Auteur: Matthew Bevis

Of all the Victorian poets, Edward Lear has a good claim to the widest audience: admired and championed by critics and poets from John Ruskin to John Ashbery, he has also been read, heard, and loved …

‘In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people’ (The Times, 1873). The Art …

William Empson was one of the most important poet-critics of the twentieth century, and continues to influence and inspire writers from many divergent critical traditions. Following on recent scholar …

‘In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people’ (The Times, 1873). The Art …

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that wr …

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that wr …

‘I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts’, confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appr …

‘I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts’, confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appr …

"The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage, " William Hazlitt recalled, "He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint an …

Collected here are the biographies which revealed aspects of their subjects that the more favourable "official" accounts tended to hide. The life of the author of each text is described, an …