Wordsworth After War

Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester. He has written extensively on Romantic-period literature, specialising in literary and visual responses to the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. His books include Romantic Wars (2000), Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002), The Sublime (2006/2017), and Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (2013).

• Introduction; 1. Conscripting 'The Recluse'; 2. Peace out of time: The White Doe of Rylstone; 3. Thanksgiving after war; 4. 'Returning, like a ghost unlaid': Peter Bell and The Waggoner; 5. Violent waters: The River Duddon and Ecclesiastical Sketches; 6. Wordsworth after Byron: Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820; After Wordsworth.

'… this is a book of richly detailed readings of lesser-known poems that consistently illuminates their inner tensions by reconstructing the personal and public contexts in which they were written and read. It presents Wordsworth not as a genius or prophet but as consistent in an inconsistency that is a token of his inability, despite himself, to toe the conventional line. A Wordsworth worth reading then, even if that reading will more often be provoking and annoying than inspiring or beautiful.' Tim Fulford, The Charles and Mary Lamb Journal