This Norton Critical Edition includes: The Eversley Edition text of the poem, accompanied by Erik Gray's preface, full introduction and detailed explanatory footnotes. One illustration. A generous selection (new to the Third Edition) of background materials on In Memoriam's subject, Arthur Henry Hallam, as well as its literary and scientific contexts. Twelve contemporary reviews spanning 1850-55 (also new to this Third Edition) that suggest In Memoriam's initial reception. Eleven critical essays, five of them new to the Third Edition. A chronology, a selected bibliography and an index of first lines. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format-annotated text, contexts and criticism-helps students to better understand, analyse and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

From its opening scenes--in which the hero refrains from fighting a duel, then discovers that his horse has been stolen--Book Two of The Faerie Queene redefines the nature of heroism and of chivalry. Its hero is Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, whose challenges frequently take the form of temptations. Accompanied by a holy Palmer in place of a squire, Guyon struggles to subdue himself as well as his enemies. His adventures lead up to a climactic encounter with the arch-temptress Acrasia in her Bower of Bliss, which provides the occasion for some of Spenser's most sensuous verse. With its mixture of chivalric romance, history, and moral allegory, Book Two succeeds in presenting an exuberant exploration of the virtue of self-restraint.

The Victorian period was a golden age for the study of Milton. Yet the influence of Milton on poetry, and on literature more generally, during the period is often obscure. Victorian writers rarely display the overt, self-conscious engagement with Milton that typified so much Romantic writing earlier in the nineteenth century. In Milton and the Victorians, Erik Gray argues that this shift represents not a breach but an expansion: if Milton's influence seems less remarkable than before, it is due not to his absence but to his pervasiveness.

Through detailed consideration of works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot, Gray shows how Victorian writers tended to draw upon the less sublime, more understated elements of Milton's writings. In tracing the characteristically oblique influence of Milton on Victorian authors, Gray also draws attention to important aspects of Milton's own work, notably the way it often depicts power being exerted indirectly. Gray thus proposes new and nuanced models of literary relations, while offering original and elegant readings both of Milton's poetry and of major works of Victorian literature.

From its opening scenes--in which the hero refrains from fighting a duel, then discovers that his horse has been stolen--Book Two of The Faerie Queene redefines the nature of heroism and of chivalry. Its hero is Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, whose challenges frequently take the form of temptations. Accompanied by a holy Palmer in place of a squire, Guyon struggles to subdue himself as well as his enemies. His adventures lead up to a climactic encounter with the arch-temptress Acrasia in her Bower of Bliss, which provides the occasion for some of Spenser's most sensuous verse. With its mixture of chivalric romance, history, and moral allegory, Book Two succeeds in presenting an exuberant exploration of the virtue of self-restraint.

A century ago Tennyson had begun to be dismissed as a poet whose work embodied everything the modern world was looking to leave behind. He still seems to readers to embody the substance of the Victorian era more fully than any other poet-but nowadays that is again counted in his favour. Critics continue to find layers of complexity in poems once thought simplistic-while appreciating with fresh ears Tennyson's aural mastery. This new edition includes the two long poems "In Memoriam" and "Maud: A Monodrama" in their entirety, all the short poems for which Tennyson remains famous and a generous selection of his lesser-known poetry, together with a concise introduction to the poet and his work and substantial headnotes for "In Memoriam", "Maud" and "Idylls of the King". Unlike other editions that provide a selection of Tennyson's work, this one includes both marginal glosses of obscure or archaic words and phrases and extensive annotations at the bottom of each page. Appendices of visual material are also included.

Indifference is a common, even indispensable element of human experience. But it is rare in poetry, which is traditionally defined by its direct opposition to indifference--"by its heightened emotion, consciousness, and effort. This definition applies especially to English poets of the nineteenth century, heirs to an age that predicated aesthetics on moral sentiment or feeling. Yet it was in this period, Erik Gray argues, that a concentrated strain of poetic indifference began to emerge. "The Poetry of Indifference analyzes nineteenth-century works by Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald, among others--"works that do not merely declare themselves to be indifferent but formally enact the indifference they describe. Each poem consciously disregards some aspect of poetry that is usually considered to be crucial or definitive, even at the risk of seeming "indifferent" in the sense of "mediocre." Such gestures discourage critical attention, since the poetry of indifference refuses to make claims for itself. This is particularly true of FitzGerald's "RubC!iyC!t, one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, but one that recent critics have almost entirely ignored. In concentrating on this underexplored mode of poetry. Gray not only traces a major shift in recent literary history, from a Romantic poetics of sympathy to a Modernist poetics of alienation, but also considers how this literature can help us understand the sometimes embarrassing but unavoidable presence of indifference in our lives.