Henry James's Style of Retrospect traces James's engagement with the writing of the recent past across the last twenty-five years of his life and examines the thoroughgoing change his style underwent in this last phase of his career, as his focus turned from the observation of contemporary manners to biographical commemoration and autobiographical reminiscence, and the balance of his output gradually shifted from fiction to non-fiction. The 'late personal writings' of the book's subtitle are works of retrospective non-fiction. They are a varied group, representing a broad array of genres and occasions: commemorative essays and obituary tributes, textual revisions and accounts of revisiting familiar places, cultural and literary criticism, biography and autobiography, and family memoir. Oliver Herford proposes that we read the late personal writings as a coherent sequence, bound together by a close texture of cross-references and allusive echoes, and united by James's newly discovered sense for the literary possibilities of non-fiction. Closely analyzing the style of these writings, this study offers a boldly revisionist account of the way style itself challenges and preoccupies the very late James. A linked series of innovative close readings takes the major works of this period in sequence, addressing a key point of style in each: particular attention is paid to procedures of reference (to the historical past, to real persons and places and objects), a dimension of style often neglected and sometimes actively slighted in analyses of James's late work. Henry James's Style of Retrospect asks what it means for so distinguished a novelist to alter the foundations of his written manner so strikingly in late life, and shows how we may begin to reconfigure our understanding of late Jamesian aesthetics accordingly.

Lin Shu, Inc. explores the dynamic interactions between literary translation, commercial publishing, and the politics of "traditional" Chinese culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It breaks new ground as the first full-length study in any Western language on the career and works of Lin Shu and his many collaborators in the publishing, academic, and business worlds. Integrating literary scholarship, translation studies, and print history, this book provides new insights into a controversial figure in world literature and his place in the profound transformations in authorship and cultural production in modern China. Well before Ezra Pound and Bertolt Brecht transformed Western-language poetry and theater with their inventions of Chinese culture, Lin Shu and his collaborators had already embarked on a translation project unique in modern literature. Although he knew no foreign languages, in a 20-year period Lin Shu worked with 19 different assistants schooled in English, French, and other tongues to complete more than 180 book-length translations into classical Chinese. Through burgeoning print outlets such as the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan), Lin and his collaborators offered many readers in China their first taste of "Western literature" - usually 19th-century novels and short stories from the United States, England, and France. At the same time, Lin Shu leveraged his labors as a translator to make himself into a leading authority on "traditional" Chinese literature and cultural values. From what one publisher called his "factory of words," Lin issued scores of textbooks and anthologies of classical-language literature, along with short stories, poems, essays, and a handful of full-length novels.

In 1889 uniformed post boys were found moonlighting in a West End brothel frequented by men of the upper classes. "The Cleveland Street Scandal" erupted and Victorian Britain was gripped by the possibility that the Post Office - a bureaucratic backbone of nation and empire - was inspiring and servicing perverse passions. The alliance between transgressive sex and the Post Office that the scandal illuminated was neither incidental nor singular; there was something queer about the post in the nineteenth century. Postal Pleasures tells the story of queer postal relations, from Post Office reforms initiated in 1840 up to the imperial end of the nineteenth century. It tells this story by analysing literature that expresses the cultural consequences of this peculiar kind of "going postal." Victorian writers abandoned the epistolary novel in favour of postal fiction. The postal network, its uniformed employees and its material trappings - envelopes, postmarks, stamps - were used to signal and circulate sexual intrigue. For Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Eliza Lynn Lynton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and others, the idea of an envelope promiscuously jostling its neighbours in a post boy's bag, or the notion that secrets passed through the eyes and fingers of telegraph girls, was more stimulating that the actual contents of correspondence. By the period's end, the postal system had become both an instrument and a metaphor for sexual relations that crossed and double-crossed lines of class, marriage and heterosexuality.

Modern European literature has traditionally been seen as a series of attempts to assert successive styles of writing as 'new'. In this groundbreaking study, Ben Hutchinson argues that literary modernity can in fact be understood not as that which is new, but as that which is 'late'. Exploring the ways in which European literature repeatedly defines itself through a sense of senescence or epigonality, Hutchinson shows that the shifting manifestations of lateness since romanticism express modernity's continuing quest for legitimacy. With reference to a wide range of authors-from Mary Shelley, Chateaubriand, and Immermann, via Baudelaire, Henry James, and Nietzsche, to Valery, Djuna Barnes, and Adorno- he combines close readings of canonical texts with historical and theoretical comparisons of numerous national contexts. Out of this broad comparative sweep emerges a taxonomy of lateness, of the diverse ways in which modern writers can be understood, in the words of Nietzsche, as 'creatures facing backwards'. Ambitious and original, Lateness and Modern European Literature offers a significant new model for understanding literary modernity.

The site of William Penn's 'Holy Experiment' in religious toleration and representative government, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential 'free' African American communities in the United States. The city was seen as a laboratory for social experimentation, one with international consequences. While historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand how writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, and others were creating a distinctive literary tradition, one shaped by the city itself. Analyzing a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War, Otter shows how literary discourse intervened significantly in the period's intense debates about character, race, and nation. The book advances chronologically from the 1790s to the 1850s, and it is organized around the volatile issues the Philadelphia writing tradition responded to: contagion, riots, manners, and freedom. Throughout this exemplary work, Otter reveals how historical events produced a literature that wrestles with specific concerns: the city as specimen, the diagnosis and proper treatment for urban disorder, the effects of position on interpretation, the trials of character, the substance of action, the nature of human difference and similarity, and the vehemence of prejudice. Philadelphia Stories is a work that reveals (1) how the writers of Philadelphia defined the edge between freedom and slavery, altering the course of America's intellectual and national history, and (2) how the figure 'Philadelphia' stands for a place, a history, a tradition of the 'literary' that enriches and even clarifies the whole of American literary history.

What does modern British and Irish literature have to do with French impressionist painting? And what does Henry James have to do with the legal dispute between John Ruskin and J.M.W. Whistler? What links Walter Pater with Conrad's portrait of a genocidal maniac in Heart of Darkness? Or George Moore with Irish nationalism, Virginia Woolf with modern distraction, and Ford Madox Ford with the Great Depression?
Adam Parkes argues that we must answer such questions if we are to appreciate the full impact of impressionist aesthetics on modern British and Irish writers. Complicating previous accounts of the influence of painting and philosophy on literary impressionism, A Sense of Shock highlights the role of politics, uncovering new and deeper linkages. In the hands of such practitioners as Conrad, Ford, James, Moore, Pater, and Woolf, literary impressionism was shaped by its engagement with important social issues and political events that defined the modern age. As Parkes demonstrates, the formal and stylistic practices that distinguish impressionist writing were the result of dynamic and often provocative interactions between aesthetic and historical factors.
Parkes ultimately suggests that it was through this incendiary combination of aesthetics and history that impressionist writing forced significant change on the literary culture of its time. A Sense of Shock will appeal to students and scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, as well as the growing readership for books that explore problems of literary history and interdisciplinarity.

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. But the impact of Dante on English writers has rarely been analysed and its history has been little understood. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work - its style, project, and achievement - commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing. It explores how these Romantic poets understood Dante, what they valued in his poetry and why, setting them in the context of contemporary commentators, translators, and illustrators, (including Fuseli, Flaxman, and Reynolds) both in England and Europe. Romantic readings of the Divine Comedy are shown to disturb our own ideas about Dante, which are based on Victorian and Modernist assumptions. Pite also presents a reconsideration of the concept of 'influence' in general, using the example of Dante's presence in Romantic poetry to challenge Harold Bloom's belief that the relations between poets are invariably a fight to the death.

THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1845-1961 presents a thorough discussion of the six principal writers of the Catholic revival in English literature -- Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, and Waugh. Beginning with Newman's conversion in 1845 and ending with Waugh's completion of the triology The Sword of Honor in 1961, this book explores how Catholicism shaped the work of these six prominent writers. John Henry Newman claimed in The Idea of a University that post-Reformation English literature was overwhelmingly Protestant and that there was no prospect of a Catholic body of literature. Describing this claim as "happily lacking in prescience," Ian Ker persuasively argues that Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, and Waugh succeeded in producing a substantial body of literature written by Catholics who wrote as Catholics. These Catholic revivalists were not so much influenced by traditional Catholic themes of guilt, sin, and ceremony, as they were attracted to unexpected facets of Catholicism. The idea of a Catholic priest as a craftsman is a recurring motif, as is the celebration of the ordinariness and objectivity of Catholicism. Ker's compelling and intelligent reading of these six major writers will appeal to anyone with an interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English literature, or the relation between literature and theology.

