Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry
James Williams editor Matthew Bevis editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Published:25th Aug '16
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£31.49(9780198833796)
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).
Makes a convincing case for Lear's enduring interest not just for Victorianists but for those who would seek to understand modernist and later twentieth-century innovations in poetic form . . . The play's the thing, as this lovely collection shows again and again. * Victorian Studies *
The Play of Poetry sounds like a deference to the particular kind of responsibility that belongs to good art and artists. It does justice to an artist properly good, not improperly great: illuminating a writer as responsibly irresponsible as the surprising last lines of his limericks. * Barbara Everett, Times Literary Supplement *
a fresh way to read a supposedly minor poet...I should add that in an era when publishers are cutting corners, this is a particularly pleasing edition, a sturdy volume with good quality paper. * Talia Schaffer, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry [...] feels like it has been gifted to us. [T]he collection revels in the inexplicable mysteriousness of Lear the man, along with his art and the often contradictory emotions it elicits [...] an invitation to wonder. * Joseph Jordan *
The clever and vivacious essays assembled by James Williams and Matthew Bevis in Edward Lear: The Play of Poetry build sensibly on these foundations. * Andrew Motion, The Hopkins Review *
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. * Ben Westwood, Times Literary Supplement *
[An] excellent volume ... If Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry is any guide to what is to come, the future for Lear studies looks bright indeed. Its contributors show it to be possible to write successfully about his nonsense in diverse ways. ... Arriving at a moment when Lears critical fortunes appear to be on the rise, it will be an essential point of reference. * Martin Dubois, Review of English Studies *
Almost every page contained pleasurable surprises. * Paris Review *
ISBN: 9780198708568
Dimensions: 235mm x 173mm x 24mm
Weight: 808g
402 pages