A selection of keynote lectures and conference papers from the prestigious 2010 Wordsworth Summer Conference. Contains 1. Simon Bainbridge, 'The Power of Hills': Romantic Mountaineering; 2. Peter Spratley, Wordsworth's Walking Aesthetic; 3. Gary Harrison, The Poetics of Acknowledgment: John Clare; 4. James Castell, The Society of Birds in Home at Grasmere; 5. Nahoko Miyamoto Alvey, 'Kubla Khan' and Orientalism: The Roads to and from Xanadu; 6. Saeko Yoshikawa, Wordsworth in the Guides; 7. Daniel Robinson, Mary Robinson and the Della Crusca Network; 8. Erica McAlpine, Keats's Might: Subjunctive Verbs in the Late Poems; 9. Fay Yao, 'Old Romance' and New Narrators: A Reading of Keats's 'Isabella' and 'The Eve of St Agnes'; 10. Anthony John Harding, The Fate of Reading in the Regency; 11. Ken Johnston, Wordsworth at Forty: Memoirs of a Lost Generation; 12. Richard Gravil, Is The Excursion a 'metrical Novel?'; 13. Seamus Perry, Wordsworth's Pluralism.

Five keynote lectures and seven papers from the 41st Wordsworth Summer Conference. In this selection of twelve specially chosen Lectures and Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference, Heather Glen writes on 'We are Seven' in the context of population studies in the 1790s, Judith W. Page on Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth, Anthony Harding on Wordswortyh, Coleridge and the Reading Public, Pamela Woof and Suzanne Stewart on Dorothy Wordsworth's writing, Peter Swaab on Sara Coleridge as a Wordsworth critic, Heidi Thomson on Wordworth and Auden, Judyta Frodyma on Bishop Lowth and 'Home at Grasmere', Stacey McDowell on Keats and Indolence, Catherine Redford on 'The Last Man' and Romantic Archaeology, Paul Whickman on Shelley's revisions of 'Laon and Cythna', and Jason Goldsmith on 'picturesque travel, or viewing landscape by painting it. The final essay includes twelve original landscapes, mostly in colour.

This collection of essays includes Stephen Gill on Wordsworth's 'revisitings', Ann Wroe on Shelley's famous pamphlet, 'The Necessity of Atheism', Mary Favret on the cultural practice of 'The General Fast and Humiliation' in war-time, Gregory Leadbetter on Wordsworth's 'Lucy Poems', Daniel Robinson on Wordsworth's sonnets and newspaper verse, Mark J Bruhn and Jacob Risinger on aspects of Wordsworths's thought, Jessica Fay on Wordsworth and hermitude, Matthew Rowney on Wordsworth's peripatetics, Madeleine Callaghan on Shelley's Idealism, Monika Class on Coleridge and the once reputable 'science' of Phrenology, Stacey McDowell on Keats's play 'Otho the Great', Felicity James on Mary Hays and the life-writing of religious Dissent, and Richard Gravil on John Thelwall's hitherto unknown analysis of the prosody of Wordsworth's 'Excursion'.

Contents include four keynote lectures - on Wordsworth and Coleridge by John Beer, on Byron by Angela Esterhammer and Kasahara Yorimichi, and on Harriet Martineau by Anthony John Harding - together with Judith Thompson's 'Bindman Lecture' on John Thelwall. In shorter papers, Monika Class writes on Coleridge and Kant; Laurent Folliot, Mandy Swann, Timothy Michael, Martina Domines Veliki, Patrick Vincent and Yu Xiao on Wordsworth; and Madeleine Callaghan on Shelley. A Feature of the book is five 'new' poems by the famous agitator John Thelwall, transcribed from the recently discovered Derby MS.

In 1807 Robert Southey published a pseudonymous account of a journey made through England by a fictitious Spanish tourist, ‘Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella’. Letters from England (1807) relates Espriella’s travels. On his journey Espriella comments on every aspect of British society, from fashions and manners, to political and religious beliefs.

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.

In 1798, Coleridge persuaded Wordsworth that it was his destiny to write the first truly philosophical poem, a project Wordsworth dubbed 'The Recluse, or Views of Nature, Man and Society'. It was, as Wordsworth eventually conceived it, to be a poem in three Parts, each of many books. This is the first ever edition of all the poetry intended to form part of the great work. It includes two poems already written in 1798, 'The Old Cumberland Beggar' and 'A Night Piece'; 'Home at Grasmere' (1806), designated 'The Recluse, Part First, Book First'; four other short poems written for 'The Recluse' in 1808 and 1826; and 'The Recluse, Part Second', otherwise known as 'The Excursion' in the text of 1814. (This is the only reading edition of the original text of 'The Excursion'.) The texts included are selected from 'The Poems of William Wordsworth: Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth', edited by Jared Curtis and first published by Humanities-Ebooks in 2009.

Called by one of its reviewers "Wordsworth’s biographia literaria," this book takes its reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of the poet whose attitude to God and religion points to a major shift in Western culture. The monograph probes the philosophical foundations of Wordsworth’s religious outlook, drawing attention to this First Generation Romantic poet as the author who happened to record in his verse the rise to prominence of some of the intellectual and spiritual challenges and the most troublesome uncertainties that have defined Western man ever since. The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with the companion volume, The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth. These two works can be regarded as contraries—or negatives: one offering an ironically positive reading of Wordsworth’s religious discourse, the other offering a reading which is positively negative.

Approaching Wordsworth’ writings from perspectives which have not been considered in critical literature, this book offers a multiangled reflection on the technicalities of the poet’s religious discourse, including the methodology of The Prelude revision, or Wordsworth’s patent art of "pious postscripts." The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with The Absent God in The Works of William Wordsworth, whose six chapters follow this book’s eight chapters like a sestet which complements the octave—becoming, thus, a tribute to Wordsworth as one of the most prolific sonneteers in history. Both monographs build their theses on Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre and embrace the whole of his wide lifespan. Their completion in 2020 coincides with several round anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, the 200th anniversary of The River Duddon, and the 170th anniversary of the publication of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude.

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies