The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Critical Biographies) - Hardcover

Ryals, Clyde De L.

9781557861498: The Life of Robert Browning: A Critical Biography (Blackwell Critical Biographies)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1557861498 ISBN 13: 9781557861498

Publisher: Blackwell Pub, 1993

Clyde Ryals's account explores Browning's work from his earliest published poem, "Pauline", to his last volume, "Asolando". It examines, chronologically and at length, his entire literary output, and aims to set Browning firmly within the context of his poems and his times. Browning has always been regarded as a dramatic poet who stands at an objective distance from his writing. Professor Ryals, however, proposes a different view, and presents him as a writer who was both objective and subjective. He shows how each poem is, as Browning termed it, a performance in which the poet plays a part - as producer, presenter, or actor, and sometimes all three. We discover the role each poetic performance played in Browning's own "self-fashioning" and learn how the principle of endless becoming stood at the very heart of his thought and practice as a poet.

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From the Back Cover:

Clyde Ryals's masterful account explores Browning's work from Pauline, his earliest published poem, to Asolando, his last volume, and is the first biographical study in fifty years to treat chronologically and at length the entire Browning corpus.

About the Author:

The author is Professor of English at Duke University. He has written many books on Victorian literature, including Browning's Later Poetry 1871-1889 (1975), Becoming Browning: The Poems and Plays of Robert Browning 1833-1846 (1983), and A World of Possibilities: (Romantic Irony in Victorian Literature (1900). He is editor of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Walsh Carlyle (1970- ).

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