Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 930
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780198833796
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- August
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Edward Lear and The Play of Poetry (OUP, 2016, pp. 416) is the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to Lear. 17 chapters, commissioned from established and emerging critics of poetry, provide new contexts in which Lear’s poetry can be better understood and enjoyed. They consider how his 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). In addition to co-editing all chapters in this volume (providing detailed feedback on drafts), Bevis co-wrote a substantial introduction (7,000 words) and a chapter, ‘Falling for Edward Lear’ (11,000 words). Drawing on the Lear family’s religious background, his responses to debates about Original Sin and the Fall, and his chronic struggle with epilepsy (seen as a manifestation of holy folly in antiquity, and referred to in the nineteenth century as ‘the falling illness’), Bevis’s chapter argues that Lear’s bathetic experiments in nonsense carry metaphysical as well as materialist charges. Many contemporaries still associated epilepsy with unruly sexual desires and forms of degeneracy, but physicians were also exploring how seizures could be accompanied by acute sensory perceptions, apparently nonsensical utterances, and visionary states. Lear’s writing offered an eccentric contribution to contemporary debate; Bevis argues that, by setting falls from grace to verbal music, the poet sought to translate physical and psychological traumas into tentative forms of faith, recuperation, and agency.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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