Wordsworth's Fun
1st Edition
Published on 20. August 2019
264 pages
978-0-226-65222-1 (ISBN)
Description
"e;The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage,"e; William Hazlitt recalled, "e;He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth."e; Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know-and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy.Wordsworth s Fun explores the writer s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.
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Matthew Bevis
Wordsworth's Fun
Book
09/2019
University of Chicago Press
€76.75
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Matthew Bevis
Wordsworth's Fun
Book
09/2019
University of Chicago Press
€29.50
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Person
Matthew Bevis is professor of English at the University of Oxford. He is the author of
The Art of Eloquence,
Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, and
Lessons in Byron. His essays have appeared in the
London Review of Books,
Harper's,
Poetry, and
Raritan.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Facing Him
- Laughing
- Echoes
- Fits
- Pains
- Playing
- Children
- Reprobates
- Idlers
- Fooling
- Vices
- Naturals
- Idiots
- Humoring
- Oddities
- Medleys
- Selves
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
