Description: Essays by leading scholars offer new insights into a remarkable poet and early advocate of environmental ethics and aesthetics.
Brief description: Scott McEathron is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University. He has written extensively on the relationship between labouring-class poetry and canonical Romanticism, and, more recently, has published a series of essays on Romantic-era painters and paintings connected with Lamb, Hazlitt, and Keats. He is the editor of English Labouring-Class Poetry, 1800-1830 (2006) and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Sourcebook (2005). His current projects include work on the nineteenth-century labouring-class elegy and on the treatment of labouring-class poets by the Royal Literary Fund.
Review Quotes: 'This fine collection of essays exemplifies, as the editors' note in their introduction, the 'striking variety' of Clare's writings and the 'interpretive capaciousness' of this fertile moment in Clare scholarship ... Ranging widely from Clare's engagement with eighteenth-century verse to his reception in the years following his death, the contributors shed new light on some of his most characteristic forms and themes and on his complex place in the literary and political cultures of his day ... ground-breaking and important not only for Clare scholarship but also for the study of nineteenth-century literature.' Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Modern Philology