First Published in 1991. This edition draws upon a wide range pf Browning's poetry and prose, inducing selections from his 'Dramatic Lyrics', 'Dramatic Romances and Lyrics' and 'Men and Women' and 'Dramatis Personae' collections, as well as extracts from his correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett. Aidan Day's introduction chronicles the events both of Browning's life and of his development as a poet.

Romanticism was a revolutionary intellectual and artistic movement which generated some of the most popular and influential texts in British and American literary history. This clear and engaging guide introduces the history, major writers and critical issues of this crucial era. This fully updated second edition includes:Discussion of a broad range of writers including William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. T...

These lectures were delivered by Seamus Heaney while he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. In the first of them, Heaney discusses and celebrates poetry's special ability to redress spiritual balance and to function as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces in the world. He proceeds to explore how this 'redress' manifests itself in a diverse range of poems and poets, including Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', 'The Midnight Court' by the eighteenth-century Irish...

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history...

This 2004 volume offers an introduction to British literature that challenges the traditional divide between eighteenth-century and Romantic studies. Contributors explore the development of literary genres and modes through a period of rapid change. They show how literature was shaped by historical factors including the development of the book trade, the rise of literary criticism and the expansion of commercial society and empire. The first part of the volume focuses on broad themes inclu...

The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, first published in 1997, provides an introduction to the works and intellectual life of one of the most challenging and wide-ranging writers in English literary history. Compiler of the first great English dictionary, editor of Shakespeare, biographer and critic of the English poets, author both of the influential journal Rambler and the popular fiction Rasselas, and one of the most engaging conversationalists in literary culture, Johnson is here ...

Victorian poetry was read and enjoyed by a much larger audience than is sometimes thought. Publication in widely-circulating periodicals, reprinting in book reviews, and excerpting in novels and essays ensured that major poets such as Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and Rossetti were household names, and they remain popular today. The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry provides an accessible overview of British poetry from 1830 to 1901, paying particular attention to its role in mass med...

English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century is an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, which can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This student Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, informs and illuminates the poetry by providing close reading of texts and an exploration of their background. There are individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbe...

The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth provides a wide-ranging account of one of the most famous Romantic poets. Specially commissioned essays cover all the important aspects of this multi-faceted writer; the volume examines his poetic achievement with a chapter on poetic craft, while other chapters focus on the origin of his poetry and on the challenges it presented and continues to present. Further contributions include discussions of The Prelude and The Recluse, Wordsworth as philosophic...

How and why childhood became so important to such a wide range of Romantic writers has long been one of the central questions of literary historical studies. Ann Wierda Rowland discovers new answers to this question in the rise of a vernacular literary tradition. In the Romantic period the child came fully into its own as the object of increasing social concern and cultural investment; at the same time, modern literary culture consolidated itself along vernacular, national lines. Romantici...

Andrew Marvell is one of the greatest English lyric poets of the seventeenth century and one of its leading polemicists. This Companion brings a set of fresh questions and perspectives to bear on the varied career and diverse writings of a remarkable writer and elusive man. Drawing on important new editions of Marvell's poetry and of his prose, scholars of both history and literature examine Marvell's work in the contexts of Restoration politics and religion, and of the seventeenth-century...

This volume provides lively and authoritative introductions to twenty-nine of the most important British and Irish poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Philip Larkin. The list includes, among others, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and represents the tradition of English poetry at its best. Each contributor offers a new assessment of a single poet's achievement and importance, with readings of the most important poems. The essays, written by leading exper...