Book Description
About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Browning as never before
"Grow old along with me!/ The best is yet to be .... Great line--quoted recently and beautifully by Christopher Plummer in the popular movie "Must Love Dogs," but did you know it comes from the poem "Rabbi Ben Ezra"? This book discovers Browning as never before. Not only will you find the chestnuts you've heard over the years, but you will read them in context. Not only will you see the breadth and depth of this poet's work, but also find extraordinary essays on his technique and discussions of specific poems by Carlyle and James and Hopkins sitting right next to essays by Harold Bloom and other present-day luminaries. And to boot, you won't be overwhelmed by footnotes, but when you find one, it will be in plain English. This is a book to treasure.

Good introductory anthology.
This is as good as you'll find for a brief one-volume, in-print collection of some major Browning poems.Browning, as Pound himself made clear, is the forerunner of "modernism," his poetry capable of outdoing Pound's in difficulty because of the labyrinthian syntax in pursuit of meanings which for their originator, at least, were clear.Even "Sordello," the ultimate poem about the ultimately self-conscious troubador, was too much for Ezra, who couldn't get on with his Cantos until distancing himself from its difficulties.

With all due respects to the other reviewer, Browning is a "Christian" poet but no orthodox one.He believes in a dynamic Incarnation repeating itself throughout creation and in every moment of existence.Grace and redemption, however, are relatively foreign if not alien concepts to him--one of the reasons it's quite accurate to think of him as the most "optimistic" poet, if not author, in all English literature.Life is purposeful becoming: there's no need to mourn or forgive the past.

Also, any reader may read, or teacher teach, "My Last Duchess" without guilt.Though certain readers might find it easy or convenient to reduce the Duke to a two-dimensional character, to do so is to produce a willful or ignorant misrepresentation of him.His rhetoric alone is dazzling, complex, as obfuscating as it is revealing of his character.Moreover, the poem also has the characters of the Duchess and Envoy to evaluate, both of whom become complex in proportion to the maturity and perceptiveness of an ever-present 4th character--you, the reader (or "implied reader," as the Reader-Response crowd would designate him).

Lesson: Don't mess with Browning unless you're willing to become an active participant in the poetry which, admittedly, can involve considerable patience, time and work.Even Pound is easier, if only because he allows a reader more "wiggle room."

A good reference!
I am a fan of Robert Browning, and believe him to be one of the best Christian poets from the Victorian age.

In the introductions to poems that I've read, the editor James Loucks, perhaps to be "objective," fails to even make the slightest mention of Browning's Christianity, or how that could have affected the themes of his poems.

In Browning's earlier dramatic monologues such as "My Last Duchess," his characters are wholly villainous or otherwise two-dimensional.They don't have any redemptive qualities about them at all.However, in Browning's mature dramatic monologues, his characters have specks of redemptive qualities, and this makes them real, and even makes the characters human.

In "an Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician," Karshish meets Lazarus shortly before the fall of the Jewish Temple.

Loucks says that "the title refers to an imaginary encounter between an itinerant Arab . . . long after [Lazarus] was raised from the dead by Jesus.Since the conflict experienced by Karshish -- that of positivism opposed to the will to believe -- was shared by many of Browning's contemporaries, the poem has a modern resonance" (127).

He leads the reader to believe that Browning was trying to express and maybe even uplift the belief of unbelief, to praise his 'scientific' contemporaries, yet this is far from the case.

Browning, a Christian, in part shows how the Incarnation, God becoming Man, could strongly twang the beliefs that Karshish has of God -- that the body entraps the soul, and that the soul and body are wholly separate and cannot be mixed.

I will conclude with a quote from this poem where Karshish, in a redemptive moment, briefly opens his eyes to the power of the Incarnation:

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too--
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!" (lines 304-311) ... Read more

Book Description
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are without parallel in the nineteenth century: celebrated poets, they became equally famous for their marriage. Still popular more than a century after their deaths, their poetry vividly reflects the unique nature of their relationship.

This collection presents the Brownings’ work in the context of their lives: the early years and their initial friendship, their courtship and marriage, the fifteen happy years they spent living in Italy until Elizabeth’s death. Whether in short poems such as Elizabeth’s “Hector in the Garden” and Robert’s “Natural Magic,” or in extracts from longer works such as Aurora Leigh and Pauline, the great themes they shared are all represented: love, marriage, illicit passion, England and Italy, childhood, religion, poetry, and nature. Elizabeth’s famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, based on their love affair, is included in its entirety.

