In "Romantic Interactions, " Susan J. Wolfson examines how interaction with other authors--whether on the bookshelf, in the embodied company of someone else writing, or in relation to literary celebrity--shaped the work of some of the best-known (and less well-known) writers in the English language.

Working across the arc of Long Romanticism, from the 1780s to the 1840s, this lively study involves writing by women and men, in poetry and prose. Combining careful readings with sophisticated literary, historical, and cultural criticism, Wolfson reveals how various writers came to define themselves as "author." The story unfolds not only in deft textual analyses but also by provocatively placing writers in dialogue with what they were reading, with one another, and with the community of readers (and writers) their writings helped bring into being: Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith in the Revolution-roiled 1790s; William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth in the society of the Lake District; Lord Byron, a magnet for writers everywhere, inspired, troubled, but always arrested by what he (and his scandal-ridden celebrity) represented.

This fresh, informative account of key writers, important texts, and complex cultural currents promises keen interest for students and scholars, literary critics, and cultural historians.

Great literature is more often praised for compelling depictions of conflict and tragedy than for moving portrayals of harmony and well-being. This collection of verse brings together poems of felicity, capturing what it means to be well in the fullest sense. Presented in 14 thematic sections, these works offer inspiring readings on wisdom, self-love, ecstasy, growth, righteousness, love and lust, inspiration, oneness with nature, hope, irreverence, awe, the delights of the senses, gratitude and compassion, relation to the sacred, justice, and unity. At times elegant, at others blunt, these poems reflect on what it means to live a rich, fulfilling life.

John Keats (1795-1821), one of the best-loved poets of the Romantic period, is ever alive to words, discovering his purposes as he reads - not only books but also the world around him. Leading Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson explores the breadth of his works, including his longest ever poem Endymion; subsequent romances, Isabella (a Boccaccio tale with a proto-Marxian edge admired by George Bernard Shaw), the passionate Eve of St Agnes and knotty Lamia; intricate sonnets and innovative odes; the unfinished Hyperion project (Keats's existential rethinking of epic agony); and late lyrics involved with Fanny Brawne, the bright (sometimes dark) star of his last years. Illustrated with manuscript pages, title-pages, and two portraits, Reading John Keats investigates the brilliant complexities of Keats's imagination and his genius in wordplay, uncovering surprises and new delights, and encouraging renewed respect for the power of Keats's thinking and the subtle turns of his writing.

In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture and the relation of his poetry to the visual arts. These specially commissioned essays are sophisticated but accessible, challenging but lucid, and are complemented by an introduction to Keats's life, a chronology, a list of contemporary people and periodicals, a source reference for famous phrases and ideas articulated in Keats's letters, a glossary of literary terms and a guide to further reading.

The star of Northanger Abbey" is seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, Jane Austen's youngest and most impressionable heroine. Away from home for the first time, on a visit to Bath with family friends, Catherine, a passionate consumer of novels (especially of the gothic variety), encounters a world in which everything beckons as a readable text: not only books, but also conversations and behaviors, clothes, carriages, estates, and vistas. In her lively introduction to this newest volume in Harvard's celebrated annotated Austen series, Susan Wolfson proposes that Austen's most underappreciated, most playful novel is about fiction itself and how it can take possession of everyday understandings.

The first of Austen's major works to be completed (it was revised in 1803 and again in 1816-17), Northanger Abbey" was published months after Austen's death in July 1817, together with Persuasion." The 1818 text, whose singularly frustrating course to publication Wolfson recounts, is the basis for this freshly edited and annotated edition.

Wolfson's running commentary will engage new readers while offering delights for scholars and devoted Janeites. A wealth of color images bring to life Bath society in Austen's era--the parade of female fashions, the carriages running over open roads and through the city's streets, circulating libraries, and nouveau-riche country estates--as well as the larger cultural milieu of Northanger Abbey. "This unique edition holds appeal not just for "Friends of Jane" but for all readers looking for a fuller engagement with Austen's extraordinary first novel.

In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture and the relation of his poetry to the visual arts. These specially commissioned essays are sophisticated but accessible, challenging but lucid, and are complemented by an introduction to Keats's life, a chronology, a list of contemporary people and periodicals, a source reference for famous phrases and ideas articulated in Keats's letters, a glossary of literary terms and a guide to further reading.

