This volume is a reference source to literature in the English language throughout the world. It provides a survey of the world-wide literary tradition of this area, and offers explanations of genres, movements, critical terms and literary concepts.
The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.
In 1808 Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) inflicted a major defeat on Napoleon's forces at the battle of Vimiero, but promptly signed an armistice and convention (negotiated by Sir Hew Dalrymple with General Junot). The Convention permitted the evacuation of the latter's defeated army from Portugal to Bayonne - along with its equipment and its plunder. This disgraceful Convention was regarded by the people of Britain - government ministers excepted - as a betrayal of Britain's allies, Portugal and Spain. Some of the troops repatriated under this agreement fought against Sir John Moore's expeditionary force the following year, forcing his evacuation from northern Spain. Wordsworth's enormous pamphlet on the betrayal of the Iberian patriots by Britain's officer class is one of the most remarkable political documents produced by a Romantic poet. Here the text of W J B Owen's 1968 edition is republished for the bicentennial, with a critical symposium by Richard Gravil, Simon Bainbridge, David Bromwich, Timothy Michael and Patrick Vincent.
Volume 1 of The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, as edited by W J B Owen and Jane W Smyser. This is a print version of the new, searchable, navigable, electronic edition of this standard work. Compared with the original Clarendon edition, this one has two advantages: textual notes are more clearly separated and are columnized; and the existence of editorial commentary is indicated by marginal symbols in the text (in the ebook, of course, these symbols are hyperlinked to the commentary). While colour is used in the preview, as in the ebook, the print in the paperback is black and white. The Contents include Wordsworth's famous poetical manifesto, the 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', his Jacobinical defence of political terror in 'A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff; and an impassioned intervention in the peninsular wars, protesting at British betrayal of Portuguese and Spanish allies at the Convention of Cintra.