Portraits and sketches

X, 297 p

Science in neo-Victorian poetry

This article considers the work of three contemporary poets and their engagement, in verse, with Victorian science. Beginning with the outlandish ‘theories’ of Mick Imlah’s ‘The Zoologist’s Bath’ (1983), it moves on to two works of biografiction – Anthony Thwaite’s poem ‘At Marychurch’ (1980), which outlines Philip Henry Gosse’s doomed attempts to unite evolution and Christianity, and Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009). Starting off with John Glendening’s idea that science in neo-Victorian fiction, if fully embraced, provides an opportunity for self-revelation to characters, this article explores the rather less happy resolutions of each of these poems, while in addition discussing the ways in which these poems perform the formal changes and mutability discussed within them

Gray

X, 231 p. , 19 c

A short history of modern English literature

Edmund Gosse (1849?1928), author and literary critic, held posts as a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and librarian to the House of Lords; he was honoured with a knighthood in 1925. His 1897 history of English literature (of which the version reissued here was published a year later by William Heinemann as Volume 3 in the series Short Histories of the Literatures of the World) traces the nation's greatest literature, from Chaucer to Tennyson, across eleven chapters. Rather than concentrating on biographical or sociological detail of English literary history, Gosse's book instead focuses on literary technique and style, intending to instil 'a feeling of the evolution of English Literature in the primary sense of the term'. Gosse had his detractors, who accused him of a cavalier approach to factual detail, but his novel approach to literary criticism means that the work can still be read with interest and enjoyment

Portraits and sketches

X, 297 p

Gray

X, 231 p. , 19 c

A history of eighteenth century literature (1660-1780)

This work by Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was commissioned by Macmillan as the third volume in a series of literary histories, and published in 1889, when literary criticism was still a relatively new field of academic study. His earlier work had led to his appointment as Lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1884 and to a hugely popular American lecture tour that same year. An established poet, author and critic, Gosse had a loyal following within the literary establishment of Cambridge and London, despite lacking formal academic qualifications. His approach to analysis was through personal impressions, and discussions of the biographies as well as output of a wide range of writers from Dryden to Johnson. Reviewers noted his identification of the years 1660?1780 as being central to the beginnings of the novel and the concern to 'reform and regulate ordinary writing', and praised his comparison of English and Continental literature