John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance

John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance
Author: Johanne Clare
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 248
Release: 1987
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780773506060

As a working-class poet, born in 1793 to an impovisherished family in rural England, John Clare has often been considered of interest for the unusual nature of his life and career rather than for his poetry. In this book, Johanne Clare argues that he should be taken seriously both as a poet and as a representative figure in a period of social and agrarian upheaval. She discusses Clare's political attitudes and his views on the social issues which most affected him - poverty, economic inequality, class prejudice, and the enclosure movement - and shows how his social identity and experience were intricately related to his major writings.

John Clare

John Clare
Author: R. Sales
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2001-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 140399028X

This book situates John Clare's long, prolific but often badly neglected literary life within the wider cultural histories of the Regency and earlier Victorian periods. The first half considers the construction of the Regency peasant-poet and how Clare performed this role on stages such as the London Magazine. It also looks at the way in which it went out of fashion as Regency mentalities were replaced by early Victorian ones. The second half recreates asylum culture and places Clare's performances as Regency boxers and Lord Byron within this bleak new world.

John Clare's Romanticism

John Clare's Romanticism
Author: Adam White
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2017-07-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319538594

This book offers a major reassessment of John Clare’s poetry and his position in the Romantic canon. Alert to Clare’s knowledge of the work of his Romantic contemporaries and near contemporaries, it puts forward the first extended series of comparisons of Clare’s poetry with texts we now think of as defining the period – in particular poems by Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats. It makes fully evident Clare’s original contribution to the aesthetic culture of the age by analysing how he explores a wide range of concerns and preoccupations which are central to, and especially privileged in, Romantic-period poetics, including ‘fancy’, the sublime, childhood, ruins, joy, ‘poesy’, and a love lyric marked by a peculiar self-consciousness about sincere expression. At the heart of this book is the claim that the hitherto under-scrutinised subjective stances, transcendent modes, and abstract qualities of Clare’s lyric poetry situate him firmly within, and as fundamentally part of, Romanticism, at the same time as his writing constitutes a distinctive contribution to one of the most fascinating eras of English literature.

New Essays on John Clare

New Essays on John Clare
Author: Simon Kövesi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2015-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107031117

Essays by leading scholars offer new insights into a remarkable poet and early advocate of environmental ethics and aesthetics.

John Clare in Context

John Clare in Context
Author: Geoffrey Summerfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1994-05-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521445474

Critics including Seamus Heaney provide a welcome reappraisal in the wake of Clare's bicentenary.

Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies

Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies
Author: Simon Kӧvesi
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2020-10-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3030433749

This collection gathers together an exciting new series of critical essays on the Romantic- and Victorian-period poet John Clare, which each take a rigorous approach to both persistent and emergent themes in his life and work. Designed to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Clare’s first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, the scholarship collected here both affirms Clare’s importance as a major nineteenth-century poet and reveals how his verse continually provokes fresh areas of enquiry. Offering new archival, theoretical, and sometimes corrective insights into Clare’s world and work, the essays in this volume cover a multitude of topics, including Clare’s immersion in song and print culture, his formal ingenuity, his environmental and ecological imagination, his mental and physical health, and his experience of asylums. This book gives students a range of imaginative avenues into Clare’s work, and offers both new readers and experienced Clare scholars a vital set of contributions to ongoing critical debates.

John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader

John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader
Author: P. Chirico
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2007-07-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230591108

This broad and original study of the full range of John Clare's work is the first to take seriously his repeated appeals to the judgement of future readers. A series of close readings reveals Clare's sophisticated poetics: his covert quotations, his careful analysis of the history, and his fascination with literary success and posthumous fame.

John Clare and Community

John Clare and Community
Author: John Goodridge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2013
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 052188702X

John Clare (1793-1864) is one of the most sensitive poetic observers of the natural world. Born into a rural labouring family, he felt connected to two communities: his native village and the Romantic and earlier poets who inspired him. The first part of this study of Clare and community shows how Clare absorbed and responded to his reading of a selection of poets including Chatterton, Bloomfield, Gray and Keats, revealing just how serious the process of self-education was to his development. The second part shows how he combined this reading with the oral folk-culture he was steeped in, to create an unrivalled poetic record of a rural culture during the period of enclosure, and the painful transition to the modern world. In his lifelong engagement with rural and literary life, Clare understood the limitations as well as the strengths in communities, the pleasures as well as the horrors of isolation.

John Clare Society Journal, 25 (2006)

John Clare Society Journal, 25 (2006)
Author: Ronald Blythe
Publisher: John Clare Society
Total Pages: 100
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 9780953899562

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

John Clare and the Place of Poetry

John Clare and the Place of Poetry
Author: Mina Gorji
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846311632

Traditional accounts of Romantic poetry have depicted John Clare as a peripheral figure, an original genius whose talents removed him from the mainstream. This volume helps to show that far from being brilliant yet isolated, Clare was deeply involved in the rich cultural life of both his village and the larger metropolis. Offering an account of Clare’s poems as they relate to the literary culture and burgeoning literary history of his day, Mina Gorji defines the context in which Clare’s work can best be understood: in relation to eighteenth-century traditions as they persisted and developed in the Romantic period.