Wordsworth''s Fun

Informationen zum Autor Matthew Bevis is professor of English at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Art of Eloquence , Comedy: A Very Short Introduction , and Lessons in Byron . His essays have appeared in the London Review of Books , Harper's , Poetry , and Raritan . Klappentext "The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage," William Hazlitt recalled, "He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth." Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know--and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy. Wordsworth's Fun explores the writer's debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth's interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth's Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet's strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.

Product details

• Authors: Matthew Bevis, Bevis Matthew
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.09.2019
• EAN: 9780226652191
• ISBN: 978-0-226-65219-1
• No. of pages: 264
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; European History, English, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Georgian Era (1714-1837), POETRY / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, British & Irish history, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Literary studies: poetry and poets