The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce

'In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people' (The Times, 1873).The Art of Eloquence considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this 'Parliamentary people', and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources - classical rhetoric, Hansard, newspaper reports, elocutionary manuals, treatises on crowd theory - this book argues that oratorical procedures and languages were formative influences on literary culture from Romanticism to Modernism. Matthew Bevis focuses attention on how the four writers negotiated contending political demands in and through their work, and on how they sought to cultivate forms of literary detachment that could gain critical purchase on political arguments. Providing a close reading of the relations between printed words and public voices as well as a broader engagement with debates about the socio-political inflections of the aesthetic realm, this is a major study of how styles of writing can explore and embody forms of responsible political conduct.

Literature & Fiction

Bevis, Matthew

British & Irish

Oxford University Press

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony? This Very Short Introduction explores comedy both as a literary genre, and as a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences and events. Matthew Bevis studies the classics of comic drama, prose fiction and poetry, alongside forms of pantomime, comic opera, silent cinema, popular music, Broadway shows, music-hall, stand-up and circus acts, rom-coms, sketch shows, sit-coms, caricatures, and cartoons. Taking in scenes from Aristophanes to The Office, from the Roman Saturnalia to Groundhog Day, Bevis also considers comic theory from Aristotle to Freud and beyond, tracing how comic achievements have resisted as well as confirmed theory across the ages. This book takes comedy seriously without taking it solemnly, and offers an engaging study of the comic spirit which lies at the heart of our shared social and cultural life.

Comedy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Reference

Wordsworth's Fun

University of Chicago Press

“The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge’s cottage,” William Hazlitt recalled, “He answered in some degree to his friend’s description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth.” Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we know—and, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy. Wordsworth’s Fun explores the writer’s debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition; his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes; his engagement with forms of English poetic humor; and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworth’s interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Wordsworth’s Fun sheds fresh light on how one poet’s strange humor helped to shape modern literary experiment.

Humor & Satire

Collected here are the biographies which revealed aspects of their subjects that the more favourable "official" accounts tended to hide. The life of the author of each text is described, and their relation to the writers they portray is sketched in.

Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part I, Volume 3: George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Alfred, Lord Tennyson by their Contemporaries

Marshall, Gail

Pite, Ralph

Russell, Corinna

History & Criticism

Routledge

Lord Byron is one of the most provocative and seductive voices of world literature, and Matthew Bevis provides insights from his work that resonate even today. Born in 1788, Lord Byron was an English poet and a leading figure of the Romantic movement. A prodigious poetic gift and a scandalous private life made him famous throughout Europe, and his masterpiece, Don Juan, became the bestselling work of the period. He remains one of the most storied and fascinating figures in world literature, and Matthew Bevis takes this great thinker and highlights the ideas most relevant to us today. The Great Thinkers on Modern Life Series, part of The School of Life, shows how thse wise voices from the past have urgently important and inspiring things to tell us.

Byron: Great Thinkers on Modern Life

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Pegasus Books

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Books by Bevis, Matthew