The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth''s life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth''s poetry other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present in turn Wordsworth''s life career and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of ''The Recluse''; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender landscape psychology ethics politics religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets but also in modern criticism and scholarship.