Nonsense writing often operates through a complex of the familiar and the surprising. This article argues that Edward Lear’s originality—to an extent that distinguishes him from contemporaries like ...Lewis Carroll—derives precisely from a sidelining of surprise in favor of suddenness: an aesthetic that becomes, in his hands, an ethics of relationship that tenses to an abrupt, unpredictable Other even as it lovingly accommodates it. Carroll’s Wonderland books keep a surprised perspective aloft, through Alice’s incredulous eyes. But for Lear’s protagonists, things are sudden more often than they are surprising. Drawing at every stage on unpublished manuscripts, and rethinking a popular critical image of the poet as a blissful, comfortable refuge for eccentrics and outsiders, the essay contrasts Lear’s writing with that of the more temporally orderly Carroll to argue that, for Lear, suddenness captures a sensation that something might be at once expected and unprepared-for. It goes on to explore how suddenness sends both bodies and feelings out of sync, arguing that suddenness brings home, in Lear’s work, the importance of living tolerantly alongside an unknowable Other. Finally, it traces how in Lear’s hands, the surprising comes to mean something different from the use made of surprise by his contemporaries: the delight of the uneventful, and the persistence of hope for a normal, unremarkable happiness.
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Edward Lear was in the vanguard of cultural assimilation of evolutionary theory. In what amounts to a gestalt relationship, some of his published "nonsense" figures against, and largely derives its ...meaning from, innovation in the natural sciences. Certain of his works, some not previously interpreted, are specific in their engagement with evolutionists, including Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Robert Grant. Before and after the appearance of On the Origin of Species (1859), Lear backs one side against another in public debates sparked by evolutionary theory. His implicit engagement with the new biology becomes evident in close attention to the drawings, which are essential components of Lear's innovative hybridization of visual and literary artforms.
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3.
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF EDWARD LEAR Beehler, Bruce M
The Wilson Journal of Ornithology,
12/2022, Letnik:
134, Številka:
4
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
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Edward Lear—the father of nonsense—wrote some of the best-loved poems in English. He was also admired as a naturalist, landscape painter, travel writer, and composer. Awkward but funny, absurdly ...sympathetic, Lear invented himself as a Victorian character. Sara Lodge offers a moving account of one of the era's most influential creative figures.
General Materials Pionke, Albert D
Victorian Poetry,
09/2022, Letnik:
60, Številka:
3
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Readers of Victorian Poetry may be especially interested in chapters 14 through 17 from the book's third chronologically arranged section, "Afterlives," which "looks ahead to the presence of Byronie ...forms, motifs, manners and characters in post-Romantic poetry" (p. 12). ...in "In-Between Byrons: Byronie Legacies in Women's Poetry of the Late Romantic to Mid-Victorian Era," Sarah Wootton positions Letitia Elizabeth Landon as "a pivotal figure in the dissemination of Byron and Byronie influence from the mid-1820s to the 1840s" (p. 235). ...Richard Cronin rounds out the Victorian portion of "Afterlives" by reexamining Swinburne's ambivalent relationship to Byron. Stylishly written and consistently attentive to contemporary stage-ballet performance, its reception by English critics, and the subtle nuances of Barrett Browning's own poetic language, the chapter repeatedly identifies moments in both poems when a dance-infused diction "leaps," "carries," and "snatches" up readers into considering issues of "partnership, power, and art that the ballet's steps and stories conveyed" (p. 166).
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This article discusses selected “rewritings” of Edward Lear’s nonsense poem “The Akond of Swat”, focusing specifically on the translators’, illustrators’, adapters’ and editors’ attitudes towards the ...allusive nature of the poem – and specifically the reference it makes to the historical figure of the Pashtun religious leader Abdul Ghaffūr, also known as the Akond (or Wali) of Swat or Saidū Bābā, which may be viewed as orientalist or parodistic from a contemporary viewpoint. Recent translated and illustrated versions of the poem inscribe it with new aesthetic and ideological values. Two Polish translations considered in this article, produced by Andrzej Nowicki and Stanisław Barańczak respectively, demonstrate changing approaches to the nonsense genre evidenced in Polish literary circles (revealing a gradual transition from pure to parodistic nonsense). Graphic representations of the poem discussed in the article testify to the artists’ interpretive powers in redefining the genre of Lear’s poem, rebranding it as an infantile fairy tale on the one hand and a disturbing reflection on tyranny and “the war on terrorism” on the other.
