Paula R. Feldman – författare

A Century of Sonnets is a striking reminder of that some of the best known and most well-respected poems of the Romantic era were sonnets. It presents the broad and rich context of such favourites as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias," John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and William Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" by tracing the sonnet revival in England from its beginning in the hands of Thomas Edwards and Charlotte Smith to its culmination in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This volume is the first in modern times to collect such sonnets, many never published before in the twentieth century, and contains nearly five hundred examples composed between 1750 and 1850 by 81 poets, nearly half of them women.

A Century of Sonnets is a striking reminder that some of the best-known and most well-respected poems of the Romantic era were sonnets. It presents the broad and rich context of such favourites as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias," John Keat's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and William Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" by tracing the sonnet revival in England from its beginning in the hands of Thomas Edwards and Charlotte Smith to its culmination in the poetry of Elizabeth Barret Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This volume is the first in modern times to collect such sonnets, many never published in the twentieth century, and contains nearly five hundred examples composed between 1750 and 1850 by eighty-one poets, nearly half of them women.

The Collected Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld presents, for the first time, all the known surviving works of this major English writer, who lived from 1743 to 1825. Poet, essayist, editor, innovative writer for children, polemicist for religious and political reform, Barbauld helped set the agenda for Anglo-American culture for over a century. Her poems influenced Coleridge and Wordsworth; her writings on education, church-state relations, identity politics, and the ethics of citizenship are freshly relevant today; her commentary on books and writers went far to establish today's canon of English novelists. Beyond their importance, her writings are distinguished by great charm and profound intelligence.Volume 2 publishes Barbauld's ground-breaking Lessons for Children (4 vols., 1778-9) for the first time from the earliest surviving copies and reproduces these texts in a manner that honours, as far as possible, the special format the author desired. It also includes the first scholarly edition of Hymns in Prose for Children (1781); pieces in prose and verse associated with the Barbauld school at Palgrave (1774-85); her contributions to Evenings at Home (1793-6); the essays, jeux d'esprit, and poems she wrote for children or young women, many gathered by Lucy Aikin in A Legacy for Young Ladies, reviews of educational books from the Monthly Review; and a trove of previously unpublished letters on the subject of education to Lydia Rickards.

Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), one of the most influential and widely-read poets of the nineteenth century, wrote Records of Woman in 1828 at the height of her long career. In the series, which includes nineteen poems about exemplary lives, Hemans explores what it means to be a woman, challenging traditional beliefs while at the same time reinforcing persistent stereotypes. Her work celebrates the lives, events, and imagined thoughts of unremembered women from different cultures and time periods whose deeds show nobility of spirit and inner strength. In her introduction, Paula Feldman examines how Hemans's poetry shaped and was shaped by nineteenth-century literary tastes, and she reconsiders the aesthetic value of Hemans's work and the current understanding of the nature of Romanticism.