Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1979. Carl Dawson looks at the year 1850, which was an extraordinary year in English literary history, to study both the great and forgotten writers, to survey journals and novels, poems and magazines, and to ask questions about dominant influences and ideas. His primary aim is descriptive: How was Wordsworth's Prelude received by his contemporaries on its publication in 1850? How did reviewers respond to new tendencies in poetry and fiction/ Who were the prominent literary models? But Dawson's descriptions also lead to broader, theoretical questions about such issues as the status of the imagination in an age obsessed by mechanical invention, about the public role of the writer, the appeal to nature, and the use of myth and memory. To express the Victorians' estimation of poetry, for example, Dawson presents the contrasting views help by two eminent Victorians, Macaulay and Carlyle. In Macaulay's opinion, the advance of civilization led to the decline of poetry
Trade ReviewThe extraordinary vigor of mid-century literature, a period Dickens called 'this summer-dawn of time,' is well demonstrated in Professor Dawson's most readable and enlightening vertical analysis of a crucial year . . . The reader will be surprised at how the narrow corner of a single year can be as revealing a study of a period as a detail-laden survey of a decade or a century.
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New York TimesTable of ContentsPreface
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Poetics: The Hero as Poet
Chapter 3. In Memoriam: The Uses of Dante and Wordsworth
Chapter 4. Dramatic Elegists: Arnold, Clough, and Browning at Mid-Century
Chapter 5. Phases of the Soul: The Newman Brothers
Chapter 6. "The Lamp of Memory": Wordsworth and Dickens
Chapter 7. Men of Letters as Hacks and Heroes
Chapter 8. Polemics: Charles Kingsley and Alton Locke
Chapter 9. The Germ: Aesthetic Manifesto
Chapter 10. Postscripts: On the Eve of the Great Exhibition
Notes
Index
