Description
Book SynopsisFor the first time in print, this complete, critical edition presents reconstructions of obliterated poems, alongside surviving plays of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. This first volume provides established texts of Finch's early manuscript books, including poems written under her pen name, Ardelia.
Trade Review'With remarkable success and rigor, Jennifer Keith's and Claudia Kairoff's first volume of the Works of Anne Finch investigates and analyzes complex sets of evidence and revisions in manuscript and in print, providing an extensive scholarly apparatus and historical notes on the conditions of production, not just of Finch's own writing but of its reception and publication. Rivaling the best examples of traditional critical editions, the Works of Anne Finch offers fresh approaches to questions of variants and emendations while supplying a clean, readable text of Finch's extensive literary production.' Citation, Society for Textual Scholarship
'… a major event in English literary studies … The literary world is fortunate that Finch's complicated canon met its match in the editorial skills and intellectual commitment of Jennifer Keith and the team of talented experts she assembled … Anne Finch's poetry is the expression of her heart, the expression of an age, and the expression of the general human condition. In other words, she is a major poet whose works are finally accorded in this edition the establishment of texts and contexts needed for literary history to begin to acknowledge that fact.' Elizabeth Kraft, The Scriblerian
'Henceforth, no scholar of Anne Finch's poetry can write about her oeuvre without studying these two volumes.' Ellen Moody, The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer
Table of ContentsList of illustrations; Preface and acknowledgments; Chronology; Abbreviations; Note; General introduction Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Jennifer Keith and Jean I. Marsden; Textual introduction Jennifer Keith; Account of the texts Jennifer Keith; Works excluded from this edition Molly Hand and Jennifer Keith; From Poems on Several Subjects written by Ardelia (The Northamptonshire Manuscript); Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia (The Folger Manuscript); Some peices out of the First Act of the Aminta of Tasso; The Triumphs of Love and Innocence: a tragecomedy; Aristomenes, or the Royal Shepheard: a tragedy; Aditional Poems Cheifly upon Subjects Devine and Moral; Explanatory and textual notes; List of source copies; Select bibliography; Index of titles; Index of first lines.
