The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry explores the diversity of Victorian poetic forms and their impact. Divided into four sections, it covers innovations in form, literary influences, readings of twenty-three poets, and the contextual significance of poetry in Victorian society. This essential resource aims to contribute to future studies in the field.
“The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage,” William Hazlitt recalled, “He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth.” Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know—and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy. Wordsworth’s Fun explores the writer’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth’s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth’s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet’s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.
Exploring the interplay between public speaking and literary expression, the book delves into the works of Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce. It highlights how oratory, as reported in newspapers and Hansard, influenced their writing styles and themes. By examining these relationships, it provides fresh insights into the role of literature in the public sphere during the 19th and early 20th centuries, revealing how these authors engaged with contemporary societal issues through their art.
With a broad scope across the millennia, from high literature to popular culture, between page and stage and screen, this Very Short Introduction considers comedy not only as a literary genre, but also as a broader impulse at work in many other historical and contemporary forms of satire, parody, and play.
Essential life lessons from Byron, one of life's Great Thinkers