John Keats (1795-1821), one of the best-loved poets of the Romantic period, is ever alive to words, discovering his purposes as he reads - not only books but also the world around him. Leading Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson explores the breadth of his works, including his longest ever poem Endymion; subsequent romances, Isabella (a Boccaccio tale with a proto-Marxian edge admired by George Bernard Shaw), the passionate Eve of St Agnes and knotty Lamia; intricate sonnets and innovative odes; the unfinished Hyperion project (Keats's existential rethinking of epic agony); and late lyrics involved with Fanny Brawne, the bright (sometimes dark) star of his last years. Illustrated with manuscript pages, title-pages, and two portraits, Reading John Keats investigates the brilliant complexities of Keats's imagination and his genius in wordplay, uncovering surprises and new delights, and encouraging renewed respect for the power of Keats's thinking and the subtle turns of his writing.

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women's equality. Emerging from the turbulent decade of the French Revolution, her vindication delivered a systematic critique of the treatment of women across time and place. Drawing on extensive experience teaching and writing about Wollstonecraft, Susan J. Wolfson offers new insight into how Wollstonecraft's particular methods, style, and energy make this case for her readers. Wolfson places this polemic in its political and literary contexts and in relation to Wollstonecraft's other works about political rights. She considers how Wollstonecraft balanced advocacy for the seemingly universal ideals of the French Revolution with analysis of the gendered exclusions in the vaunted rights of "man." This book pays particular attention to Wollstonecraft's literary craft, highlighting the force of her close reading. Wollstonecraft pinpointed the role of gendered phrases and concepts in political discourse, both in her opponents' metaphors and received ideas and in her own efforts to craft a new political language with which to defend women's capabilities. Wolfson reveals her as a pioneer in decoupling sex from gender and shows how she provided an enduring model of how to be a female intellectual. Sharing the excitement of reading Wollstonecraft's work with care for her literary as well as political genius, this book provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements.

Opening with the revolution-era debates of the 1790s, "Borderlines" reads Romantic genders across a mobile syntax, tuned to such figures as the stylized "feminine" poetess, the aberrant "masculine" woman, male poets deemed "feminine" or "unmanly," the campy male "effeminate," and hapless or strategic cross-dressers of both sexes. With fresh readings of the works, careers, and volatile receptions of Mary Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, M. J. Jewsbury, Lord Byron, and John Keats, Susan Wolfson shows how senses (and sensations) of gender shape and get shaped by sign systems that prove arbitrary, fluid, and susceptible of lively transformation.

Why care about poetic form and its intricacies, other than in nostalgia for a bygone era of criticism? The purpose of this book is to refresh today this care for criticism, applying a historically aware formalist reading to poetic form in Romanticism and showing how in theory and practice Romantic writers addressed, debated, tested, and contested fundamental questions about what is at stake in the poetic forming of language. In the process, it suggests the importance of these conflicted inquiries for contemporary critical discussion and demonstrates the pleasures of attending to the complex changes of form in poetic writing.
After an introductory chapter on the controversies about poetic form and formalism from the Romantic era to our own, succeeding chapters consider particular instances in Romantic poetry in which experimental agendas or unsettled traditions promote an awareness of new textual possibilities. The author shows how Blake's" Poetical Sketches" predicts many of the key issues of Romantic theory and practice, and how Coleridge's ambivalent engagement with simile impels him to address the very foundations of poetic form. A chapter on Wordsworth's revision of an episode in" The Prelude" demonstrates how a repeated reworking of form virtually characterizes the work of autobiography, and the dilemma of self-formation is also the focus of a chapter on Byron's seemingly perverse choice of the heroic couplet in "The Corsair."
Keats, too, is shown to wrestle with the issue of self and form at the end of his career in his personal lyrics to Fanny Browne, which subverted the formalism of the "Great Odes" of 1819, the celebrated icons of New Criticism. A final chapter describes Shelley's investment of poetic performance with social agency in two seemingly opposite but related modes--the political exhortation of "The Mask of Anarchy" and the intimate addresses to Jane and Edward Williams. In an afterword, the author reviews recent attacks on formalist criticism and argues for the specific value of shaped language as one of the texts in which culture is written and revised.

