Böcker av Edmund Gosse

CONTENTSChildhood and Early College LifeThe Grand TourStoke-Pogis. - Death of West. - First English PoemsLife at CambridgeThe "Elegy." - Six Poems. - Death of Gray's Aunt and MotherThe Pindaric OdesBritish Museum. - Norton NicholsLife at Cambridge. - English TravelsBonstetten. - DeathPosthumous

Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), best known for his memoir Father and Son, was one of the foremost literary critics of his day, even though he had not received a university education. Invited to give the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge, he developed the materials for this book, first published in 1885. Gosse sets out his theory of classical poetry, analysing its rise in the seventeenth century in opposition to freer, more romantic blank-verse forms. The book became the subject of a famously excoriating forty-page review by Oxford-educated critic John Churton Collins. While Collins' estimation of the inaccuracies in Gosse's work was largely correct, the review went far beyond constructive appraisal and caused a literary scandal, though Gosse's reputation was not permanently damaged. This book and the controversy it caused form part of the story of English literature as it established itself as a professional academic discipline.

Thomas Gray (1716-71) was one of the most influential poets of the eighteenth century, and is probably best remembered today for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. In this biography of Gray, first published in the first 'English Men of Letters' series in 1882, poet and critic Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) delivers a sympathetic account of his subject, offering both a traditional chronological narrative of Gray's life, from his schooldays at Eton, through his travels abroad and his academic career at Cambridge (though he was appointed professor of modern history in 1768, failing health meant that he never delivered any lectures), and an analysis of his poetry. In the book's last chapter, Gosse laments the lack of recognition that Gray had received in England since his death: Dr Johnson is criticised especially for his writings on Gray - 'barren and meagre of fact to the last degree'.

Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) was an often controversial English poet, playwright, novelist and literary critic. He and fellow writer Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) became close friends, and Gosse eventually undertook this brief biography of the poet, which was published in 1912.

First published in 1897 (though the version reissued here was published in 1898 in the series Short Histories of the Literatures of the World), this book documents English literature from Chaucer to Tennyson. Rather than focusing on the biographical and historical aspects, Gosse concentrates instead on literary technique and form.

Edmund Gosse wrote of his account of his life, "This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs." Father and Son remains one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it, Edmund Gosse recounts, with humor and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles to forge his own identity despite the loving control of his father. His work is a key document of the crisis of faith and doubt and a penetrating exploration of the impact of evolutionary science. An astute, well-observed, and moving portrait of the tensions of family life, Father and Son remains a classic of twentieth-century literature. This edition contains an illuminating introduction, and provides a series of fascinating appendices including extracts from Philip Gosse's Omphalos and Edmund Gosse's harrowing account of his wife's death from breast cancer.

Published in 1889, Gosse's study of English literature from 1660 to 1780 was commissioned by Macmillan as the third volume in a series of literary histories. It was a landmark in a relatively new field of academic study, popular and accessible, providing an enthusiastic and wide-ranging introduction to the period.

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.