP, 2007; paperback 2010) and Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), and editor of Some Versions of Empson (OUP, 2007) and The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (OUP, 2013; paperback 2015).
