Algernon Charles Swinburne

This is the first rigorous scholarly edition of a substantial selection of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) ever produced. Swinburne was one of the most brilliant and controversial poets of the nineteenth century: a republican, a scorner of established Christianity, a writer of sexual daring, a poet of loss and of love. Yet he is also the most misunderstood poet of the Victorian period. This new edition, with substantial editorial material, presents a new and convincing portrait of a man sharply different from what is usually said of him. Beginning with his unpublished "Ode to Mazzini" (1857) and ending with his last major critical work on The Age of Shakespeare (1908), this edition offers Swinburne in the round--a man of astonishing consistency whose formal innovations and critical penetration remain persistently engaging as well as provocative. A major introduction explores Swinburne's complicated reaction to the scandal of his first major collection, Poems and Ballads (1866); his life-long commitment to radical voices (Blake, Hugo, Landor, Shelley); his permanent hostility to tyranny; his sense of literature as a living form and of the heroic personality of the artist; his dazzling art criticism and adroit analysis of Renaissance and modern literature; his exceptional elegies for dead friends; his burlesques and richly atmospheric fiction and drama. This is a new, more complete, more challenging, but also more credible Swinburne than has ever been presented. Scholarly annotation draws on rich contemporary sources, manuscripts, and the diverse print culture of Swinburne's day, as well as moving through ancient and modern languages that Swinburne wrote with fluency.

Francis O'Gorman has written widely on English literature chiefly from 1780 to the present, and mostly, but not exclusively, on poetry and non-fictional prose. His recent publications include editions of John Ruskin's Praeterita, Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers, and a co-edited edition, with Katherine Mullin, of Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage. He recently edited The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin and published Worrying: A Cultural and Literary History as well as essays on Philip Larkin, Wordsworth, Swinburne, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Tennyson, and the state of the modern English university. O'Gorman--from English, Irish, and Hungarian families--was educated at the University of Oxford and is currently a Professor in the School of English at the University of Leeds and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.