Jane Austen is one of the most extensively read writers in English literature, renowned around the world for her much-loved romantic novels. Little is often known about this brilliant author, yet in this absorbing collection of stories and trivia readers will find answers to the amazing and extraordinary aspects of Austen's life, work and legacy. From her development as a world-class author from unassuming origins and the secrets of her own life and loves, through insights into her novels and their characters along with the changing reception to them over the years, to intriguing stories behind the screen and stage adaptations of her works and her continued legacy, there is something for every enthusiast to relish. This authoritative and absorbing book is published to coincide with the 200th Anniversary of Austen's death in 2017.

The role of chance changed in the nineteenth century, and American literature changed with it. Long dismissed as a nominal concept, chance was increasingly treated as a natural force to be managed but never mastered. New theories of chance sparked religious and philosophical controversies while revolutionizing the sciences as probabilistic methods spread from mathematics, economics, and sociology to physics and evolutionary biology. Chance also became more visible in everyday life as Americans struggled to control its power through weather forecasting, insurance, game theory, statistics, military science, and financial strategy. Uncertain Chances shows how the rise of chance shaped the way nineteenth-century American writers faced questions of doubt and belief. Poe in his detective fiction critiques probabilistic methods. Melville in Moby-Dick and beyond struggles to vindicate moral action under conditions of chance. Douglass and other African American authors fight against statistical racism. Thoreau learns to appreciate the play between nature's randomness and order. Dickinson works faithfully to render poetically the affective experience of chance-surprise. These and other nineteenth-century writers dramatize the inescapable dangers and wonderful possibilities of chance. Their writings even help to navigate extremes that remain with us today-fundamentalism and relativism, determinism and chaos, terrorism and risk-management, the rational confidence of the Enlightenment and the debilitating doubts of modernity.

The Wordsworth volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the most comprehensive selection currently available of the poetry and prose of one of the finest poets in the English language. The familiar poems from Wordsworth's 'Great Decade' are all included, but they are complemented by a more than usually generous selection of the best poems from his later years. The extracts from the Guide to the Lakes will be a revelation to many readers, as will the political prose of the Convention of Cintra. All of the material is presented in chronological sequence, so that the reader can see how Wordsworth's changing concerns were expressed in prose as well as poetry. Work which Wordsworth published is separated from that which he did not reveal, which will enable the reader to trace through successive published volumes the development of Wordsworth's public poetic self, while also being able to follow the growth of the body of poetry which, for whatever reason, Wordsworth did not choose to make public when it was written - The Prelude being the greatest and most obvious example.

Drawing on a broad range of rarely studied sources, De Quincey's Disciplines reveals the English Opium-Eater to be a more complex and contradictory figure than the latter-day Romantic and psychedelic dreamer usually portrayed. Taking a theoretical, new historicist stance, Josephine McDonagh's innovative examination of De Quincey's less frequently scrutinized works recontextualizes De Quincey as a true interdisciplinarian, aspiring to participation in the major intellectual project of his time: the formation of new fields of knowledge, and the attempt to unify these into an organic whole.

This is a detailed and innovative study of the use by the poet Shelley, conventionally regarded as atheist, of ideas and imagery from the Scriptures in expressing his world view. Assessing Shelley's poetic theory and practice in relation to the Gnostic heresies of the early church period and the Enlightenment critiques of Scripture, the book shows the poet's method of biblical interpretation to be heterodox and revisionist. Shelley's early appropriation of Scriptural elements is seen to be based on the Bible's ethical content and its ideals of the kingdom of heaven, while in the period 1818-1820 he is a prophet in exile, an English expatriate preoccupied with the nature of the mind (or self). The final part of the study, which looks at Shelley's last two years, focuses on the notion of an increasingly spiritualized self who realizes that his kingdom is `not of this world'. A detailed appendix sets out a large number of definite or possible Biblical allusions in Shelley's poetry. Shelley and Scripture draws on a deep knowledge of the Bible, and of the various currents in the history of Biblical exegesis and Christian typology, to present a timely re-evaluation of the influence on Shelley of the language and traditions of Christianity.

A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction challenges the prevailing view that 'psychology' explains the Gothic. Mighall offers original readings of familiar texts, from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle; but also a rich store of original sources, from European travelogues to sexological textbooks, from ecclesiastic histories to pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. The book aims to provide the first full-length historical survey of Victorian Gothic fiction.

Coleridge's status as a philosopher has often been questioned. `I am a poor poet in England,' he admitted, `but in America, I am a great philosopher.' J. S. Mill's assertion that `the time is yet far distant when, in the estimation of Coleridge, and of his influence upon the intellect of our time, anything like unanimity can be looked for' seems to have been justified. Mary Anne Perkins re-examines Coleridge's claim to have developed a `logosophic' system which attempted `to reduce all knowledges into harmony'. She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which his unifying principle is revealed. She explores the various meanings for the term `Logos', a recurrent theme in every area of Coleridge's thought - philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting, his perceptions more acute, as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves.

