7 Letters From John Clare To Isaiah Knowles Holland

More than a century after his death, John Clare is being recognized as a poet of importance and stature. His letters, drawn from the whole of his adult life until a few years before his death, provide a fascinating and frequently moving insight into his work and thoughts, charting his progress from youthful enthusiasm to poignant decline.

The official Journal of the John Clare Society, published annually to reflect the interest in, and approaches to, the life and work of the poet John Clare.

Critics including Seamus Heaney provide a welcome reappraisal in the wake of Clare's bicentenary.

Providing the first reliable basis for a new assessment of John Clare's poetic growth, this two-voume collection presents all of Clare's early poems--many published here for the first time--and all known variants. Ranging from juvenilia to the published poems that first established Clare's reputation, this edition preserves Clare's characteristic spelling, punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary, and includes an introduction, extensive annotations, and a glossary.

Elizabeth Helsinger's iconoclastic book explores the peculiar power of rural England to stand for conflicting ideas of Britain. Despite the nostalgic appeal of Constable's or Tennyson's rural scenes, they record the severe social and economic disturbances of the turbulent years after Waterloo. Artists and writers like Cobbett, Clare, Turner, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot competed to claim the English countryside as ideological ground. No image of rural life produced consensus over the great questions: who should constitute the nation, and how should they be represented? Helsinger ponders how some images of rural life and land come to serve as national metaphors while others challenge their constructions of Englishness at the heart of the British Empire. Drawing on recent work in social history, nationalism, and geography, as well as the visual and literary arts, Helsinger recovers other possible and alternative readings of social ties embedded in the imagery of land. She reflects on the power of rural images to transfer local loyalties to the national scene, first popularizing then institutionalizing them. By turning a critical gaze on these scenes, she comments on the difference between art and ideology, and the problems and dangers of asserting any kind of national identity through imagery of the land. Originally published in 1996. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.