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women's equality. Emerging from the turbulent decade of the French Revolution, her vindication delivered a systematic critique of the treatment of women across time and place. Drawing on extensive experience teaching and writing about Wollstonecraft, Susan J. Wolfson offers new insight into how Wollstonecraft's particular methods, style, and energy make this case for her readers. Wolfson places this polemic in its political and literary contexts and in relation to Wollstonecraft's other works about political rights. She considers how Wollstonecraft balanced advocacy for the seemingly universal ideals of the French Revolution with analysis of the gendered exclusions in the vaunted rights of "man." This book pays particular attention to Wollstonecraft's literary craft, highlighting the force of her close reading. Wollstonecraft pinpointed the role of gendered phrases and concepts in political discourse, both in her opponents' metaphors and received ideas and in her own efforts to craft a new political language with which to defend women's capabilities. Wolfson reveals her as a pioneer in decoupling sex from gender and shows how she provided an enduring model of how to be a female intellectual. Sharing the excitement of reading Wollstonecraft's work with care for her literary as well as political genius, this book provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements.

The first standard edition of the writings of Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), this volume marks a revival of interest in, and a new critical appreciation of, one of the most important literary figures of the early nineteenth century. A best-selling poet in England and America, Felicia Hemans was regarded as leading female poet in her day, celebrated as the epitome of national "feminine" values. However, this same narrow perception of her work eventually relegated Hemans to an obscurity lightened occasionally by parody and a sentimental enthusiasm for poems such as "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers" and "Casabianca." Only now is Hemans's work being rediscovered and reconsidered--for the complexity of its social and political vision, but also for its sounding of dissonances in nineteenth-century cultural ideals, and for its recasting of the traditional canon of male "Romantics."

Offering readers a firsthand acquaintance with the remarkable range of Hemans's writing, this volume includes five major works in their entirety, along with a much-admired aggregate, "Records of Woman." Hemans's letters, many published here for the first time, reflect her views of her contemporaries, her work, her negotiations with publishers, and her emerging celebrity, while reviews and letters from others--including Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and the Wordsworths--tell the story of Hemans's reception in her time. An introduction by editor Susan Wolfson puts these writings, as well as Hemans's life and work, into much-needed perspective for the contemporary reader.

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year A renowned Keats scholar illuminates the poet's extraordinary career, in a new edition featuring seventy-eight verse selections with commentary. John Keats's career as a published poet spanned scarcely more than four years, cut short by his death early in 1821 at age twenty-five. Yet in this time, he produced a remarkable-and remarkably wide-ranging-body of work that has secured his place as one of the most influential poets in the British literary tradition. Celebrated Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson presents seventy-eight selections from his work, each accompanied by a commentary on its form, style, meanings, and relevant contexts. In this edition, readers will rediscover a virtuoso poet, by turns lively, experimental, self-ironizing, outrageous, and philosophical. Wolfson includes such well-known favorites as Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and The Eve of St. Agnes, as well as less familiar poems, several in letters to family and friends never meant for publication. Her selections redefine the breadth and depth of Keats's poetic imagination, from intellectual jests and satires to erotic bandying, passionate confessions, and reflections on mortality. The selections, presented in their order of composition, convey a chronicle of Keats's artistic and personal evolution. Wolfson's revealing commentaries unfold the lively complexities of his verbal arts and stylistic experiments, his earnest goals and nervous apprehensions, and the pressures of politics and literary criticism in his day. In critically attentive and conversational prose, Wolfson encourages us to experience Keats in the way that he himself imagined the language of poetry: as a living event, a cooperative experience shared between author and reader.

"Depicting a city besieged and a family held hostage to a murderous chivalry, The Siege of Valencia is one of Hemans's most discussed works." -- Nanora Sweet, University of Missouri, St. Louis

Reflecting varieties of theory and practice in both verse and prose from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, these essays by many of America's leading literary scholars call for a reinvigorated formalism that can enrich literary studies, open productive routes of commerce with cultural studies, and propel cultural theory out of its thematic ruts. This book reprints Modern Language Quarterly's highly acclaimed special issue Reading for Form, along with new essays by Marjorie Perloff, D. Vance Smith, and Susan Stewart, and a revised introduction by Susan Wolfson. With historical case studies and insightful explorations, Reading for Form offers invaluable material for literary critics in all specializations.