The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader involves a complex interaction of rhetorical, orthographical and visual mediating skills. At issue are the nature of 'authority', the creation of a readership attuned to the writer's poetic resonances, and a delicate negotiation between literary tradition and individual talent. In a series of detailed readings leading scholars focus on the presentation of work by Spenser, Herbert, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Smart, Blake, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, Lawrence and David Jones. The wide chronological range enables unusually extensive comparison across the boundaries of generic form, and between the varying emotional, aesthetic and rhetorical emphases of specific periods: from the creation of fictitious 'persona' to the construction of autobiographical 'self', from the interaction of printed word and visual image to the arrangements and rearrangements of structure and sequence.
The Atterbury Plot was one of three Jacobite attempts to seize the throne from the Hanover line, and the only one that was decided primarily outside of battle. It was an exercise almost purely of poli
A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-cen
The presentation of poetry to auditor and reader involves a complex interaction of rhetorical, orthographical and visual mediating skills. At issue are the nature of "authority," the creation of a rea
A major academic controversy has raged in recent years over the analysis of the political and religious commitments of Samuel Johnson, the most commanding of the 'commanding heights' of eighteenth-cen
In one of the more sudden shifts of perspective, and hotly contested controversies of recent historical and literary scholarship, the view of Johnson has been fundamentally changed. This volume offers
