The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship.

This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

After a career teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Canada, Poland, and England, Richard Gravil is now Chairman of The Wordsworth Conference Foundation and Commissioning Editor of Humanities-Ebooks. He is the author of Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862 (St Martin's Press, 2000); Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation: 1787-1842 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Wordsworth and Helen Maria Williams; or, the Perils of Sensibility (Humanities-Ebooks, 2010). For ten years he co-edited Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, and his numerous edited and co-edited books, including Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel (Ashgate, 2001) and The Republic of Poetry: Poetic Continuities from Bradstreet to Plath (a special issue of Symbiosis, 2003).

Daniel Robinson is Professor of English at Widener University. He is the co-editor (with Paula R. Feldman) of A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750-1850 (OUP, 1999) and (with William Richey) of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 2001); the editor of the complete poetry of Mary Robinson for The Works of Mary Robinson (Pickering and Chatto, 2009); and the author of William Wordsworth's Poetry (Continuum, 2010), The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (Palgrave, 2011), and Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing (University of Iowa Press, 2014). He is working on a new edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge for Bloomsbury and is one of the team of editors working on OUP's forthcoming Anna Letitia Barbauld: Collected Works.

Introduction, Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson
Genius Loci, Geoffrey Hartman
Prelude: Of 'Daffodils' and 'Yew-Trees', Poems of Imagination, Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson
Part I: Life, Career, and Networks
1. The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770-1798, Nicholas Roe
2. Wordsworth's Domestic Life, 1799-1850, K. E. Smith
3. Wordsworth and Literary Friendship, Felicity James
4. Wordsworth as Professional Author, Brian Goldberg
5. Itinerant Wordsworth, Christopher Simons
6. Wordsworth's Political Odyssey, Simon Bainbridge
Part II: Poetry
7. The Salisbury Plain Poems (1793-1842), Quentin Bailey
8. The Borderers (1796-1842), Frederick Burwick
9. Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798), Daniel Robinson
10. 'Poem upon the Wye'; or, 'Lines, written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, On revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798', Susan J. Wolfson
11. Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1800), Jason N. Goldsmith
12. The Lyric Impulse of Poems, in Two Volumes, Gregory Leadbetter
13. 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', Michael O'Neill
14. Wordsworth's Characters, Matthew Brennan
15. The White Doe of Rylstone and Later Narrative Poems, Peter Manning
16. The River Duddon and Wordsworth, Sonneteer, Daniel Robinson
17. Poetry and Place from An Evening Walk to Yarrow Revisited, Fiona Stafford
18. Wordsworth's Later Poetry, Pamela Woof
Part III: 'The Recluse'
19. The 'Recluse' Project and its Shorter Poems, Richard Gravil
20. The Pedlar, the Poet, and 'The Ruined Cottage', Paul H. Fry
21. The 'I' in The Prelude , Anthony John Harding
22. The Prelude as Philosophy, Mark J. Bruhn
23. The Prelude as History, Philip Shaw
24. The Excursion as Dialogic Poem, Jacob Risinger
Part IV: Poets and Poetics
25. Wordsworth's English Poets, Jonathon Shears
26. Wordsworth and Sensibility, Duncan Wu
27. Wordsworth's Poetic Theory, Raimonda Modiano
28. Wordsworth and Coleridge on 'Imagination', Alexander Schlutz
29. Wordsworth's Prosody, Ruth Abbott
30. Wordsworth's Experiments with Form and Genre, Charles Mahoney
31. Wordsworth's Communicative Strategies, Don Bialostosky
Part V: Inheritance and Legacy
32. Wordsworth and Classical Humanism, John Cole
33. Wordsworth and the Enlightenment, Allison Dushane
34. Wordsworth, Science, and Mathematics, Marilyn Gaull
35. Wordsworth and Landscape, James Heffernan
36. Wordsworth and Shepherds, Terry McCormick
37. Wordsworth on Gender and Sexuality, Judith Page
38. Wordsworth and Nation, Stephen C. Behrendt
39. Wordsworth's Ethical Thinking, Adam Potkay
40. Wordsworth on Religious Experience, Jonathan Roberts
41. Wordsworth, Child Psychology, and the Growth of the Mind, Peter Newbon
42. Wordsworth and 'the Life of Things', James Castell
Part VI: Reception
43. Wordsworth among the Romantics, Matthew Scott
44. 'Intimations' in America, Richard Gravil
45. Wordsworth and Twentieth-Century Poets, John Powell Ward
46. Wordsworth in Modern Literary Criticism, Andrew Bennett
47. Editing Wordsworth in the Twentieth Century, Bruce E. Graver
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