The Poetics of Place and Space
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UNIT 2 George Crabbe's the Village Book I
George Crabbe: The Village: UNIT 2 GEORGE CRABBE’S THE VILLAGE Book I BOOK I Structure 2.0 Objectives 2.1 Introduction and Background 2.2 Explanation 2.3 Critical Responses 2.4 Suggested Readings 2.5 Check Your Progress : Possible Questions 2.0 OBJECTIVES This unit will help you understand: • The primary themes in Crabbe’s The Village • The eighteenth century tradition of topographical poetry • Scholarly perspectives and responses on The Village 2.1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND George Crabbe’s (1754 – 1832) ‘‘The Village’’, published in 1783, is a narrative poem, following on the footsteps of eighteenth century Augustan topographical poetry. The eighteenth century was replete with poetry which celebrated the rural English countryside as the epitome of pristine beauty. They amalgamated elements of the pastoral and georgics to picture the rural landscape and living as humanity’s ideal goal. Georgics chiefly described specifically named actual localities, but in the eighteenth century, along with describing the natural scenery they usually also gave information about specific rural subject matters giving genre sketches and brief histories of the resident people and their livelihood. The georgics get their name from Virgil’s classical Latin composition ‘‘Georgics’’ which presented agricultural themes and celebrates peaceful rural nature. With John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Georgics in 1697, meant for a quintessentially urban literate readership, the rural themes garnered a renewed attention in poetry all throughout the eighteenth century. Some famous instances of Augustan poetry which thematically work around and adapt the georgics are Alexander Pope’s ‘‘Windsor Forest’’ and Thomson’s ‘‘The Seasons’’. -
Folk Song in Cumbria: a Distinctive Regional
FOLK SONG IN CUMBRIA: A DISTINCTIVE REGIONAL REPERTOIRE? A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Susan Margaret Allan, MA (Lancaster), BEd (London) University of Lancaster, November 2016 ABSTRACT One of the lacunae of traditional music scholarship in England has been the lack of systematic study of folk song and its performance in discrete geographical areas. This thesis endeavours to address this gap in knowledge for one region through a study of Cumbrian folk song and its performance over the past two hundred years. Although primarily a social history of popular culture, with some elements of ethnography and a little musicology, it is also a participant-observer study from the personal perspective of one who has performed and collected Cumbrian folk songs for some forty years. The principal task has been to research and present the folk songs known to have been published or performed in Cumbria since circa 1900, designated as the Cumbrian Folk Song Corpus: a body of 515 songs from 1010 different sources, including manuscripts, print, recordings and broadcasts. The thesis begins with the history of the best-known Cumbrian folk song, ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel’ from its date of composition around 1830 through to the late twentieth century. From this narrative the main themes of the thesis are drawn out: the problem of defining ‘folk song’, given its eclectic nature; the role of the various collectors, mediators and performers of folk songs over the years, including myself; the range of different contexts in which the songs have been performed, and by whom; the vexed questions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘invented tradition’, and the extent to which this repertoire is a distinctive regional one. -
Susan Glickman. the Picturesque and the Sublime: a Poetics of the Canadian Landscape
Book Reviews Susan Glickman. The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998. Pp. xi, 212. $50.00. “I came to the study of Canadian poetry late,” volunteers Susan Glickman in her preface to The Picturesque and the Sublime. “ A poet myself,” she ex- plains, “I wanted to know more about my antecedents, and perhaps because I never studied ‘Canlit’ formally, my reading remained a private pleasure— without obligation, and without preconceptions. It was random and idiosyn- cratic . .” (vii). Suggesting later that she is “not interested in constructing a master narrative,” Glickman describes her book as a collection of essays in literary history, not the unfolding of a thesis. Continuity is implied by the chronological order of the pieces, co- herence by the repetition of themes and variations, but the struc- ture of the book, and of the essays themselves, is ruminative rather than linear. Like the poets who roam through this work, I too wish to wander, ponder, and digress, according to the dictates of the landscape. (x) A promising but misleading catalogue from an author who asserts, at the same time, that her “mandate is twofold: to illuminate the contributions of European theories of the picturesque and the sublime to Canadian depictions of nature, and to explore the critical reception to poems informed by these aesthetics” (x). More narrowly, it is “the argument of this book that eigh- teenth-century aesthetic conventions still inform English Canadian poetry, particularly the poetry of landscape” (ix), which, she contends, articulates an understanding of the sublime that is “unique to this country; indeed, because of its profound contribution to the ideology of our fi rst writers, it is one of the formative ideas of Canadian culture” (59). -
