Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edited by James Williams and Matthew Bevis

The first collection of exploratory essays on Edward Lear
Sets the agenda for future work in the area
Provides readers with a comprehensive overview of the field and starting-points for further research
Places Lear's work into a wide range of contexts, both among his contemporaries and in a longer perspective
Illustrated throughout, with Lear's graphic work
Contributors include both established and emerging scholars of Victorian and modern poetry

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edited by James Williams and Matthew Bevis

Description

Of all the Victorian poets, Edward Lear has a good claim to the widest audience: admired and championed by critics and poets from John Ruskin to John Ashbery, he has also been read, heard, and loved by generations of children. As a central figure in the literature of nonsense Lear has also shaped the evolution of modern literature, and his work continues to influence and inspire writers and readers today. This collection of essays, the first ever devoted solely to Lear, builds on a recent resurgence of critical interest and asks how it is that the play of Lear's poetry continues to delight, and to challenge our sense of what poetry can be. These seventeen chapters, written by established and emerging critics of poetry, seek to explore and appreciate the playfulness embodied in the poems, and to provide contexts in which it can be better understood and enjoyed. They consider how Lear's poems play off various inheritances (the literary fool, Romantic lyric, his religious upbringing), explore particular forms in which his playful genius took flight (his letters, his queer writings about love), and trace lines of Learical influence and inheritance by showing how other poets and thinkers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played off Lear in their turn (Stein, Eliot, Auden, Smith, Ashbery, and others).

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edited by James Williams and Matthew Bevis

Introduction: Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, James Williams and Matthew Bevis
1:Lear and the Fool, James Williams
2:'One of the Dumms': Edward Lear and Romanticism, Michael O'Neill
3:Edward Lear and Dissent, Sara Lodge
4:'Some think him ... queer': Loners and Love in Edward Lear, Peter Swaab
5:Edward Lear: Celebrity Chef, Peter Robinson
6:Falling for Edward Lear, Matthew Bevis
7:Being and Naughtiness, Daniel Brown
8:Fragments out of Place: Homology and the Logic of Nonsense in Edward Lear, Anna Henchman
9:'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat', and other Poems of Love and Marriage, Daniel Karlin
10:Playing with Letters: Lear's Episthilarity, Hugh Haughton
11:The Sense and Nonsense of Weariness: Edward Lear and Gertrude Stein read Tennyson, Anna Barton
12:T.S. Eliot plays Edward Lear, Anne Stillman
13:'Now listen, Mr Leer!': Joyce's Lear, Adam Piette
14:Auden's Lear, Seamus Perry
15:Drawing away from Lear: Stevie Smith's Deceitful Echo, William May
16:Edward Lear's Contribution to British Psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips
17:Edward Lear, John Ashbery, and the Pleasant Surprise, Stephen Ross
Select Bibliography
Index

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edited by James Williams and Matthew Bevis

Author Information

Edited by James Williams, University of York, and Matthew Bevis, Keble College, Oxford

James Williams is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of York. His publications include essays on Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Beckett, and Victorian comic verse. He is currently completing a short monograph, Edward Lear, in the Writers and Their Work series (Northcote House).

Matthew Bevis is a Lecturer in English at Oxford University, and a Fellow of Keble College. He is the author of The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (OUP, 2007; paperback 2010) and Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012), and editor of Some Versions of Empson (OUP, 2007) and The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (OUP, 2013; paperback 2015).

Contributors:

Anna Barton, University of Sheffield
Matthew Bevis, Keble College, Oxford
Daniel Brown, University of Southampton
Hugh Haughton, University of York
Anna Henchman, Boston University
Daniel Karlin, University of Bristol
Sara Lodge, University of St Andrews
Will May, University of Southampton
Michael O'Neill, Durham University
Seamus Perry, Balliol College, Oxford
Adam Phillips, University of York
Adam Piette, University of Sheffield
Anne Stillman, Clare College, Cambridge
Peter Swaab, University College London
Peter Robinson, University of Reading
Stephen Ross, Concordia University, Montreal
James Williams, University of York

Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry

Edited by James Williams and Matthew Bevis

Reviews and Awards

"Makes a convincing case for Lear's enduring interest not just for Victorianists but for those who would seek to understand modernist and later twentieth-century innovations in poetic form . . . The play's the thing, as this lovely collection shows again and again." - Victorian Studies

"The Play of Poetry sounds like a deference to the particular kind of responsibility that belongs to good art and artists. It does justice to an artist properly good, not improperly great: illuminating a writer as responsibly irresponsible as the surprising last lines of his limericks." - Barbara Everett, Times Literary Supplement

"a fresh way to read a supposedly minor poet...I should add that in an era when publishers are cutting corners, this is a particularly pleasing edition, a sturdy volume with good quality paper." - Talia Schaffer, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry [...] feels like it has been gifted to us. [T]he collection revels in the inexplicable mysteriousness of Lear the man, along with his art and the often contradictory emotions it elicits [...] an invitation to wonder." - Joseph Jordan

"The clever and vivacious essays assembled by James Williams and Matthew Bevis in Edward Lear: The Play of Poetry build sensibly on these foundations." - Andrew Motion, The Hopkins Review

"An admirable new collection ... Rarely does a collection of essays published by an academic press carry such emotional nuance, or tune it to the requirements of literary analysis so deftly and consistently ... This collection will swiftly become one of the first ports of call for Lear scholars, but some of its essays deserve to be read by anyone with an interest in the ways we might "turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us", as Matthew Arnold put it." - Ben Westwood, Times Literary Supplement

"[An] excellent volume ... If Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry is any guide to what is to come, the future for Lear studies looks bright indeed. Its contributors show it to be possible to write successfully about his nonsense in diverse ways. ... Arriving at a moment when Lears critical fortunes appear to be on the rise, it will be an essential point of reference." - Martin Dubois, Review of English Studies

"Almost every page contained pleasurable surprises." - Paris Review