The so-called nonsense literature had special relevance in the 19th Century. Within the framework of the evolutionary debate, Victorian literary nonsense begins to raise problems regarding the ...classification of entities in the world, and not only botanical and animal species. There is a return to the hybrid and the strange, and the term queer begins to appear as a mark of otherness. Although the texts fulfilled a mixed purpose of educational entertainment, they frequently had a transgressive background, incorporating dark aspects that indirectly contested established ideas, hiding themselves from censorship. Under the guise of children's texts, the hidden messages in nonsense literature questioned the taxonomic categories that divided the species, also taking the opportunity to raise gender issues, as it happens in the three cases explored in this article.
According to the poets grandson, Lears were the only settings of his poems that Alfred liked-they seem to throw a diaphanous veil over the words-nothing more, he would say.5 This article builds on ...the historical testimony of this authorial approval, aiming to illuminate what Lear and Tennyson understood to be the vital qualities of the latters lines-qualities that could be especially well preserved in intimate musical performance. Sara Lodge devotes several pages of her book Inventing Edward Lear to examining his settings, with an ear for what they demonstrate about Lears sensibilities-a sensitivity to the power of language to produce psychological effect that rivaled Tennysons, for example, and his use of sound effects that mimic the textual content.6 The expanded analyses that follow further confirm these observations. ...it is not always easy to locate the printed scores of sometimes minor composers.12 Most intimately connected to Tennyson's household salons, Emily Tennyson herself crafted music for her husband's poems; Phyllis Weliver has discussed her music manuscripts and their implications for our understanding of the creative collaboration between the couple.13 No one was better positioned than Emily to understand Tennyson's preferences and receive input on compositions in progress; it would therefore be especially interesting to compare her versions of "Sweet and Low" and "Home they brought her warrior dead" with Lear's.14 In addition to other similarities, both had an equivalent level of amateur musical skill. ...Edwin Edwards was four years into his tenure as the organist at Rugby School.19 His version of Elaine's song (from "Lancelot and Elaine" in the Idylls of the King) was entitled "Sweet is true love," though the same text was often called the "Song of Love and Death," as in Lear's setting.
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Based on extensive research, Uglow's narrative guides readers on a journey from Lear's birth in London, through his time with his sister Ann on the Gray's Inn Road and his travels throughout Europe ...and Northern Africa, to his death in San Remo in January 1888. The first few chapters of this thorough volume explain how Lear was inspired as a teen by the public's fascination with wild animals and spent his visits to Regent's Park at the London Zoo, learning to sketch birds. Uglow links this to his love of birds: "Birds gave Lear joy all his life, not in cages but in the freedom of the skies, lakes and rivers, forests and gardens" (55).
The limericks of his first Book of Nonsense (1846) were, as Vivien Noakes records, originally "written and drawn for the children at Knowsley," where in the 1830s Lear had spent long stretches ...drawing Lord Stanley's private menagerie of birds and animals (CN, p. xxviii).1 It was in the nursery that Lear's nonsense writings and sketches first took wing; and throughout his life as a practitioner of nonsense, that child audience stuck with him. In interviews, Muldoon's reflections on his literary influences lead us everywhere and nowhere: asked by Lynn Keller in 1994 whose writing he was most interested in, he name-checked eighteen poets from across the world, from Milosab Holub to Heaney, adding, "once I start naming names I don't want to leave people out. Michael Allen, John Lyon, and Hugh Haughton have each drawn comparisons between them, commenting on the poets' mutual interest in overdetermined formal patterns and verbal felicities.8 In 1988, Haughton selected Muldoon's "Quoof" as the final poem in his Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry and paired it suggestively with one of Lear's illustrations from "The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World": How often have I carried our family word for the hot water bottle to a strange bed, as my father would juggle a red-hot half-brick in an old sock to his childhood settle. A hotel room in New York City with a girl who spoke hardly any English, my hand on her breast like the smouldering one-off spoor of the yeti or some other shy beast that has yet to enter the language.9 Drawing "Quoof" into this nonsense book implicitly situates Muldoon's poem at the fringe-or perhaps the frontier-of a poetry that troubles the border of sense.
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