Joseph Cottle and West-Country Romanticism Richard Cronin ______
From The Coleridge Bulletin The Journal of the Friends of Coleridge New Series 28 (NS) Winter 2006 © 2006 Contributor all rights reserved http://www.friendsofcoleridge.com/Coleridge-Bulletin.htm Joseph Cottle and West-Country Romanticism Richard Cronin ____________________________________________________________________________________________ N OCTOBER, 1799, Coleridge travelled from Bristol with his publisher, I Joseph Cottle, to meet Wordsworth at Sockburn-on-Tees. The three men embarked on a tour of Wordsworth’s beloved Lake Country, but on October 30, at Greta Bridge, Cottle left the party and travelled south. ‘It was a tactful departure’, notes Mary Moorman, ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge wanted to be by themselves’.1 That leave-taking has a symbolic value: it marks the birth of the Lake School of Romantic poetry, and yet Joseph Cottle, the man so brusquely dismissed by Moorman, staked a claim to have originated that school himself, and not in the Lake District but some 250 miles to the South, in Bristol: Many might think it no small honour (without the slightest tincture of vanity) to have been the friend, in early life, of such men as Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb: to have encouraged them in their first productions, and to have published, as it respects each of them, his first Volume of Poems. Typically, this is not quite accurate,2 but it was, as Cottle rightly insisted, ‘a distinction that might never occur again to a Provincial bookseller.’3 It seemed to Cottle an ‘extraordinary circumstance that Mr. Coleridge in his “Biographia Literaria” should have passed over in silence, all distinct reference to Bristol, the cradle of his literature, and for many years his favourite abode.’4 He was moved to publish his Early Recollections to correct Coleridge’s omission, to celebrate a period in the life of his city when ‘so many men of genius were there congregated, as to justify the designation, ‘The Augustan Age of Bristol,”5 and, with pardonable egotism, to remind the reading public of his own status as the provincial west-country Maecenas. -
Coleridge's Imperfect Circles
Coleridge’s Imperfect Circles Patrick Biggs A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2012 2 Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Note on Abbreviations 5 Introduction 6 The Eolian Harp 16 This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison 37 Frost at Midnight 60 Conclusion 83 Bibliography 91 3 Abstract This thesis takes as its starting point Coleridge’s assertion that “[t]he common end of all . Poems is . to make those events which in real or imagined History move in a strait [sic] Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion” (CL 4: 545). Coleridge’s so-called “Conversation” poems seem to conform most conspicuously to this aesthetic theory, structured as they are to return to their starting points at their conclusions. The assumption, however, that this comforting circular structure is commensurate with the sense of these poems can be questioned, for the conclusions of the “Conversation” poems are rarely, if ever, reassuring. The formal circularity of these poems is frequently achieved more by persuasive rhetoric than by any cohesion of elements. The circular structure encourages the reader’s expectations of unity and synthesis, but ultimately these expectations are disappointed, and instead the reader is surprised by an ending more troubling than the rhetoric of return and reassurance would suggest. Taking three “Conversation” poems as case studies (“The Eolian Harp,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” and “Frost at Midnight”), this thesis attempts to explicate those tensions which exist in the “Conversation” poems between form and effect, between structure and sense. -
English Language and Literature in Borrowdale
English Language and Literature Derwentwater Independent Hostel is located in the Borrowdale Valley, 3 miles south of Keswick. The hostel occupies Barrow House, a Georgian mansion that was built for Joseph Pocklington in 1787. There are interesting references to Pocklington, Barrow House, and Borrowdale by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Borrowdale and Keswick have been home to Coleridge, Southey and Walpole. Writer Born Selected work Places to visit John Dalton 1709 Poetry Whitehaven, Borrowdale William Wordsworth 1770 Poetry: The Prelude Cockermouth (National Trust), Dove Cottage (Wordsworth Trust) in Grasmere, Rydal Mount, Allan Bank (National Trust) in Grasmere Dorothy Wordsworth 1771 Letters and diaries Cockermouth (National Trust), Dove Cottage (Wordsworth Trust), Rydal Mount, Grasmere Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 Poetry Dove Cottage, Greta Hall (Keswick), Allan Bank Robert Southey 1774 Poetry: The Cataract of Lodore Falls and the Bowder Stone (Borrowdale), Dove Lodore Cottage, Greta Hall, grave at Crosthwaite Church Thomas de Quincey 1785 Essays Dove Cottage John Ruskin 1819 Essays, poetry Brantwood (Coniston) Beatrix Potter 1866 The Tale of Squirrel Lingholm (Derwent Water), St Herbert’s Island (Owl Island Nutkin (based on in the Tale of Squirrel Nutkin), Hawkshead, Hill Top Derwent Water) (National Trust), Armitt Library in Ambleside Hugh Walpole 1884 The Herries Chronicle Watendlath (home of fictional character Judith Paris), (set in Borrowdale) Brackenburn House on road beneath Cat Bells (private house with memorial plaque on wall), grave in St John’s Church in Keswick Arthur Ransome 1884 Swallows and Amazons Coniston and Windermere Norman Nicholson 1914 Poetry Millom, west Cumbria Hunter Davies 1936 Journalist, broadcaster, biographer of Wordsworth Margaret Forster 1938 Novelist Carlisle (Forster’s birthplace) Melvyn Bragg 1939 Grace & Mary (novel), Words by the Water Festival (March) Maid of Buttermere (play) Resources and places to visit 1. -
