Individually and collectively, these essays establish a new direction for scholarship that examines the crucial activities of reading and writing about literature and how they relate to 'authenticity'. Though authenticity is a term deep in literary resonance and rich in philosophical complexity, its connotations relative to the study of literature have rarely been explored or exploited through detailed, critical examination of individual writers and their works. Here the notion of the authentic is recognised first and foremost as central to a range of literary and philosophical ways of thinking, particularly for nineteenth-century poets and novelists. Distinct from studies of literary fakes and forgeries, this collection focuses on authenticity as a central paradigm for approaching literature and its formation that bears on issues of authority, self-reliance, truth, originality, the valid and the real, and the genuine and inauthentic, whether applied to the self or others. Topics and authors include: the spiritual autobiographies of William Cowper and John Newton; Ruskin and travel writing; British Romantic women poets; William Wordsworth and P.B. Shelley; Robert Southey and Anna Seward; John Keats; Lord Byron; Elizabeth Gaskell; Henry David Thoreau; Henry Irving; and Joseph Conrad. The volume also includes a note on Professor Vincent Newey with a bibliography of his critical writings.

A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and poetry were lived and created on the edge. In this brief life, acclaimed biographer Lucasta Miller takes nine of Keats's best-known poems—"Endymion"; "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer"; "Ode to a Nightingale"; "To Autumn"; "Bright Star" among them—and excavates how they came to be and what in Keats's life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keats's life that have been overlooked, and explores his imagination in the context of his world and experience, paying tribute to the unique quality of his mind. Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, living dangerously, disdaining respectability and cultural norms, and embracing subversive politics. Keats was a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and fractured family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression, who delighted in the sensation of the moment. We see how Keats was regarded by his contemporaries (his writing was seen as smutty) and how the young poet’s large and boisterous life—a man of the metropolis, who took drugs, was sexually reckless and afflicted with syphilis—went straight up against the Victorian moral grain; and Miller makes clear why his writing—considered marginal and avant-garde in his own day—retains its astonishing originality, sensuousness and power two centuries on.

John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the most prominent art and architecture critic of his time. Yet his reputation has been overshadowed by his personal life, especially his failed marriage to Effie Gray, which has cast him in the history books as little more than a Victorian prude. In this book, Andrew Ballantyne rescues Ruskin from the dustbin of history’s trifles to reveal a deeply attuned thinker, one whose copious writings had tremendous influence on all classes of society, from roadmenders to royalty. Ballantyne examines a crucial aspect of Ruskin’s thinking: the notion that art and architecture have moral value. Telling the story of Ruskin’s childhood and enduring devotion to his parents—who fostered his career as a writer on art and architecture—he explores the circumstances that led to Ruskin’s greatest works, such as Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, and Unto This Last. He follows Ruskin through his altruistic ventures with the urban poor, to whom he taught drawing, motivated by a profound conviction that art held the key to living a worthwhile life. Ultimately, Ballantyne weaves Ruskin’s story into a larger one about Victorian society, a time when the first great industrial cities took shape and when art could finally reach beyond the wealthy elite and touch the lives of everyday people.

Uncovering Wordsworth's influence on TennysonThis book explores Tennyson's poetic relationship with Wordsworth through a close analysis of Tennyson's borrowing of the earlier poet's words and phrases, an approach that positions Wordsworth in Tennyson's poetry in a more centralised way than previously recognised. Focusing on some of the most representative poems of Tennyson's career, including 'The Lady of Shalott', 'Ulysses' and In Memoriam, the study examines the echoes from Wordsworth that these poems contain and the transformative part they play in his poetry, moving beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in the selected texts to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions that shed a penetrating light on Tennyson's poetic relationship with his Romantic predecessor.Key FeaturesFirst book-length study of Tennyson's poetic relationship with WordsworthBy focusing on echoes or parallel passages, book reevaluates Tennyson's poetic relationship with Wordsworth Reveals Wordsworth as the lynchpin of Tennyson's poetryRecalibrates critical estimates of Tennyson as poet, Poet Laureate and Post-Romantic poet

This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The ‘Boy-Man’ emerged from the nexus of Rousseau’s counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility’s ‘Man of Feeling’, the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters.

Particularly in the humanities and social sciences, festschrifts are a popular forum for discussion. The IJBF provides quick and easy general access to these important resources for scholars and students. The festschrifts are located in state and regional libraries and their bibliographic details are recorded. Since 1983, more than 659,000 articles from more than 30,500 festschrifts, published between 1977 and 2011, have been catalogued.

This study of the poetry and drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley reads the letters and their biographical contexts to shed light on the poetry, tracing the ambiguous and shifting relationship between the poet's art and life. For Shelley, both life and art are transfigured by their relationship with one another where the 'poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one' but is equally bound up with and formed by the society in which he lives and the past that he inherits. Callaghan shows that the distinctiveness of Shelley's work comes to rest on its wrong-footing of any neat division of life and art. The dazzling intensity of Shelley's poetry and drama lies in its refusal to separate the twain as Shelley explores and finally explodes the boundaries between what is personal and what is poetic. Arguing that the critic, like the artist, cannot ignore the conditions of the poet's life, Callaghan reveals how Shelley's artistry reconfigures and redraws the actual in his poetry. The book shows how Shelley's poetic daring lies in troubling the distinction between poetry as aesthetic work hermetically sealed against life, and poetry as a record of the emotional life of the poet.