Traditionally, Wordsworth’s greatness is founded on his identity as the poet of nature and solitude. The Wordsworthian imagination is seen as an essentially private faculty, its very existence premised on the absence of other people. In this title, first published in 1987, David Simpson challenges this established view of Wordsworth, arguing that it fails to recognize and explain the importance of the context of the public sphere and the social environment to the authentic experience of the imagination. Wordsworth’s preoccupation with the metaphors of property and labour shows him to be acutely anxious about the value of his art in a world that he regarded as corrupted. Through close examination of a few important poems, both well-known and relatively unknown, Simpson shows that there is no unitary, public Wordsworth, nor is there a conflict or tension between the private and the public. The absence of any clear kind of authority in the voice that speaks the poems makes Wordsworth’s poetry, in Simpson’s phrase, a ‘poetry of displacement’.

First published in 1992, this book represents the first major attempt to compile a bibliography of Derrida’s work and scholarship about his work. It attempts to be comprehensive rather than selective, listing primary and secondary works from the year of Derrida’s Master’s thesis in 1954 up until 1991, and is extensively annotated. It arranges under article type a huge number of works from scholars across numerous fields — reflecting the interdisciplinary and controversial nature of Deconstruction. The substantial introduction and annotations also make this bibliography, in part, a critical guide and as such will make a highly useful reference tool for those studying his philosophy.

First Published in 1992, this encyclopedia is designed to survey the social, cultural and intellectual climate of English Romanticism from approximately the 1780s and the French Revolution to the 1830s and the Reform Bill. Focussing on ‘the spirit of the age’, the book deals with the aesthetic, scientific, socioeconomic – indeed the human – environment in which the Romantics flourished. The books considers poets, playwrights and novelists; critics, editors and booksellers; painters, patrons and architects; as well as ideas, trends, fads, and conventions, the familiar and the newly discovered. The book will be of use for everyone from undergraduate English students, through to thesis-driven graduate students to teaching faculty and scholars.

Upon initial publication in 1956, this book was an attempt to re-state certain problems concerning the aesthetics and ethics of the tragic form; to examine these in relation to contemporary work in psychology and anthropology; to enquire into the significance of 'the fact or experience called tragedy' in the modern world; and to suggest a synthesis in terms of the Christian tradition. This is a reissue of the corrected second edition of the work, first published in 1966.

Drawing together landscape, architecture and literature, Strawberry Hill, the celebrated eighteenth-century ’Gothic’ villa and garden beside the River Thames, is an autobiographical site, where we can read the story of its creator, Horace Walpole. This 'man of taste' created private resonances, pleasure and entertainment - a collusion of the historic, the visual and the sensory. Above all, it expresses the inseparable integration of house and setting, and of the architecture with the collection, all specific to one individual, a unity that is relevant today to all architects, landscape designers and garden and country house enthusiasts. Avoiding the straightforward architectural description of previous texts, this beautifully illustrated book reveals the Gothic villa and associated landscape to be inspired by theories that stimulate 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' articulated in the series of essays by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) published in the Spectator (1712). Linked to this argument, it proposes that the concepts behind the designs for Strawberry Hill are not based around architectural precedent but around eighteenth-century aesthetics theories, antiquarianism and matters of 'Taste'. Using architectural quotations from Gothic tombs, Walpole expresses the mythical idea that it was based on monastic foundations with visual links to significant historical figures and events in English history. The book explains for the first time the reasons for its creation, which have never been adequately explored or fully understood in previous publications. The book develops an argument that Walpole was the first to define theories on Gothic architecture in his Anecdotes of Painting (1762-71). Similarly innovative, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (1780) is one of the first to attempt a history and theory of gardening. The research uniquely evaluates how these theories found expression at Strawberry Hill. This reassessment of the villa and its associated l

This book explores the relationship between humanity and nature while challenging the notion that anthropocentric behaviour causes the environmental catastrophes depicted in the four selected British eco-science fiction novels. These novels are John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), J. G. Ballard’s The Drought (1965), Brian Aldiss’s Earthworks (1965), and John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up (1972), all of which fictionalise the fact that the consequences of environmental problems can be diverse but equally serious. This book examines how even the smallest damage caused by human beings to the environment negatively affects them, other living beings, and the ecosystem they need to live and flourish. In conjunction with these, the factors and conditions that push characters in the novels to ignore and harm the environment are also scrutinised. While examining how and why the environmental problems in the novels have arisen, it is evaluated whether the authors propose solutions to these problems and, if so, what they are.

Tom Lockwood's study is the first examination of Jonson's place in the texts and culture of the Romantic age. Part one of the book explores theatrical, critical, and editorial responses to Jonson, including his place in the post-Garrick theatre, critical estimations of his life and work, and the politically-charged making and reception of William Gifford's 1816 edition of Jonson's Works. Part two explores allusive and imitative responses to Jonson's poetry and plays in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and explores how Jonson serves variously as a model by which to measure the poet laureate, Robert Southey, and Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley. The introduction and conclusion locate this 'Romantic Jonson' against his eighteenth-century and Victorian re-creations. Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age shows us a varied, mobile, and contested Jonson and offers a fresh perspective on the Romantic age.

Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.