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This series provides a high-quality selection of early printings of literary works, textual editions, anthologies and literary criticism which are of lasting scholarly interest. Ranging from Old English to Shakespeare to early twentieth-century work from around the world, these books offer a valuable resource for scholars in reception history, textual editing and literary studies.

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451 results in Cambridge Library Collection - Literary Studies

Page 6 of 23

Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
  • Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare
  • Volume 2
  • Edited by Charles Lamb
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    31 October 2013
  • Since its first appearance in 1808, this collection of extracts from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama has been highly acclaimed; the twentieth-century critic Edmund Blunden considered it 'the most striking anthology perhaps ever made from English literature'. In compiling the work, the critic and essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) aimed to achieve two goals: to illustrate the greatness of Shakespeare's often forgotten contemporaries, and to explore the way in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishmen experienced emotion. He includes only those scenes which he judges to show the best poetry and the deepest passion, adding only brief notes to let the texts speak for themselves. This reissue is of the expanded two-volume edition of 1835. Volume 2 focuses on plays produced in the seventeenth century. Including extracts from Massinger, Fletcher and Shirley, among others, it remains a rich resource for literature students.

Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
  • Volume 3
  • John Gibson Lockhart
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    13 November 2012
    First published in:
    1837
  • As son-in-law and literary executor to Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) was uniquely placed to produce a definitive biography of the great poet and novelist. First published in 1837–8, shortly after Scott's death, this celebrated seven-volume work is based on personal memories, correspondence, and Scott's own autobiographical sketches. Wide-ranging in his purview, Lockhart is also detailed in his descriptions: the Aberdeen Journal of the day observed that the volumes trace Scott's life and literary efforts with 'the most minute distinctness'. Volume 3 opens in 1812 with an account of 'one of the busiest summers of Scott's busy life', during which he finally moved into his beloved Abbotsford. Incorporating extracts from Scott's correspondence with the English poet George Crabbe, this volume covers the period in which Scott finished Waverley (1814) and published in verse The Field of Waterloo (1815).

Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
  • Volume 6
  • John Gibson Lockhart
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    13 November 2012
    First published in:
    1837
  • As son-in-law and literary executor to Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) was uniquely placed to produce a definitive biography of the great poet and novelist. First published in 1837–8, shortly after Scott's death, this celebrated seven-volume work is based on personal memories, correspondence, and Scott's own autobiographical sketches. Wide-ranging in his purview, Lockhart is also detailed in his descriptions: the Aberdeen Journal of the day observed that the volumes trace Scott's life and literary efforts with 'the most minute distinctness'. Volume 6 covers the years 1825–6, during which Scott experienced literary triumph with the publication of Tales of the Crusaders (1825), continued to work on Woodstock (1826), and took an excursion to Ireland. The closing chapters cover the banking crises of 1825 and hint at the financial catastrophes that were to plague the author until his death seven years later.

Letters Written between the Years 1784 and 1807
  • Volume 6
  • Anna Seward
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    21 March 2013
    First published in:
    1811
  • The literary career of Anna Seward (1742–1809) had many frustrations. Erasmus Darwin once printed her poetry under his own name. Horace Walpole accused her of having 'no imagination'. And despite her evident talents, she was unable to find a patron willing to support a woman. Yet her letters reveal the breadth of her interests and the strength of her literary criticism. In addition to writing to newspapers and magazines, she counted many eminent figures among her correspondents, including James Boswell (who begged for a lock of her hair) and the young Walter Scott. This six-volume selection of her letters, edited by the publisher Archibald Constable (1774–1827), first appeared in 1811. A touching record of her final years, Volume 6 covers the period 1802–7. It includes her letters to the young Walter Scott, who visited her at her Lichfield home and prepared an edition of her poems after her death.

Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
  • Volume 2
  • John Gibson Lockhart
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    13 November 2012
    First published in:
    1837
  • As son-in-law and literary executor to Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) was uniquely placed to produce a definitive biography of the great poet and novelist. First published in 1837–8, shortly after Scott's death, this celebrated seven-volume work is based on personal memories, correspondence, and Scott's own autobiographical sketches. Wide-ranging in his purview, Lockhart is also detailed in his descriptions: the Aberdeen Journal of the day observed that the volumes trace Scott's life and literary efforts with 'the most minute distinctness'. Incorporating accounts of Scott's correspondence with Southey, Wordsworth and Byron, Volume 2 opens with the death of Walter's uncle, Captain Robert Scott, in 1804, leading readers through the commencement of Waverley and the foundation of the Ballantyne publishing firm. This portion of Lockhart's account concludes in 1812.

