Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wodsworth - (Early Modern Literature in History) by J Dolan (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

John Dolan takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasising the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasion. This book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

Review Quotes

'This most readable study of literary history not only reveals the well springs of Romanticism in eighteenth-century poetry but, like all thoughtful rhetorical analyses, sheds new light on writers and readers, on their creative and interpretative impulses.' - Professor Thomas O. Sloane, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

JOHN DOLAN is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand (1993 to date). From 1985 to 1992 he was lecturer in the Rhetoric Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He has published scholarly work on eighteenth-century poetry and prose, and on twentieth-century poetry, especially the work of Wallace Stevens, as well as two books of poetry.