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Description of  Wordsworth's Fun

022665219X pdf The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridges cottage, William Hazlitt recalled, He answered in some degree to his friends description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote- like . . . there was a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth. Hazlitt presents a Wordsworth who differs from the one we knowand, as Matthew Bevis argues in his radical new reading of the poet, this Wordsworth owed his quixotic creativity to a profound feeling for comedy. Wordsworths Fun explores the writers debts to the ludic and the ludicrous in classical tradition his reworkings of Ariosto, Erasmus, and Cervantes his engagement with forms of English poetic humor and his love of comic prose. Combining close reading with cultural analysis, Bevis travels many untrodden ways, studying Wordsworths interest in laughing gas, pantomime, the figure of the fool, and the value of play. Intrepid, immersive, and entertaining, Read more