Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Author: Susan J. Wolfson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2000
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

This anthology brings together three powerfully original figures who vividly capture the spirit and anxieties of their age. Thomas Hood and Winthrop Mackworth Praed write with a self-conscious playfulness about literary history and traditions as well as an active and often satirical engagement with contemporary social and political culture. Thomas Lovell Beddoes has always held the interest of the "dark" Victorianists for his lushly lurid imagination and of the modernists for his ironic, frequently caustic verses. Most of all, these are three amazingly interesting poets--full of verbal wit, evocative imagery, compelling imaginations. Although he started by writing in the style of Keats, Thomas Hood (1799-1845) declared, "I have to be a lively Hood for a livelihood," and devoted most of his career to comic verse. But his sheer verbal ingenuity and endlessly inventive punning do not conceal his phobias and fears, nor overshadow the emerging social protest that was to shape the impressive poems in his later years. Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839) observed the social scene of his day--the flirtations, political intrigues, elegant chit-chat, and parliamentary procedures--with sparkling, self-deprecating wit. Having read law, Praed was called to the Bar in 1829 and entered Parliament as a Conservative in 1830. Even so, he wrote to his school friend and future editor, "Having been favoured by Nature with a long face, a short purse, and two elder Brothers, I find no way of making myself popular in the circle in which she has placed me, except versifying." Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849), who committed suicide, was, in the editors' words "brilliant, solitary, eccentric, erratic, homosexual, politically radical, a poet of powerful, haunting imagination, and, like the other morbidly witty poets in this volume, is most characteristic for his defiance of easy characterization." He has been called the last Elizabethan, a Jacobean scion, an original interpreter of gothic terror, the first modernist, and, with his comic grotesqueries, a precursor of the twentieth-century theater of the absurd. The editors' introductions to each poet are lively and accessible to the non-specialist, while their editorial work, both in establishing the texts and in their annotation and apparatus, makes this an ideal text for specialist study as well.

Science, Politics, and Friendship in the Works of Thomas Lowell Beddoes

Science, Politics, and Friendship in the Works of Thomas Lowell Beddoes
Author: Ute Berns
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2012
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611493676

This study revaluates the work of the scientist and radical, poet and dramatist and English exile in Germany Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). While his writing has elicited high praise from poets ranging from Robert Browning through Ezra Pound to John Ashbery, scholars have frequently neglected it on grounds of its purportedly morbid and opaque eccentricity. Countering this scholarly perception, this book deftly relocates Beddoes's poetry, drama and prose at the centre of Anglo-German debates on aesthetics and life science, politics and theatre in an early nineteenth-century European context. Aided by his letters from Germany, the book re-creates the intercultural discursive universe in which Beddoes easily moves from Shakespeare's plays or the aesthetic experiments of Shelley and his circle to Goethe and to topics debated among Heinrich Heine and the Jungdeutschen, from the most advanced contemporary scientific research to the post-Napoleonic politics of the German radical students' organisations, and from Byron, Baillie and London's illegitimate theatre to Schiller's and Tieck's highly charged reflections on male-male friendship. The study combines historicist strategies with theories of performance, performativity, and visuality as it focuses, in particular, on Beddoes's major and defining work, Death's Jest-Book, first completed in 1829 and published posthumously after much revision in 1850. This study shows how Death's Jest Book, as both drama and poetry, devises complex perspectives on scientifically inspired notions of 'life' and history, how it forges a radical vision for post-Napoleonic Europe and how it links this vision to a daring conception of desiring, gendered selves. The book pays close attention to the dialogue Beddoes's writing maintains with Early Modern literature, and it highlights the proto-modernist features that link his work to that of B chner, Grabbe and a European theatre avant-garde. This innovative study of Beddoes's work, cutting across current investigations into politics, gender, and science in intercultural Romantic Studies should be of interest to scholars and students of British Romantic and Victorian studies as well as of German Vorm rz studies, and to students and scholars of drama and theatre as well as Queer studies.

