The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight original essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays explore the highlights of a long career systematically, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth ofLyrical Ballads and the Poems in Two Volumes and to the blank verse poet of 'The Recluse'. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship.

This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

After a career teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Canada, Poland, and England,Richard Gravil is now Chairman of The Wordsworth Conference Foundation and Commissioning Editor of Humanities-Ebooks. He is the author ofRomantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862 (St Martin's Press, 2000);Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation: 1787-1842 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility (Humanities-Ebooks, 2010). For ten years he co-editedSymbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, and his numerous edited and co-edited books, includingMaster Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel (Ashgate, 2001) andThe Republic of Poetry: Poetic Continuities from Bradstreet to Plath (a special issue of Symbiosis, 2003).

Daniel Robinson is Professor of English at Widener University. He is the co-editor (with Paula R. Feldman) ofA Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750-1850 (OUP, 1999) and (with William Richey) ofWordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); the editor of the complete poetry of Mary Robinson forThe Works of Mary Robinson (Pickering and Chatto, 2009); and the author ofWilliam Wordsworth's Poetry (Continuum, 2010), The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (Palgrave, 2011), andMyself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing (University of Iowa Press, 2014). He is working on a new edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge for Bloomsbury and is one of the team of editors working on OUP's forthcoming Anna Letitia Barbauld: Collected Works.