Comet 31St March 2009
Volume 4, Issue 1 Comet 31st March 2009 Comet: the Newsletter of the Norman Nicholson Society * Memories of Yvonne Nicholson by Rosemary Joyce MEMORIES OF YVONNE NICHOLSON by Rosemary Joyce * A Surprise Present Yvonne Edith Nicholson, née Gardner, was born on May 24th 1921. She by Angela Petersen was my sister and was third in a family of four. She attended Rhodes Avenue Junior School and later Glendale Grammar, Wood Green. She * Helen Sutherland by obtained her matriculation with flying colours. During the war she joined Mary Burkett OBE the WRNS as a torpedo WRN. She and I followed Amateur Dramatics at the church. She was a blonde, as was I, and we were selected as angels * The Nicholson Window in the Passion plays! by Christine Boyce After the war she attended a Government Course for teaching. Her first * On ‘Beck’ post was in Ladywell, Birmingham where she lived with the local Vicar and by Brian Whalley his wife (Norman and Sybil Darrall). She specialised in Drama and Modern Dance. * Standing—inside or out by Phil Houghton When the Darralls moved to Millom Yvonne joined them and became a teacher at the secondary school there. She produced many productions * Events at Dove at the school, often making the costumes also. Cottage by Andrew After attending a course at the Royal Academy of Music she met Norman Forster Nicholson because she wanted to produce “The Old Man of the Mountains”. Then one thing led to another! My husband and I lived in Barnes, London, and we met Norman with much trepidation. -
Spatial Humanities: Methods & Materials Mapping Nicholson's
Christopher Donaldson, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, C.J. Rupp, Ian Gregory, Andrew Hardie and Paul Rayson Spatial Humanities, Lancaster University We are a five-year, European Research Council-funded project whose main ambition is to explore how quantitative Spatial Humanities: research tools developed in the fields of Geography and Corpus Linguistics can be adapted to address qualitative research questions in the Humanities. Our work primarily focuses on developing techniques for analysing textual Texts, GIS & Places information, including large corpora of books and manuscripts, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other data-visualization technologies. Methods & Materials GIS is a software-based computer mapping and database management system that allows the user to structure, visualize and explore the geographic information contained in a given text or dataset. Broadly speaking, geographic information consists of two components: a spatial component, such as a set of place names or locations, and a thematic component, which assigns some attribute to those locations. A GIS is a digital tool for bringing these different strands of information together and for analysing correlations between them. Like the other data-visualization technologies we employ—including network diagrams, word clouds and cartograms—GIS is a powerful tool for reducing large datasets to a few salient features and thus for detecting patterns that might otherwise remain hidden. It has thus traditionally been used for quantitative research. Recently, however, researchers have embraced GIS as a key technology for the study of literary cartography. Our project has been driving innovation in this emergent field of research by integrating GIS and other visualization tools to map out the literary history of the English Lake District. -
U DP162 Archives of the Poetry Magazine 1960 - 1976 Phoenix and the Peterloo Poets Series
Hull History Centre: The Poetry Magazine ‘Phoenix ‘ and the ‘Peterloo’ Poets series U DP162 Archives of the Poetry Magazine 1960 - 1976 Phoenix and the Peterloo Poets series Historical Background: Phoenix came into being in February 1959 during Harry Chambers' second term as a post- National Service student reading English at Liverpool University. Initially it was conceived as the platform for an idealistic left-wing staff-student group called Interaction, of which Chambers was a member. The first issue came out in February 1959 and cost 4d. The name, Phoenix, was supposed to suggest a 'mordent-ironical-toughly-idealistic comment on the supposed lack of literary-social-political life at the University'. In 1959 Harry Chambers was made sole editor in time for the second issue and in Phoenix 3 he published his own review of Philip Larkin's 'The Less Deceived'. By Phoenix 4 Chambers had decided to shift the focus of the magazine and with Phoenix 5 (Spring 1961) the drift from politics to poetry was complete (Schmidt & Lindop, British Poetry Since 1960). After Phoenix 7 (Spring 1962) Chambers left Liverpool to find a teaching job in Yorkshire, handing over the editorship to David Selzer and Tony Chapman. Issues 9, 10 and 11 were produced under their editorship. In 1967 it was agreed that Harry Chambers should resume the editorship from Belfast, where he was lecturing at a non-denominational teacher-training college. Phoenix began again. The new Phoenix 1 was a 60 page Arts in Ulster issue. It appeared in March 1967 and carried several poems by Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. -
