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Reading Victorian Poetry

ISBN: 978-1-405-19392-4

January 2012

Wiley-Blackwell

248 pages

Description
Reading Victorian Poetry

“Richard Cronin’s exceptionally fine book carries out just what its title promises – reading. The pleasure of his adroit, meticulously imaginative insights into verbal and metrical effects is constant … One of the best general readings of Victorian poetry in the last ten years.”
Victorian Studies

“Reading Victorian Poetry will make an excellent introduction to Victorian poetry and gives a good account of a number of key issues.”
English Studies

Reading Victorian Poetry offers close readings of poems from the Victorian era, carefully selected by the author to reflect the breadth and diversity of nineteenth-century poetry. Richard Cronin’s outstanding consideration of a wide range of poets reflects the unusual diversity of Victorian poetry, which includes, amongst others, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, D.G. Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The book investigates key concerns of the era in which poetry was ousted by the novel from the culturally central position that it had enjoyed for centuries. The result is an important and exciting contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century poetry, and a crucial resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature.

About the Author
Professor Richard Cronin lectures in Nineteenth Century Literature in the department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His publications include 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (1998), The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In search of the Pure Commonwealth (2000), Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840 (co-edited. with Antony J. Harrison and Alison Chapman, 2002), and A Companion to Victorian Poetry (Blackwell, 2002). Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo(Oxford: Oxford University Press, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840 (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2002),edited with Dorothy McMillan, Jane Austen, Emma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), lxxvii + 600, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, general editor Janet Todd. In addition, he has published articles on Byron, Clare, Godwin, Jhabvala, Keats, Kipling, Narayan, Rushdie, Ruskin, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, P. B. Shelley, Alexander Smith, Tennyson, and Wordsworth.