Poetic Form and British Romanticism

by Stuart Curran

Overview

Across Europe, and particularly in Great Britain, the Romantic age coincided with a large-scale revival of lost literatures and the first attempts to create a coherent history of Western literature. Calling into question that history, Stuart Curran demonstrates that the Romantic poets, far from being indifferent or hostile to popular forms of literature were actually obsessed with them as repositories of literary conventions and conveyors of implicit ideological value. Whether in their proccupation with fixed forms, which resulted in the incomparable artistry of Romantic odes, or in their rethinking of major genres like the pastoral, the epic, and the romance, the Romantic poets transformed every element they touched to suit their own democratic, secular and skeptical ethos—a world view recognizably modern in its dimensions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195060720
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/22/1990
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

University of Pennsylvania

Table of Contents

Chapter 1	Of Form and Genre	3
Chapter 2	The Second Renaissance	14
Chapter 3	The Sonnet	29
Chapter 4	The Hymn and Ode	56
Chapter 5	The Pastoral	85
Chapter 6	The Romance	128
Chapter 7	The Epic	158
Chapter 8	Composite Orders	180
Chapter 9	Form and Freedom in European Romantic Poetry	204
	Notes	221
	Index	253

Editorial Reviews

"While the argument of the book is strong, Poetic Form and British Romanticism is a new and necessary reference work. Each chapter offers a plentiful gathering of the relevant poems of the genre under discussion, and each points to little-known or forgotten works that may be of interest to us in our present concern with the contexts of poetry....[it] sets out the agenda for romantic studies well into the 1990s."—Studies in Romanticism

"Definitive. Curran's work will be the standard work on the subject of poetic form and British romanticism for a long time to come....A book like this comes along only rarely, so apparently modest and merely industrious in procedure, yet so sweepingly important in its scope and implication for critical theory and practice....An essential text for the study of British romantic poetry, and every serious scholar and student of the period should have a copy on the shelf of his or her working library."—Modern Philology

"The compression of his presentation is astonishing, and the overview is stunning....Its learning, insight, and judiciousness make it, for the serious student, by far the outstanding survey of British Romantic poetry yet written....It is a book to be bought, read, and reread frequently."—Keats-Shelley Journal

"The author's brilliance and originality and the broad sweep of his knowledge are everywhere evident....We will all be absorbing what he has to teach us for a long time to come."—The Romantic Movement

"Throughout, Curran's explications of major as well as of lesser-known poems in each genre are always interesting and often brilliant, the range of his learning astonishing."—Choice

From the Publisher