Specimens of English Dramatic Poets
  • Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Charles Lamb
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    31 October 2013
  • Since its first appearance in 1808, this collection of extracts from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama has been highly acclaimed; the twentieth-century critic Edmund Blunden considered it 'the most striking anthology perhaps ever made from English literature'. In compiling the work, the critic and essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) aimed to achieve two goals: to illustrate the greatness of Shakespeare's often forgotten contemporaries, and to explore the way in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Englishmen experienced emotion. He includes only those scenes which he judges to show the best poetry and the deepest passion, adding only brief notes to let the texts speak for themselves. This reissue is of the expanded two-volume edition of 1835. Volume 1 focuses on the plays produced at the height of the Elizabethan theatre's popularity. Including extracts from Kyd, Marlowe and Jonson, among others, it remains a rich resource for literature students.

Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore
  • Volume 8
  • Thomas Moore
  • Edited by John Russell
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    18 April 2013
    First published in:
    1856
  • Throughout his professional life, the poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852) was variously celebrated and vilified for both his verse and his politics. Born in Dublin, he remained an ardent Irish patriot until his death. This eight-volume collection of Moore's memoirs, diaries and letters, edited by his friend Lord John Russell (1792–1878) and first published between 1853 and 1856, provides rare insights into a man whose genius was applauded by the Morning Chronicle as 'embracing almost all sides of imaginative literature, of criticism and philosophy'. Volume 8 opens with a portrait of Moore in later life and a view of the valley where he died. This final volume contains Moore's diary for the period 1845–7, prior to his descent into dementia. A selection of correspondence from 1799 to 1847, Russell's postscript and an index to the eight volumes complete the work.

Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
  • To Which Are Added Some Poems Never before Printed
  • Volume 1
  • Samuel Johnson
  • Edited by Hester Lynch Piozzi
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    06 June 2013
    First published in:
    1788
  • One of the most celebrated individuals of English literature, Samuel Johnson (1709–84) was a defining figure of his age. In addition to his celebrated labours as a lexicographer, Johnson distinguished himself as a poet, essayist, critic, biographer and editor. The writer and society hostess Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821) was an unconventional woman of great intellectual vivacity. She became a close friend of Johnson, whom she met through her first husband, the brewer Henry Thrale, whose ailing business Johnson did much to support. As well as writing essays, poetry, memoirs and travel diaries, she was one of the first women to produce works on philology and history. First published in 1788 - two years after her groundbreaking Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, which anticipated Boswell's biography - these letters offer a captivating glimpse into their daily lives and concerns. Volume 1 covers the period 1765 to 1777.

Memoirs of the Late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton
  • With a Selection from her Correspondence, and Other Unpublished Writings
  • Volume 2
  • Elizabeth Benger
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    02 January 2014
  • The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hamilton (1756?–1816) wrote with especial distinction on the subject of education. Inspired by her older brother, the orientalist Charles Hamilton, she pursued her literary ambitions, informing her work with a knowledge of history, philosophy and politics. Her ability to present complex ideas in an accessible manner did much to secure her an appreciative readership. Establishing her reputation with a satirical attack on radical thought, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), she enjoyed her greatest literary success with The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), a tale of moral reformation. Her Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801) is also reissued in this series. The present work was first published in two volumes in 1818 by her friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Benger (1775–1827). Volume 2 contains selected letters and Hamilton's previously unpublished critique of the Book of Revelation.

The Works of Thomas Chatterton
  • Volume 3
  • Thomas Chatterton
  • Edited by Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    26 September 2013
  • Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) was only seventeen when he died of arsenic poisoning. Among his family and friends he was known as a versifier with a fascination for medieval manuscripts, but none suspected the true scope of his work. At eleven, he was already writing poetry, and by the end of his life his love poems, eclogues and forged medieval pieces numbered in the hundreds. Chatterton is best known for the Rowley poems, which he claimed were transcribed from the work of a fifteenth-century monk. Although the precocious skill of his forgeries, once exposed, often went unrecognised by critics, Chatterton's legacy influenced the Romantics for decades after his death. This three-volume collection of his work, edited by Joseph Cottle and Robert Southey, first appeared in 1803. Volume 3 includes Chatterton's prose works, selected letters, some contemporary discussion of his work, and Cottle's account of the Rowley manuscripts.

