The Poetical Works of Robert Browning: Volume VIII. The Ring and the Book, Books V-VIII

Sampul Depan
Clarendon Press, 2001 - 424 halaman
In old age, Browning always referred people to The Ring and the Book as his finest achievement. This is the second of the three volumes of the Oxford edition presenting this great Italian murder-story, including the monologues of the villain, the aristocrat Guido Franceschini, Pompilia his abused wife, and Caponsacchi, the priest who tries to rescue her from death. The commentary, at the bottom of each page, elucidates Browning's creative and sometimes challenging use of language with reference to his correspondence, his historical sources, and his own rich experience of Italy. Previously unidentified allusions are fully explained, and a newly discovered source from a seventeenth-century Italian chronicle is presented for the first time (in Appendix B), allowing further insight into Browning's engagement with history. The copy text of 1888-9 has numerous emendations to its punctuation, both those authorized by the poet in the last year of his life and those resulting from corrected compositors' errors, and these, combined with fourteen emendations to substantives, produce a text as near as possible to Browning's final intentions.

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INTRODUCTION TO BOOK V
3
INTRODUCTION TO BOOK VI ΙΟΙ
101
INTRODUCTION TO BOOK VII
203
INTRODUCTION TO BOOK VIII
292
APPENDICES
387
E Compositors
400
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Tentang pengarang (2001)

Robert Browning was the son of a well-to-do clerk in the Bank of England. He was educated by private tutors and from his own reading in his father's library and elsewhere. Browning's first publication was Pauline (1833). The work made no stir at all. The following year Browning went to St. Petersburg and from there to Italy. On his return to England in 1835 he published Paracelsus, a dramatic poem based on the life of the fifteenth-century magician and alchemist. Browning next attempted a play. Strafford was the first of the poet's dramatic failures; it ran only five nights at Covent Garden in 1836. An obscure and difficult poem, Sordello, appeared in 1840. It did a great deal toward giving Browning a reputation for being unintelligible and for limiting the circles of his readers. The most important event in Browning's life occurred in 1846, when he married Elizabeth Barrett. The marriage brought a new lightness and openness of voice to Browning's verse during the next 21 years, resulting in the great dramatic monologues of Men and Women in 1855 and the epic The Ring and the Book in 1867. It is not that these are the most beautiful poems of the Victorian Age, but they are the most perceptive; they reveal more clearly the men and women who speak the monologues, and the poet who conceived them, than any comparable works of the century. In the last two decades of his life Browning produced only a few great poems but much were grotesque and fantastic. He turned, too, to translations and transcriptions from the Greek tragedies; in spite of some powerful passages, these were not highly successful Robert Browning died in Italy in 1889. His body lies in Westminster Abbey.

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