First edition, first printing. Original green cloth lettered in gilt to the spine. In the dustwrapper designed by Ken Carroll which reproduces John Sell Cotman's painting 'Ploughed Field'. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Light rubbing to spine tips. In the near-fine dustwrapper, with a touch of rubbing to spine tips and upper corners. A nice copy.
Published to mark the bicentenary of John Clare's birth the previous year, this landmark collection of critical essays examines the poet's work in the varied contexts suggested by the title (landscapes and botany, politics, madness, Clare and the critics, his importance as a poetic precursor, among others). As well as essays by the editors, the exemplary cast of contributors include Mark Storey, Seamus Heaney, John Lucas, and Roy Porter. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Clare scholar, Geoffrey Summerfield, who initiated the volume, but died before its completion. "The force of [the essays] lies in their sensitivity to the hesitancies and subversions of Clare's text, its resistance to category and taxonomy. Instead of any sense of stable imaginative position or coherent vision, the elusive shifts of process, change, and displacement in his writing are here persuasively highlighted." (Tim Chilcott, 'The Review of English Studies', August, 1996),
Stock code: 26482
£30