The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, 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.


About the Author
Richard Gravil, Chairman, The Wordsworth Conference Foundation, Daniel Robinson, Homer C. Nearing Jr. Distinguished Professor of English, Widener University

Richard Gravil is Chairman of The Wordsworth Conference Foundation and Commissioning Editor of Humanities-Ebooks. He is the author of Romantic 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).

Daniel Robinson is Homer C. Nearing Jr. Distinguished Professor of English at Widener University. He co-edited A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750-1850 (1999) with Paula Feldman, and Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (2001) wih William Richey. He is the editor of Poems, The Works of Mary Robinson (2 vols, 2009) and author of Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing (2014), William Wordswoth's Poetry: A Reader's Guide (2010), and The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (2011).