Richard Gravil

Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

Grasmere 2010

The keynote lectures in this collection are those by Dame Gillian Beer on Darwin and Romanticism, Richard Cronin on Wordsworth and the Periodical Press, Paul H. Fry on Wordsworth, Coleridge and the topos of Labour, Claire Lamont on the Romantic Cottage, and Nicholas Roe on Keats and the Elgin marbles (with five illustrations). In the conference papers, Jamie Baxendine writes on Intimations, James Castell on Peter Bell, Lexi Drayton on the Gypsy figure in Tintern Abbey and associated poems and painting, Mark Sandy on 'the circulation of grief', Chris Simons on Wordsworth and his patrons, Emily Stanback on medical taxonomy, Heidi Thomson on Sara Coleridge's editing of Biographia Literaria, and Saeko Yoshikawa on Sara Hutchinson (the younger)'s Journals of 1850.

Grasmere 2009: Selected papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

A selection of keynote lectures and conference papers from the prestigious 2010 Wordsworth Summer Conference. Contains 1. Simon Bainbridge, 'The Power of Hills': Romantic Mountaineering; 2. Peter Spratley, Wordsworth's Walking Aesthetic; 3. Gary Harrison, The Poetics of Acknowledgment: John Clare; 4. James Castell, The Society of Birds in Home at Grasmere; 5. Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey, 'Kubla Khan' and Orientalism: The Roads to and from Xanadu; 6. Saeko Yoshikawa, Wordsworth in the Guides; 7. Daniel Robinson, Mary Robinson and the Della Crusca Network; 8. Erica McAlpine, Keats's Might: Subjunctive Verbs in the Late Poems; 9. Fay Yao, 'Old Romance' and New Narrators: A Reading of Keats's 'Isabella' and 'The Eve of St Agnes'; 10. Anthony John Harding, The Fate of Reading in the Regency; 11. Ken Johnston, Wordsworth at Forty: Memoirs of a Lost Generation; 12. Richard Gravil, Is The Excursion a 'metrical Novel?'; 13. Seamus Perry, Wordsworth's Pluralism.

Grasmere 2010: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference

Part 1 (Life, Times, Themes) sets Lyrical Ballads in the context of Wordsworth life and his age, for instance Wordsworth in France. Part 2, Literary Strategies, considers Wordsworth's provocative theories of how poetry should work, and includes a treatment of the famous' Preface' to Lyrical Ballads, one of the great poetic manifestos. Part 3 offers illuminating commentary and questions on the following poems:' We are seven',' Anecdote for fathers',' Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree',' To my sister',' Lines written in Early Spring',' Expostulation and Reply',' The Tables Turned';,' The Female Vagrant',' Goody Blake and Harry Gill',' The Last of the Flock',' The Mad Mother',' The Complaint of a forsaken Indian Woman',' The Convict',' Old Man travelling',' Simon Lee',' The Idiot Boy',' TheThorn',' Tintern Abbey',' Hart-leap Well',' There was a boy',' Nutting',' The Lucy Poems',' The Brothers' and' Michael'. Part 4, on Critical Reception, discusses contemporary, Victorian and recent critical approaches to Wordsworth and includes an annotated guide to further reading.

Lyrical Ballads'

William Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads (1798) with some poems of 1800

William Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Daniel Robinson

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight original essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays explore the highlights of a long career systematically, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and to the blank verse poet of 'The Recluse'. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

After an Introduction examining the historical moment of Existentialism, as a product of wartime discipline and consciousness, this book sets out the thinking of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers on the broad questions of What is Man?';' What Can I Know?' and' What must I do?' It introduces models of Abandonment, The Absurd and Ambiguity; Consciousness and Freedom; Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself, Bad Faith, Facticity and Possibility, Dasein, or there-being, Temporality, attitudes towards Death; The Will-to-Power, The Superman, and the so-called Kingdom of Ends. The book glances throughout at literary contributions to Existentialism, and ends with brief biographies of the major Existentialists and an extensive glossary of terms.

Existentialism

This book examines the connection between William Wordsworth and the work of Helen Maria Williams and the effect this connection may have had on his reception by such hostile critics as Francis Jeffrey. Why did Wordsworth write his first published poem to Helen Maria Williams? What role did she play in forming his views of poetry, and of the French Revolution? Why was Wordsworth able to recite in 1820 a poem by Miss Williams that he first read in 1790? Was his own poetical sensibility comparable with that of the older woman? Did the reception of Wordsworthâ€™s Poems, in Two Volumes by Francis Jeffrey and others â€”as â€˜puerileâ€™, â€˜namby-pambyâ€™, â€˜lispingâ€™ and â€˜affectedâ€™ â€” reflect a belief that manly sense and feminine sensibility, are not compatible? If so, why did Wordsworth run that risk? This little book attempts to suggest answers to some of those questions, and to provoke more systematic considerations of them all.

Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842

The Book considers what it meant to be a Unitarian in the hungry forties, what Gaskell understood of Chartism and' political economy'; and attitudes to women's rights. It discusses the many ambiguities and instabilities in the book - suggesting where the reader may need to take issue with some of the standard critical assumptions about Gaskell's text, and considers how she might be compared to Dickens - and what Dickens learned from her.And it discusses some contemporary (i.e. Victorian) and recent critical approaches to the book. The aim is to leave the reader with a great deal of respect for a novel that is sometimes underestimated - while pointing out some of its real departures from the best practice of Realist writers, practices that Mrs Gaskell herself did much to invent.

Elizabeth Gaskell: 'Mary Barton'

This readers' guide to Bleak House begins with a general introduction to Dickens in the context of his times, stressing the public themes of the novel and the experimental aspects of its technique. Later chapters contain a survey of its major characters and aspects of Dickens's characterization; the pleasures of serial reading; a detailed analysis of several key passages; an exploration of Dickens's craft and the status of this novel as an experimental fiction; a discussion of Dickens and 'the woman question', and a survey of critical reception of what many regard as Dickens's greatest novel.

Reading Dickens's Bleak House

Five keynote lectures and seven papers from the 41st Wordsworth Summer Conference. In this selection of twelve specially chosen Lectures and Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Heather Glen writes on 'We are Seven' in the context of population studies in the 1790s, Judith W. Page on Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth, Anthony Harding on Wordswortyh, Coleridge and the Reading Public, Pamela Woof and Suzanne Stewart on Dorothy Wordsworth's writing, Peter Swaab on Sara Coleridge as a Wordsworth critic, Heidi Thomson on Wordworth and Auden, Judyta Frodyma on Bishop Lowth and 'Home at Grasmere', Stacey McDowell on Keats and Indolence, Catherine Redford on 'The Last Man' and Romantic Archaeology, Paul Whickman on Shelley's revisions of 'Laon and Cythna', and Jason Goldsmith on 'picturesque travel, or viewing landscape by painting it. The final essay includes twelve original landscapes, mostly in colour.

Richard Gravil

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