The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
  • From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford
  • Volume 1
  • Walter Scott
  • Edited by David Douglas
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    05 September 2013
  • By the close of the nineteenth century, the works of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) could be found on the bookshelves of every respectable Victorian. Public interest was such that, nearly sixty years after his death, there remained considerable demand for new insights into the man and his milieu. First published in 1890, his two-volume journal for the period 1825–32 immediately attracted press attention. One review observed that 'it shows us the man in prosperity and in adversity, now delightfully humorous … now saddened by the financial troubles which came upon his later years'. Notwithstanding his money worries, Scott's final decade was not without literary achievement. Volume 1 comprises entries from November 1825 to June 1827, soon after Scott had published Tales of the Crusaders (1825) and during which period he wrote his Letters of Malachi Malagrowther (1826).

Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
  • Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey
  • Thomas De Quincey
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    21 November 2013
  • Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) described his adolescent discovery of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge as 'an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty'. The admiring letter he sent to Wordsworth led to friendships with him, Coleridge and Robert Southey. Relations soured over time, though, as De Quincey's opium addiction and debts increased. Following Coleridge's death in 1834, De Quincey began writing his 'Lake Reminiscences', published serially in Tait's Magazine up to 1840. Candid, occasionally bitter, and highlighting flaws such as Coleridge's plagiarism, the recollections offended the surviving poets and their families, yet these vivid portraits attract continued scholarly interest for both the light shed on the subjects and on the author himself. The collected essays, reissued in this 1863 printing of the 1862 first edition, certainly served to confirm the Lake Poets as leading figures of English Romanticism.

The Brontës Life and Letters
  • Being an Attempt to Present a Full and Final Record of the Lives of the Three Sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë
  • Volume 2
  • Clement King Shorter
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    19 September 2013
  • First published in 1908, this two-volume collection was prepared by journalist, critic and Brontë enthusiast Clement King Shorter (1857–1926), following the appearance of Charlotte Brontë and her Circle (1896) and Charlotte Brontë and her Sisters (1905). Building on the research of Elizabeth Gaskell, the volumes document through correspondence the remarkable lives and literary careers of Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49). The use of previously unpublished manuscripts and letters served to broaden significantly the scope of the work. Volume 2 covers the period 1848–55, addressing the deaths of Emily and Anne while offering many small, poignant details of daily life. Charlotte's marriage and final years bring the volume to a close. Presenting a wealth of source material, this collection remains a treasure trove for those seeking to understand how classics of English literature came to be shaped by the world their authors inhabited.

My Father as I Recall Him
  • Mamie Dickens
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    17 April 2014
    First published in:
    1896
  • The official biography of Charles Dickens (1812–70) was published in 1872–4 by his close friend and literary executor John Forster, and has been reissued in this series. Of the many other memoirs and reminiscences of the great novelist, this book by his favourite daughter Mary (1838–96), known as Mamie, is perhaps the least familiar. Published in 1896, shortly after her death, it gives a loving picture, based on her own memories, of the person whom she held 'in my heart of hearts as a man apart from all other men, as one apart from all other beings'. Mamie, who had taken Dickens's side during the separation from his wife, and acted effectively as his housekeeper at Gad's Hill, had compiled an edition of her father's letters with her aunt Georgina Hogarth, and this second act of piety gives an idyllic - perhaps too idyllic - account of daily life with Dickens.

The Works of Thomas Chatterton
  • Volume 2, The Poems Attributed to Rowley
  • Thomas Chatterton
  • Edited by Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    26 September 2013
  • Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) was only seventeen when he died of arsenic poisoning. Among his family and friends he was known as a versifier with a fascination for medieval manuscripts, but none suspected the true scope of his work. At eleven, he was already writing poetry, and by the end of his life his love poems, eclogues and forged medieval pieces numbered in the hundreds. They were to influence the Romantics for decades after his death. This three-volume collection of his work, edited by Joseph Cottle and Robert Southey, first appeared in 1803. Volume 2 contains the Rowley poems, for which Chatterton is best known. Ironically, they were never published under his own name in his lifetime: he claimed that the poems were transcripts he had taken from the work of Thomas Rowley, a fifteenth-century monk. The value of these ambitious forgeries is still underappreciated.

Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats
  • Volume 1
  • Edited by Richard Monckton Milnes
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    26 September 2013
  • 'To the poet, if to any man, it must be justly conceded to be estimated by what he has written rather than by what he has done, and to be judged by the productions of his genius rather than by the circumstances of his outward life.' At the time of his death, John Keats (1795–1821) was often unfavourably appraised, not only with regard to his poetry, but also his character. In this 1848 collection of his letters, the first of its kind, editor Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–85) sets out to show the poet's true colours through his personal correspondence. Adding insightful commentary and context, he builds up a portrait of an extraordinary young man. Keats' epistolary style is often humorous and salted with miniature flights of fantasy, but he is never far from the monetary concerns that dogged him. Volume 1 charts his early life up to 1819.

Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats
  • Volume 2
  • Edited by Richard Monckton Milnes
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    26 September 2013
  • 'To the poet, if to any man, it must be justly conceded to be estimated by what he has written rather than by what he has done, and to be judged by the productions of his genius rather than by the circumstances of his outward life.' At the time of his death, John Keats (1795–1821) was often unfavourably appraised, not only with regard to his poetry, but also his character. In this 1848 collection of his letters, the first of its kind, editor Richard Monckton Milnes (1809–85) sets out to show the poet's true colours through his personal correspondence. Adding insightful commentary and context, he builds up a portrait of an extraordinary young man. Keats' epistolary style is often humorous and salted with miniature flights of fantasy, but he is never far from the monetary concerns that dogged him. Volume 2 traces his demise and includes a selection of his work.

The Life, and Posthumous Writings, of William Cowper, Esqr.
  • With an Introductory Letter to the Right Honourable Earl Cowper
  • Volume 4, Supplementary Pages
  • William Hayley
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    21 November 2013
  • Successors such as Wordsworth and Coleridge admired yet overshadowed William Cowper (1731–1800). Troubled by mental instability, he retreated from both the legal profession and the woman he had hoped to marry, seeking out a quiet existence in the country. In spite of his struggles, he made a translation of Homer's Iliad, produced a considerable body of poetry, and maintained many epistolary contacts. This four-volume biography, compiled by his friend and fellow poet William Hayley (1745–1820), appeared between 1803 and 1806, bringing together selected letters and unpublished poems to illuminate Cowper's personal and literary life. Volume 4 (1806) is a collection of supplementary material, namely amendments to the previous volumes, additional letters and an index giving a short description of every letter's content.

Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith
  • By his Daughter, Lady Holland, with a Selection from his Letters
  • Volume 2
  • Edited by Sarah Austin
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    20 March 2014
  • First published in 1855 and reissued here in the second edition of that year, this two-volume work celebrates the life of the author, wit and clergyman Sydney Smith (1771–1845). A founder of the second Edinburgh Review, Smith is best remembered for his entertaining observations and witticisms. The work comprises a memoir, written by Smith's daughter Saba Holland (1802–66), and a selection of letters, edited by Sarah Austin (1793–1867). Together, the volumes offer private insights into a man who lived much of his life in the public eye. Volume 2 includes Smith's letters to his friends and contemporaries. Forward-thinking on issues such as women's rights and child labour, he shows himself in these letters to be a wit, critic and 'champion of truth and freedom'.

An Autobiography
  • Anthony Trollope
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    13 February 2014
  • One of the most celebrated and prolific authors of the Victorian era, Anthony Trollope (1815–82) requested that his autobiography be published posthumously. The two-volume work, first published in 1883 and reissued here in the second edition of that year, recounts his childhood, successful career at the Post Office, and multiple achievements as a writer. Well received by the critics of the time, the work reveals the incredible discipline that enabled Trollope to write forty-seven novels in the course of his career. Of particular interest to literary scholars, the reflections on his early life show how his unhappy childhood and his father's financial problems influenced his fiction. Volume 1 covers Trollope's education and early Post Office career, before discussing his first authorial efforts. Two of Trollope's non-fiction works, North America (1862) and Australia and New Zealand (1873), have also been reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.

Page 6 of 23