WORDSWORTH AND THE VICTORIANS by Stephen Gill ( 9780198119654 )

Item Details

Title:

WORDSWORTH AND THE VICTORIANS

By:

Stephen Gill

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£31.49

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£27.55

Discount:

12.5% off

You save:

£3.94

ISBN 10:

0198119658

ISBN 13:

9780198119654

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Publisher:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

1 February, 1998

Pages:

368

Description:

Wordsworth and the Victorians tells the story of the flowering of Wordsworth's reputation and influence in the Victorian era. Stephen Gill uses a large amount of anecdotal and biographical material to illustrate the various ways in which Wordsworth's reputation was diffused. How poets and novelists such as Matthew Arnold and George Eliot transmitted the Wordsworthian spirit is examined, but so also is the personal testimony of critics, scholars, andordinary readers, explaining just what Wordsworth's poetry meant to them.

Synopsis:

Wordsworth was an eighteenth-century contemporary of Blake and his greatest poetry was composed before Keats had written a line. His impact, however, was not fully registered until the Victorian period, when it became common to place his poetry in the great line of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. In part this book examines how it influenced the Victorian poets and novelists who acknowledged its importance to them. However, drawing on a variety of sources from autobiographical memoirs to publishers' accounts, Wordsworth and the Victorians also examines the emergence of Wordsworth as a cultural icon and the various ways in which his reputation was constructed and transmitted through the agency not of literary giants but of critics, scholars, publishers, and latterly the disciples of the Wordsworth Society. For some readers, ranging from Quakers to Anglo-Catholics, Wordsworth was primarily a religious poet. For others, by contrast, his strength was that he was spiritually uplifting without being doctrinally specific, and this study includes testimonies from many who witnessed what Wordsworth had meant to them at times of crisis.For other readers, who valued the Guide to the Lakes as much as, if not more than, Wordsworth's verse, Wordsworth's importance was that as laureate of Nature he could be pressed into service for the cause of environmental protection. The book finally examines Wordsworth's role, thirty and more years after his death, in the battle to establish the National Trust.

Illustrations:

frontispiece, 4 pp plates, halftone figures

Publication:

Imprint:

Clarendon Press

Returns:

Returnable

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