The poems are augmented with a generous selection of the marvelous letters the Brownings wrote to each other. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A nice idea
This anthology is based on a nice idea. Instead of representing each of the Browning's separately it presents them together. Their life story and poetry are bound up with each other. And this volume shows to a degree their development together. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Browning's reputation in his own day has been extensively discussed; this study considers the influence of his work on twentieth-century literature. O'Neill relates Browning's turn-of-the-century reputation to the development of professional literary research in American, British, and Commonwealth universities, embracing approaches ranging from 'Poetry of Barbarism' to recent praise for Browning's anticipation of contemporary problems in literary theory. The book also traces responses to Browning's famous courtship of and marriage to Elizabeth Barrett, the effects of the scandal over the publication of their love letters and the recent interests of feminists in Browning's life andletters; this discussion in turn reflects on the important role of biography in the changing emphases of literary critics. PATRICIA O'NEILL teaches at Hamilton College. ... Read more

Book Description
Series Editors: Kinley E. Roby, Northeastern University; Herbert Sussman, Northeastern University; Joseph Bartolomeo, University of Massachusetts; George Economou, University of Oklahoma; Arthur F. Kinney, University of Massachusetts

Twayne's United States Authors, English Authors, and World Authors Series present concise critical introductions to great writers and their works.

Devoted to critical interpretation and discussion of an author's work, each study takes account of major literary trends and important scholarly contributions and provides new critical insights with an original point of view. An Authors Series volume addresses readers ranging from advanced high school students to university professors. The book suggests to the informed reader new ways of considering a writer's work. A reader new to the work under examination will, after reading the Authors Series, be compelled to turn to the originals, bringing to the reading a basic knowledge and fresh critical perspectives. Each volume features:

• A critical, interpretive study and explication of the author's works
• A brief biography of the author
• An accessible chronology outlining the life, work, and relevant historical background of the author
• Aids for further study -- complete notes and references, a selected annotated bibliography, and an index
• A readable style presented in a manageable length

Book Description
This is the first full scholarly edition of Browning's greatest and perhaps best-known collection of short poems, Men and Women.A comprehensive introduction shows how new research by Ian Jack an Robert Inglesfield has unearthed material which throws fresh light on the composition and dates of such famous pieces as 'Fra Lippo Lippi', 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came', and 'One Word More: To E.B.B.'. This edition uses a critical text based on that of Browning's final collection, and has detailed introductions to the individual poems.It is the fifth volume in the highly praised Political Works of Robert Browning. ... Read more

Book Description
Henry James described Browning's extended dramatic poem The Ring and the Book, over 20,000 lines in length, as `a great living thing', `a proportioned monstrous magnificence'. The story was developed from some old legal documents discovered by Browning concerning an actual murder which took place in Rome in 1698, and its writing was his major preoccupation in the 1860s, the early years of his widowerhood in London. This volume gives us the first third of the poems, Books I to IV. The Introduction draws on unpublished letters, journals, and working papers not examined by previous editors, to illuminate how the poem was conceived and researched, the range of people the poet consulted, and the five-year period of composition. The poem's complex publishing history is disentangled in the Text part of the Introduction, including a discussion of the corrections and revisions Browning made on sheets from volumes I, III, and IV of the second edition, which he later forgot and which never appeared in print. Appendix E gives these important variants in full. The annotation presents new contextual matter, including unpublished letters relating to `Lyric Love', Browning's famous invocation to his dead wife. The appendices give the original Italian text of Browning's second source, `Morte dell'Uxoricida Guido Franceschini Decapitato'; two previously unpublished autograph chronologies in which the poet worked out historical details of his story; and a new account of the biographical significance of the `Ring' image.The editors have made six substantive emendations to the text, ranging from inaccuracies in the original typesetting to changes made by Browning after publication. The evolution of the text from manuscript to copy text is also discussed, and an appendix is devoted to a set of corrected proofs preserved at Yale, a textual evolutionary dead end of great interest and significance. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Note on the Cambridge Edition of Browning
I just want to leave a note on the Cambridge Edition of Browning.The type is rather small and double column.It may be difficult for some people for extended reading.However, it is a large volume that includes everything as far as I know, so for the price it might be worth your while if you want to have all of Browning on hand. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description