Synopses & Reviews
What is Wordsworthian Romanticism and how did it evolve? What happens if we read the poetry of Charlotte Smith into the equation? Now in paperback for the first time, this book argues that what we have commonly labelled the 'Wordsworthian' in fact emerges from the sustained attention the young Wordsworth paid to the thematics of place, history, memory, and subjectivity in Smith's work: a Smithian poetics. What follows is a period of mutual reading, each poet attuned to and absorbing the work of the other, in a virtual partnership more productive to the development of English poetry than any other of the period. Although they met only once, their work shows, throughout the 1790s and until Smith's death in 1806, a common devotion to innovation and experimentation that establishes Romantic poetry. This book demonstrates that the two poets co-wrote a poetics that stands for many readers as representatively Romantic, and represents a significant and original re-evaluation of the Romantic period.
Review
"Writing Romanticism makes an essential contribution to the study of the poetry of the early Romantic period by providing the first proper account of the artistic cross-fertilization that occurred between Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth. A must for anyone interested in the history of English Romanticism." -- Professor Robert Miles, University of Victoria, Canada
Review
'Jacqueline Labbe's work on Charlotte Smith is second to none...Labbe's is a bold vision, and one likely to change the way in which we view early Romanticism.' - Claire Knowles, European Romantic Review
Synopsis
What is "Wordsworthian" Romanticism and how did it evolve? This book argues that only by reading Charlotte Smith's poetry in tandem with William Wordsworth's can this question be answered, demonstrating their mutual contribution to the creation of the "Wordsworthian," through literary analysis and historical contextualizing of their writings.
About the Author
JACQUELINE M. LABBE teaches and researches in the area of British Romantic Poetry and Poetics at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of the first scholarly book on Charlotte Smith's poetry and of numerous articles on Smith and Wordsworth. She has written three monographs, edited and contributed to four major collections of essays, and edited Smith's poetry and her novel The Old Manor House (1794).
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Writing the Lyrical Ballad: Hybridity and Self-Reflexity
Mediating History: War Poetry
Subject to Place, Subjected by Poetry
Modelling the Romantic Poet
1807: The Art of Poetry on a New Plan
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index