First published in 1980. This title provides a critical and historical account of poetry written between 1780 and 1835. The author has been especially concerned to place the great poems and poets of the age in the context of the conventions and traditions in which they wrote, offering new perspectives on familiar works. Poems still famous are examined often in relation to works of a similar kind fashionable at the time but now neglected, and these unconventional groupings throw fresh light on Romantic poetry as a whole. An appendix is included, designed to be read as a supplement to the...

In this original and significant contribution to literary controversy, first published in 1989, Professor Jackson argues on semantic grounds that historical criticism, which he defines as the attempt to read works of literature and criticism as they were read when they were new, is a necessary preliminary to other ways of approaching the literature of the past. He distinguishes between the difficulties inherent in the practice of historical critics and the problems encountered by historians. Historical criticism as he describes it is an ideal that has yet to be attained and he explores...