R. K. R. Thornton – författare

Sketches and Scholarly Studies: Part II, Musical Settings and Sketches brings together two crucial aspects of Gerard Manley Hopkins's insatiable drive to create: drawing, predominantly (but not exclusively) from the early part of his life, when he had ambitions to be a painter; and music, from the later part of his life, when he found in music suggestions of a new contact with the eternal. Hopkins grew up in a home that emphasized cultural and artistic accomplishments; his brothers Arthur and Everard were both professional illustrators, and his sister Grace was an accomplished pianist. Limited as the corpus of Hopkins's drawings is--four small sketchbooks and a handful of loose drawings--there is certainly evidence to suggest that he might have been a successful illustrator adhering to Ruskinian principles. This edition reproduces the surviving drawings, with a full introduction and annotations placing them in the context of Hopkins's creative life. His musical compositions are presented in both manuscript facsimiles and new transcriptions, revealing his exploration, in a new mode, of ideas of rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint.

Sketches and Scholarly Studies: Part 1: Academic, Classical, and Lectures on Poetry offers an original perspective on Gerard Manley Hopkins's training as a classicist. R. K. R. Thornton's edition attempts to follow the turns of Hopkins's mind, and to clarify what he was exploring. The notes and introductions reveal how careful a scholar Hopkins was, how intricate his knowledge of the Classics, and how his critical positions developed. The edition reveals in all its detail the range of Hopkins's research into the notion of poetry itself, when he prepared for his fellow Jesuits a course on 'rhetoric'. These areas were his training ground before he launched into his new-found poetic with 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. Through this authoritative critical edition, we see Hopkins's continued exploration of metrics and glimpses of material which would grow into the major poetry that we know, but everywhere we can see the acuity of Hopkins's mind.

Ernest Christopher Dowson (1867-1900) is best known as a the author of a number of exquisite lyrics which epitomise the mood and style of the English 1890s - verses like 'cynara' and 'They are not long'. Yet Arthur Symons was only repeating what Dowson often himself asserted when he said that 'Dowson was the only poet I ever knew who cared more for his prose than his verse'.Monica Borg's Introduction suggests for the first time what lay behind Dowson's opinion of the importance of his prose, seeing withing it a programme of aesthetic and cultural radicalism. She places him firmly in relation to the late-nineteenth-century crisis of values, self and representation which Dowson both expressed and sought to precipitate, and she indicates that it is in his stories rather than his verse that Dowson shows how deeply implicated he was in the politics of resistance and cultural change that characterized the decadent literary and artistic movement. This edition provides texts of all of Dowson's short stories, thoroughly corrected from the original editions and with detailed notes on their genesis and development.

This edition includes all of Dowson's known poems. It describes in detail the contents of his manuscript notebook and re-transcribes the poems from it; it includes his two published volumes, Verses (1896) and Decorations (1899), his verse play The Pierrot of the Minute, the discrete independent parts of his verse translation of Voltaire, and a few uncollected pieces. All have been checked where possible against the original manuscripts and annotated to provide explanation and context.