The Cambridge Companion to 'Lyrical Ballads'

Description

Lyrical Ballads (1798) is a work of huge cultural and literary significance. The volume of poetry, in which Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and Wordsworth's Lines written above Tintern Abbey were first published, lies at the heart of British Romanticism, establishing a poetics of powerful feeling, that is, nonetheless, expressed in direct, conversational language and exploring the everyday realities of common life. This engaging, accessible collection provides a comprehensive overview of current approaches to Lyrical Ballads, enabling readers to find fresh ways of understanding and responding to the volume. Sally Bushell's introduction explores how the Preface to the second edition (1800) became a potent manifesto for the Romantic movement. Broad in scope, the Companion includes accessible essays on Wordsworth's experiments with language and metre, ecocritical approaches, the reception of the volume in America and more; furnishing students and scholars with a range of entry points to this seminal text.

Sally Bushell is Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature and Co-Director of The Wordsworth Centre in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Lancaster University. She has long had an interest in Wordsworth. Her first book, Re-Reading The Excursion (2002), sought to open up the text to new readings, followed by her co-editing of the Cornell Excursion (2007) and her second monograph: Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson and Dickinson (2009), which explored the margins of textuality by developing a method for interpreting works in a state of process. A strong interest in place and space in literature has recently led her into research around the question of how the reader spatialises literature with a forthcoming monograph (Cambridge. 2020) on Reading and Mapping Fiction. She is also interested in digital and spatial projects for the mapping of literature and is PI on the AHRC-Funded project: Chronotopic Cartographies and has developed an educational project using Minecraft to map literary worlds (LITCRAFT).

'This bright new Cambridge Companion to 'Lyrical Ballads' is a thoughtfully conceived and well-executed collection that illuminates the famous book from several angles.' Seamus Perry, The Wordsworth Circle