There has never been a book about Blake's last period, from his meeting with John Linnell in 1818 to his death in 1827, although it includes some of his greatest works. In The Traveller in the Evening, Morton Paley argues that this late phase involves attitudes, themes, and ideas that are either distinctively new or different in emphasis from what preceded them. After an introduction on Blake and his milieu during this period, Paley begins with a chapter on Blake's illustrations to Thornton's edition of Virgil. Paley relates these to Blake's complex view of pastoral, before proceeding to a history of the project, its near-abortion, and its fulfillment as one of Blake's greatest accomplishments as an illustrator. In Yah and His Two Sons the presentation of the divine, except where it is associated with art, is ambiguous where it is not negative. Paley takes up this separate plate in the context of artists's representations of the Laocoon that would have been known to Blake, and also of what Blake would have known of its history from classical antiquity to his own time. Blake's Dante water colours and engravings are the most ambitious accomplishment of the last years of his life, and Paley shows that the problematic nature of some of these pictures, with Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car as a main example, arises from Blake's own divided and sharply polarized attitude toward Dante's Comedy. The closing chapter, called 'Blake's Bible', is on the Bible-related designs and writings of Blake's last years. Paley discusses The Death of Abel (addressed to Lord Byron 'in the Wilderness') as a response to its literary forerunners, especially Gessner's Death of Abel and Byron's Cain. For the Job engravings Paley shows how the border designs and the marginal texts set up a dialogue with the main illustrations unlike anything in Blake's Job water colours on the same subjects. Also included here are Blake's last pictorial work on a Biblical subject, The Genesis manuscript, and Blake's last writing on a Biblical text, his vitriolic comments on Thornton's translations of the Lord's Prayer.

In this book, Susan Edmunds explores he relationship between modernist domestic fiction and the rise of the U.S. welfare state. This relationship, which began in the Progressive era, emerged as maternalist reformers developed an inverted discourse of social housekeeping in order to call for state protection and regulation of the home. Modernists followed suit, turning the genre of domestic fiction inside out in order to represent new struggles on the border between home, market and state. Edmunds uses the work of Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Tillie Olsen, Edna Ferber, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor to trace the significance of modernists' radical reconstitution of the genre of domestic fiction. Using a grotesque aesthetic of revolutionary inversion, these writers looped their depictions of the domestic sphere through revolutionary discourses associated with socialism, consumerism and the avant-garde. These authors used their grotesque discourses to deal with issues of social conflict ranging from domestic abuse and racial violence to educational reform, public health care, eugenics, and social security. With the New Deal, the U.S. welfare state realized maternalist ambitions to disseminate a modern sentimental version of the home to all white citizens, successfully translating radical bids for collective social security into a racialized order of selective and detached domestic security. The book argues that modernists engaged and contested this historical trajectory from the start. In the process, they forged an enduring set of terms for understanding and negotiating the systemic forms of ambivalence, alienation and conflict that accompany Americans' contemporary investments in"family values."

This study explores Walt Whitman's contradictory response to and embrace of several great prior British poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Blake, and Wordsworth (with shorter essays on Scott, Carlyle, Tennyson, Wilde, and Swinburne). Through reference to his entire oeuvre, his published literary criticism, and his private conversations, letters and manuscripts, it seeks to understand the extent to which Whitman experienced the anxiety of influence as he sought to establish himself as America's poet-prophet or bard (and the extent to which he sought to conceal such influence). An attempt is also made to lay out the often profound aesthetic, cultural, political, and philosophical affinities Whitman shared with these predecessors. It also focuses on all of Whitman's extant comments on these iconic authors. Because Whitman was a deeply autobiographical writer, attention is also paid to how his comments on other poets reflect on his image of himself and on the ways he shaped his public image. Attention is also given to how Whitman's attitudes to his British fore-runners changed over the nearly fifty years of his active career.

When Did Indians Become Straight? explores the complex relationship between contested U.S. notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation. Examining a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, and anthropological tracts), Mark Rifkin offers a cultural and literary history of the ways Native peoples have been inserted into Euramerican discourses of sexuality and how Native intellectuals have sought to reaffirm their peoples' sovereignty and self-determination.

