"With its fascinating blend of poetics, historical prosody, and media history, Romantic Marks and Measures transforms the landscape of Romantic studies. Carlson's work is an important and original contribution to our understanding of a pervasive element of the culture within which Wordsworth's poetic development and reception took place and of how complex practices of 'marking and measuring' helped shape significant aspects of his poetic achievement." - The Coleridge Bulletin "his challenging and valuable book provides abundance of insights, large and small. She invigorates the study of historical prosody in particular, offering an important new spatial dimension to how Wordsworth marked and measured the sounds and shapes of his verse." - The British Society for Literature and Science Carlson's study of Wordsworth's cartographical imagination is a nuanced exploration of how this visual experimentation shapes his poetic lines. Her work is remarkable not only for the important contributions she makes to studies of Romantic print culture, but also for her uncovering of cartography as a site of visual imagination and playful meaningmaking, not just of disciplined, orderly knowledge. "Throughout the book, Carlson permits us to see and hear Wordsworth's poetry in exciting new ways, through sensitive close-readings and rigorous research into a wealth of historical sources. Investigating the notebook drafts of "The Discharged Soldier," the printer's copy of Lyrical Ballads, Lake District guidebooks, John Thelwall's scansion of The Excursion, and revisions and editions of The Prelude, she explores Wordsworth's major blank verse poems as sites of intervention-visual and graphic as well as formal and thematic-in cultural contests to represent Britain, on the page, as a shared landscape and language community. Carlson examines Wordsworth's poetry of "speech" and "nature" as a poetry of print, written and read in the midst of topographic and typographic experimentation and change. Within these diverse fields of print, blank verse was employed as illustration and index, directing attention to newly discovered features of British speech and space and helping to materialize the vocal and visual contours of the nation. At the same time, cartographers and travel writers published reconfigurations of landscape on large-scale topographical maps, in geometric surveys, and in guidebooks that increasingly featured charts and diagrams. In graphs of emphasis and tonal inflection, in signs for indicating poetic stress, and in tabulations of punctuation, elocutionists, grammarians, and prosodists deployed new typographic marks and measures to represent English speech on the page. Despayre in Praise of Suicide (Faerie Queene 1.9.In the late eighteenth century, British print culture took a diagrammatic and accentual turn.To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.The Red Knight Topples (Idylls of the King, X.454-76).Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in a Painting of “The Judgment of Paris”.Prospero Explains (The Tempest IV.i.148-63).Life of Life (Prometheus Unbound II.v.48-71).Lear on the Heath (King Lear III.ii.1-9).
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