Gill Stephen - The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth

The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth

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, other chapters focus on the origin of his poetry and on the challenges it presented and continues to present. The volume ensures that students will be grounded in the history of Wordsworths career and his critical reception. Further contributions include discussions of The Prelude and The Recluse, Wordsworth as philosophic poet, his writing in relation to European Romanticism, and Wordsworth as Nature poet. The collection, by an international team of established specialists, concludes with a lucid account of the history of Wordsworths texts, and offers students invaluable reference material including a chronology and guides to further reading.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

WORDS WORTH

EDITED BY

STEPHEN GILL

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo

Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521641166

Cambridge University Press 2003

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2003

Reprinted 2003

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

ISBN-13 978-0-521-64116-6 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-64116-0 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-64681-9 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-64681-2 paperback

Transferred to digital printing 2005

CONTENTS

STEPHEN GILL

NICOLA TROTT

DUNCAN WU

JAMES A. BUTLER

LUCY NEWLYN

KENNETH R. JOHNSTON

FRANCES FERGUSON

SUSAN J. WOLFSON

JUDITH W. PAGE

STEPHEN GILL

SEAMUS PERRY

RALPH PITE

NICHOLAS ROE

PAUL HAMILTON

JOEL PACE

KEITH HANLEY

CONTRIBUTORS

JAMES A. BUTLER is Professor and Chair of English at La Salle University in Philadelphia. He is an associate editor of The Cornell Wordsworth Series in which he has edited The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar (1979) and co-edited Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems (1992). His most recent book is an edition of Romney and Other New Works About Philadelphia by Owen Wister (2001).

FRANCES FERGUSON is Mary Elizabeth Garrett Professor of English and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. She has written on the eighteenth century, Romanticism, and literary theory, and is the author of Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation, and Pornography: The Theory.

STEPHEN GILL is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. His edition of Wordsworths Salisbury Plain Poems inaugurated the Cornell Wordsworth Series. He has written William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) and Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998).

PAUL HAMILTON was a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, for ten years and is now a Professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London. He has written books on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Historicism, and related subjects, and is currently working on the philosophy and political theory of European Romanticism.

KEITH HANLEY is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, where he directs the Ruskin Programme. He is co-editor, with Greg Kucich, of the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts and the book series Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies. Among his publications are An Annotated Critical Bibliography of William Wordsworth (1995) and Wordsworth: A Poets History (2000). With Amanda Gilroy, he has recently edited a selection of the plays and poems of Joanna Baillie.

KENNETH R. JOHNSTON is Ruth Halls Professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of The Hidden Wordsworth (1998) and Wordsworth and The Recluse(1984). He is currently studying the effects of the British Governments repression of the 1790s reform movement.

LUCY NEWLYN is a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She is the author of three books published by Oxford University Press: Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion (1986), Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (1993), and Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (2000). She co-edited with Richard Gravil and Nicholas Roe Coleridges Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver (1985); and she is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. She is now working on the poetry of Thomas Hardy.

JOEL PACE is Assistant Professor of British and American Romanticism at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and a Fellow of the John Nicholas Brown Center of American Civilization, Brown University. He is working on a book on Wordsworth in America for Oxford University Press and he has published further on the subject in Romanticism on the Net, Symbiosis, and Romantic Circles Praxis Series.

JUDITH W. PAGE teaches in the English Department at the University of Florida, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Research on Women and Gender and the Center for Jewish Studies. She is the author of Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (1994) and numerous articles on Romanticism. Her current research includes work on womens life-writing in the Romantic period and on British Romanticism and Judaism.

SEAMUS PERRY is a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is author of Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999), editor of Coleridge: Interviews and Recollections (2000), and co-editor, with Nicola Trott, of 1800: The New Lyrical Ballads (2001). He is an editor of the Oxford journal Essays in Criticism.

RALPH PITE, University of Liverpool, has published on Dantes importance to Romantic poetry, on Wordsworth and ecology, and on Coleridgean biography. He has recently completed a book, Hardys Geography, and is working on a biography of Hardy, The Guarded Life.

NICHOLAS ROE is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. His books include Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1988), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (1997), and, as editor, Keats and History (1995) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2001).

NICOLA TROTT is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is co-editor, with Seamus Perry, of 1800: The New Lyrical Ballads (2001), and has published several articles on Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as essays on Romantic aesthetics, periodical criticism, gothic fiction, Lamb, Keats, Christopher North, Mary Shelley, and Wollstonecraft.

SUSAN J. WOLFSON is Professor of English at Princeton University, a contributor to several volumes in the Companion series and the editor of the volume on John Keats. Her publications on Wordsworth include The Questioning Presence (1987), Formal Charges (1998), essays in Le Questionnement, a special issue of Revue Internationale de Philosophie, ed. Nigel Wood (1993), The Prelude: Theory in Practice