Although Housman's three collections of poems, the third published posthumously, have remained popular, they have not received much serious critical attention. John Bayley makes good the omission in this thorough and comprehensive reappraisal of the whole oeuvre, placing Housman's achievement in the context of the poetry of his own time and of more recent European and American poetry. Close analysis and comparison with other poets - Hardy, Frost, Edward Thomas, Larkin, and Paul Celan - prove illuminating in relation to a poet who has usually been considered something of an odd man out, and even an anachronism in the modern era. Professor Bayley explores and explains the continuing appeal of the poet to present-day readers, and the nature of the craftsmanship and psychology which lie behind its deceptive simplicities. The book will be a valuable introduction to Housman's achievement for the specialist and the poetry-lover alike.

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought-she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool.

This book is a study of writing processes of six modernist authors: Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf, from the 'golden age of manuscripts'. Finn Fordham examines how these processes relate to selfhood and subjectivity, both of which are generally considered to have come under an intense examination and reformulation during the modernist period. The study addresses several questions: what are the relations between writing and subjectivity? To what extent is a 'self' considered as a completed product like a book? Or how are selves, if considered as things 'in process' or 'constructs', reflections of the processes of writing? How do the experiences of writing inform thematic concerns within texts about identity?
There are three theoretical and methodological chapters (about 'genetic' criticism, about critical studies of selfhood within modernism, and the 'effacement' of manuscripts in philosophies of the subject). There then follow chapters on each of the six authors, with a different topic on each - compression, selection, doubling, hollowing out, multiplying and class. The study comprises much new material from archives, and many fresh ideas stemming from the combination of different critical approaches: genetic, psychological, political criticism and close reading. Readers of its contents described it as 'excellent', 'a very creative study', 'original, timely and extremely suggestive'.

This bracing and far-ranging study compares modern (post-1492) literary treatments of millenarian narratives--"end of the world" stories charting an ultimate battle between good and evil that destroys previous social structures and rings in a lasting new order. While present in many cultures for as long as tales have been told, these accounts take on a profound dramatic resonance in the context of Europe's centuries-long colonization of the American hemisphere.
With an impressive interdisciplinary approach that employs insights from history, ethnography, and theology, Thomas O. Beebee provides nuanced readings of the apocalyptic vision in a diverse group of forms and writers, stretching from the letters of Christopher Columbus to the lyrics of Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, the poetry of Ernesto Martinez, and the bestselling novels of the Left Behind franchise, among other works. Throughout, he pointedly illustrates how millennial discourse has been used as a technology of control to further national and imperial agendas while paradoxically, often simultaneously, serving the forces of resistance. Drawing on a wide variety of records, his analysis shows that repeated eruptions of imagined, epochal conflicts reveal native populations fighting against the eradication of traditional ways of life, making sense of unprecedented violence, and searching for sources of origin. It seems that Americans--North, South, Middle, and Caribbean--tend to define themselves by narrating their End.
Informed by extensive research and an imaginative marshalling of diverse insights, Beebee presents a comprehensive comparative treatment of millennial themes in works from English, French, Portuguese, andSpanish. In so doing, he illustrates that prophesies of telos, and the literature that imagines them, provide a vital context for understanding the connected yet distinct cultures that have shaped the American hemisphere.

This book seeks to isolate the special factors that generate Wordsworth's greatness as a poet. Setting out from a dissatisfaction with the current trend towards New Historicism in Wordsworthian criticism, it endeavours to qualify the social and political bias of that criticism by a renewed assertion of the poetic primacy of the personal and the qualitative. Taking Marjorie Levinson's reading of `Tintern Abbey' as the book's starting point, McFarland sets forth a different way of approaching the poem, and then identifies `intensity' as the secret of Wordsworth's power. The permutations of that quality are illustrated by careful examinations of `Ruth', of the `spots of time', and of `Home at Grasmere', which is revealed as containing the incandescent centre of Wordsworth's values. There follow chapters on Wordsworth's dessication, which is seen as precisely the absence of intensity; and on the aspiration of The Recluse, which is seen to fail largely because the personal intensity necessary to complete the venture had been used up in the opening of `Home at Grasmere'. McFarland then discusses the special way in which Wordsworth assumed the prophetic stance which was essential to his poetic vision and was adopted in the intense personal confidence that he possessed the truth. The book concludes with a reading of The Borderers, not as a successful play but as a disposal chamber for the dark matter of Wordsworth's cosmos; the writing of the play is seen as necessary to clear the way for the purified current of Wordsworthian intensity to flow towards supreme poetic achievement.