A Special "Poetry of the Forties" Edition, Plus a General Section
t-'^OCjJT V£ A special "Poetry of the Forties" edition, £2.50 plus a general section S8.00 U.S. £lr. 3.00 Aquarius 17/18 Editor Eddie S. Linden Guest Editor A.T. Tolley 1986/87 Published by Eddie S. Linden Flat 3, 114 Sutherland Avenue London W9 Copyright © Aquarius 1987 All rights reserved by the Authors Printed in Canada at Carleton University 83 Norman Nicholson The Regional Poets of the Forties Norman Nicholson came to prominence as a poet in the nineteen- forties with the publication o/Five Rivers byFaber and Faber. He lived all his life in Millom in Cumberland. He died in 1987. (Ed.) By "regional poet" I mean simply one who draws his imagery, ref erences or subject matter from one particular geographic area. Often, however, the term is used to imply that the poet's work is of minor im portance, restricted in outlook, peripheral to the main stream. It is in this sense — perhaps justly — that I have often been called a "regional poet," though I stubbornly go on hoping that I write, not just about Mil lom and Cumberland, but about life, about human relationships, human society, the physical world we live on and our relation to it. The next thing to be said is that the Regional Poets of the Forties and Fifties — or, more precisely, those who emerged during that time — did not belong to a movement. Most of us, I believe, worked in isolation, scarcely aware of what the others were doing. That was certainly the case with me, and I can only tell the story as it was seen from my own small corner. -
A Companion to Romantic Poetry
A Companion to Romantic Poetry A Companion to Romantic Poetry Edited by Charles Mahoney © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13554-2 99781405135542_1_pretoc.indd781405135542_1_pretoc.indd i 99/24/2010/24/2010 111:28:091:28:09 AAMM Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fi elds of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the fi eld. Published recently 54. A Companion to the History of the English Language Edited by Haruko Momma and Michael Matto 55. A Companion to Henry James Edited by Greg Zacharias 56. A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story Edited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm 57. A Companion to Jane Austen Edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite 58. A Companion to the Arthurian Literature Edited by Helen Fulton 59. A Companion to the Modern American Novel 1900–1950 Edited by John T. Matthews 60. A Companion to the Global Renaissance Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh 61. A Companion to Thomas Hardy Edited by Keith Wilson 62. A Companion to T. S. Eliot Edited by David E. Chinitz 63. A Companion to Samuel Beckett Edited by S. E. Gontarski 64. A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction Edited by David Seed 65. -
Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet
1 Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Bethan Lloyd Roberts August 2014 2 For George Condliffe (1925-2014) i Acknowledgements Thank you, very much, to Paul Baines for supervising this thesis, and for all that has involved. Thank you to Kelvin Everest for reading and commenting on the draft. I would also like to thank the staff and postgraduate community in the School of English at the University of Liverpool – as well as in the university more widely – for their support and encouragement. For financial help, I am grateful to the University of Liverpool; Funds for Women Graduates; BARS, for a Stephen Copley Postgraduate Research Award; and am especially grateful to Barbara Statham and for the help I have received from the Price Memorial Scholarship Fund. Thank you to my family and friends for their support, especially my parents Jill and Lloyd; and to Huw, Emma and Simon. Special thanks to my Grandpa George: I would like to dedicate this thesis to him. Parts of chapters two and three have appeared as ‘From River to Sea: Literary Past and Present in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets’ in SEL Studies in English Literature, 54.3 (2014). ii Contents Acknowledgements i List of Illustrations iii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Thesis Structure 16 Chapter One: The Eighteenth-Century Sonnet 18 Elegiac Sonnets 46 Chapter Two: Tradition 52 Woodlands 52 Streams 65 River Arun 73 Other Poetic Landscapes 96 Chapter Three: Innovation 102 The Sea 102 ‘All the charms of novelty’ 106 Breaking ‘the silent Sabbath of the grave’: Sonnet XLIV 114 Between Sea and Churchyard 130 Giddy Brinks and Lucid Lines 140 Chapter Four: Wider Prospect of the Sonnet Revival 149 Illegitimate Sonnet 155 ‘Other Song’: 1789 and Beyond 161 Hotwells and Penshurst 170 Chapter Five: Botany to Beachy Head 185 The Goddess of Botany 188 Economies of Vegetation 194 Gossamer 201 Coda: Beachy Head 206 Bibliography 217 iii List of Illustrations 1.