Bücher von Richard Gravil

Part 1 of this book examines the English contribution to the 'American Revolution', and the various models of relationship between Britain and America that existed for writers in the 'American Renaissance'. Part 2 considers the politics of James Fenimore Cooper, and the inspirational role of the English Romantics in the thinking of Emerson and the art of Bryant, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Poe, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson. An epilogue explores how Dickinson and Whitman responded to the seductive music of Alfred Lord Tennyson. "How this study is received will say as much about the recovery of serious interest in literary history as about the work's quality. Learned, rigorous in testing its assertions, mordant and spirited in its expression, Romantic Dialogues makes one wonder how one ever read the American text at all without the British context. .... An extraordinary achievement" -Robert Weisbuch, New England Quarterly

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies

This book places Wordsworth's revolutionary poetic practice, in Lyrical Ballads, in the context of a revolutionary age. It considers Wordsworth's provocative theories of how poetry should work, and includes a treatment of the famous 'Preface' to Lyrical Ballads, one of the great poetic manifestos. The main part of the book offers illuminating commentary and questions on the poems, designed to encourage readers to accept Wordsworth's invitation to 'wrestle' with the author. A final section discusses contemporary, Victorian and recent critical approaches to Wordsworth and includes an annotated guide to further reading. Richard Gravil's books include Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862 (Palgrave 2000), Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 (Palgrave 2003) And Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility (2010), all now available from Lulu. He is also co-editor of the monumental Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (2015).