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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 1 85477 070 5 174 x 110 mm 524 pages |
WILLIAM HAZLITT The Round Table 1817 Hazlitt traces his origins as a literary essayist to Steele and Addison in The Tatler and, behind them, to Montaigne, ‘father of this kind of personal authorship...in which the reader is permitted behind the curtain, and sits down with the writer in his gown and slippers’. The fifty-two essays in The Round Table: a Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (twelve are by Hunt) are so diverse as to include Hazlitt’s emotive piece on love of the country and his diatribe against those who live in it. He corrects Johnson on Lycidas, praises Milton’s women against Shakespeare’s, offers the most perceptive of all criticisms of Wordsworth (the Excursion review) and provides the basis for Keats’s literary thinking, On Gusto. There are pieces on classical education, sects, Rousseau, poetic versatility, and on actors and acting. No volume of literary essays can claim a comparable profusion. £42 $65 All country people hate each other...There is nothing good to be had in the country, or, if there is, they will not let you have it. |
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