T. L. Burton - Böcker

This is the first volume of Oxford's three-volume edition of The Complete Poems of William Barnes. William Barnes (1801-1886) was an outstanding but undervalued dialect poet, and this will be the first critical edition of his complete poems. Volume I provides the first critical edition of his Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect (1844), which broke new ground by memorializing in print the speech of a rapidly disappearing rural culture. Unfortunately, that 1844 volume has never been reprinted. This is partly because Barnes was persuaded to make its constituent poems more accessible to metropolitan readers of subsequent editions by spelling Dorset words in ways that approximated more closely to standard English, and partly because most editors and anthologists have reprinted only those revised versions of 1844 poems which Barnes published in his 1879 (and final) collection of his dialect poems.By restoring the integrity of Barnes's first volume, and investigating both its literary lineages and dialectological preoccupations, this annotated edition will enable readers to experience the initial products of those extraordinary years when Barnes was unwaveringly confident in the expressive adequacy of the Dorset dialect as a medium for poetry. Much of the literary, historical, and topographical information here brought to bear on the 1844 volume is drawn from rarely cited regional publications as well as from Barnes's uncollected contributions to newspapers and journals. The Editors' Introduction, which describes the origins, nature, and reception of Barnes's inaugural volume, offers historical accounts of both the kinds of poetry it represents and the dialectological interests that underpin it.This edition of Barnes's earliest poems in the Dorset dialect will prompt a reconsideration of their present status in the Victorian literary canon.

This is the second volume of Oxford's three-volume edition of The Complete Poems of William Barnes. Volume II contains all the poems Barnes wrote in the modified form of the Dorset dialect that he used from the mid 1850s onwards: those in the second and third collections of his Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect (1859 and 1862); those from the first collection (1844), originally written in the broad form of the dialect and here re-written in the modified form); The Song of Solomon in the Dorset dialect (1859); poems published in newspapers and periodicals after 1855 but not included in any of his collections; and posthumously published poems surviving in manuscript. Variants are included from all surviving versions of the poems. There are two introductions, the first general and the second textual. Notes on the poems record their provenance, describe their prosody, and add contextualizing information. The volume concludes with discursive appendices on textual, literary, and dialectological matters, a list of references cited, an annotated glossary, a glossary of place-names occurring in the poems, and an index of titles and first lines.

This volume, the work of a group of Chaucerians from the University of Adelaide, is the latest in the University of Toronto Press's Chaucer Bibliography series, a series which aims to provide annotated bibliographies for all of Chaucer's works. It summarizes twentieth-century commentary on the three fabliaux of Fragment 1 of The Canterbury Tales: the Miller's, the Reeve's, and the Cook's tales. There are separate sections for editions, translations and modernizations, sources and analogues, lexicographical and linguistic studies, for the tales considered as a group and for each tale considered separately. Annotations are arranged chronologically within each section, facilitating a quick grasp of the changing critical attitudes towards these tales, and showing how earlier neglect (resulting from embarrassment at the naughtiness of their subject matter) has given way, in the second half of the twentieth century, to universal admiration for their astonishing artistry. The general introduction and the separate section introductions comment on and evaluate the varying critical approaches. The detailed index facilitates research on particular characters, themes, or approaches, as well as on the work of individual commentators.