Wordsworth's Fun
- Paperback
- Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. First Edition. Paperback. Very good +. First Edition. Paperback. 9" X 6". 303pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of pictorial paper wraps. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is firm, tight, and sound. A very presentable first printing of this critical comedic study of William Wordsworth.
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
"The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage," William Hazlitt recalled, "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." 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.(Publisher).
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
"The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage," William Hazlitt recalled, "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." 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.(Publisher).
Details
Title
Wordsworth's Fun
Author
Bevis, Matthew
Binding
Paperback
Condition
Very Good
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press: Chicago
Date
2019
Edition
First Edition