Handbook of British Romanticism

Handbook of British Romanticism
Author: Ralf Haekel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2017-09-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110376695

The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry
Author: Matthew Bevis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 913
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191653020

'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements—'Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'. The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, offering focused, nuanced engagements with the pleasures and challenges offered by particular styles of thinking and writing. The final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions: the places in which poems were encountered; the poetic representation and embodiment of various sites and spaces; the location of the 'Victorian' alongside other territories and nationalities; and debates about the place - and displacement - of poetry in Victorian society. This Handbook is designed to be not only an essential resource for those interested in Victorian poetry and poetics, but also a landmark publication—provocative, seminal volume that will offer a lasting contribution to future studies in the area.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes

The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Author: Ute Berns
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317041259

Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics who offer a range of perspectives and critical methods, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. In line with the goals of Ashgate's Research Companion series, the editors and contributors provide an overview of Beddoes's criticism and identify significant new directions in Beddoes studies. These include exploring Beddoes's German context, only recently a site of critical attention; reading Beddoes's plays in light of gender theory; and reassessing Beddoes's use of dramatic genre in the context of recent work by theatre historians. Rounding out the volume are essays devoted to key areas in Beddoes's scholarship such as nineteenth-century medical theories, psychoanalytic myth, and Romantic ventriloquism. This collection makes the case for Beddoes's centrality to contemporary debates about nineteenth-century literary culture and its contexts and his influence on Modernist conceptions of literature.

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915

Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850-1915
Author: Kristine Moruzi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317161491

Focusing on six popular British girls' periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls' periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

The Broadview Anthology of Literature of the Revolutionary Period 1770-1832

The Broadview Anthology of Literature of the Revolutionary Period 1770-1832
Author: D.L. Macdonald
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 1609
Release: 2010-03-04
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1770487514

The selections from 132 authors in this anthology represent gender, social class, and racial and national origin as inclusively as possible, providing both greater context for canonical works and a sense of the era’s richness and diversity. In terms of genre, poetry, non-fiction prose, philosophy, educational writing, and prose fiction are included. Geographically, America, Canada, Australia, India, and Africa are represented along with Britain, emphasizing Romantic literature as a world literature. Biographical headnotes, explanatory footnotes, and an extensive bibliography clarify and illuminate the texts for readers.

Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet's Body

Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet's Body
Author: James Robert Allard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317061357

That medicine becomes professionalized at the very moment that literature becomes "Romantic" is an important coincidence, and James Allard makes the most of it. His book restores the physical body to its proper place in Romantic studies by exploring the status of the human body during the period. With meticulous detail, he documents the way medical discourse consolidates a body susceptible to medical authority that is then represented in the works of Romantic era poets. In doing so, he attends not only to the history of medicine's professionalization but significantly to the rhetoric of legitimation that advances the authority of doctors over the bodies of patients and readers alike. After surveying trends in Romantic-era medicine and analyzing the body's treatment in key texts by Wordsworth and Joanna Baillie, Allard moves quickly to his central subject-the Poet-Physician. This hybrid figure, discovered in the works of the medically trained John Keats, John Thelwall, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, embodies the struggles occasioned by the discrepancies and affinities between medicine and poetry.

The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s

The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s
Author: David Stewart
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-01-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319705121

The 1820s and 1830s, the gap between Romanticism and Victorianism, continues to prove a difficulty for scholars. This book explores and recovers a neglected culture of poetry in those years, and it demonstrates that culture was a crucial turning point in literary history. It explores a uniquely wide range of poets, including the poetry of the literary annuals, Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Hood and John Clare, placing their work in the light of new research into the conditions of the literary market. In turn, it uses that culture to open up wider theoretical issues relating to literary form, book history, print culture, gender and periodisation. The period’s doubt about poetry’s place in culture and its capacity to last prompted a dazzling range of creative experiments that reimagined the metrical, material and commercial forms of poetry.

Romanticism, History, Historicism

Romanticism, History, Historicism
Author: Damian Walford Davies
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2009-01-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135899657

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.