The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV

Sun, 01 Apr 2007

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XV
With Variant Readings and Annotations

Edited by Allan Dooley, David Ewbank, Jack W. Herring and Paul D. L. Turner

In the 1880s, the aging Browning showed once again the remarkable versatility of his lyric and narrative talents. Ranging across eras and cultures, the books here reveal his late thoughts about history, myth, legend, faith, love, and desire. He had never been more popular, and the founding of the Browning Society in 1881 expanded both his audience and his sense of his place in English letters.

The first title in Volume XV is Dramatic Idylls, Second Series (1880). Taking his subjects from classical history, colonial India, Arabian legend, medieval sorcery, Jewish folk tales, and Greek myth, Browning startles the reader with the rapidity of his thought and the inventiveness of his art.

In Jocoseria (1883) Browning's subjects range across time and space from Hebraic legend to the England of the Romantics. Such variety helped attract new readers: Jocoseria was immediately successful, and a second edition was printed in the same year as the first.

Although Browning's next volume, Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), was so popular that three editions were printed in less than two years, this artful string of anecdotes and lyrics has attracted little favorable criticism. The materials—Persian legends and Arabic backgrounds—chimed with the wildly popular Orientalism of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, Whistler's Peacock Room, and Alma-Tadema's paintings. But the thought was pure Browning in his most optimistic vein, and not at all in tune with the growing pessimism of the day.

As always in this series of critical editions, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning%2C+Volume+XV.
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The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIV

Sun, 11 May 2003

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XIV
With Variant Readings and Annotations

By Robert Browning

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning%2C+Volume+XIV.
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The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XII

Mon, 01 Oct 2001

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XII

Edited by Rita Patterson and Paul Turner

A single work, the complex Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), comprises the twelfth volume of The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Second in Browning’s series of long narrative poems based on classical Greek materials, Aristophanes’ Apology begins as a further adventure of Browning’s young Greek heroine, Balaustion (previously encountered in Balaustion’s Adventure, in Volume X of the present edition). In a confrontation with Aristophanes, Balaustion defends her (and Browning’s) favorite tragedian, Euripides, whom Aristophanes had repeatedly satirized. Aristophanes offers an ingenious, vigorous explanation of his motives and values, but Browning ensures that Balaustion claims the higher moral and artistic ground for Euripides. To demonstrate his greatness, she reads Euripides’ play Herakles aloud, in Browning’s own translation.

Browning’s understanding of this play and its author, like his view of Greek drama overall, is both idiosyncratic and strongly held. He energetically takes up artistic and philosophical issues ancient and modern through his dramatized speaker. Many interpreters have noted that the charges against Euripides are parallel to Victorian critics’ complaints about Browning’s own works, and that the poet’s justification of Euripides constitutes a vehement defense of his art.

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning%2C+Volume+XII.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X

Fri, 31 Dec 1999

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X
With Variant Readings and Annotations

Edited by Allan C. and Susan E. Dooley

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume X contains critical editions of Balaustion's Adventure: Including a Transcript from Euripides and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society. Both published in 1871, these two long poems take up a pair of subjects that held enduring fascination for Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: classical Greek literature and the career of Napoleon III, Emperor of France. Balaustion's Adventure, which the poet characterized as merely a "May-month amusement," was surprisingly successful with the reading public that paid more attention to Browning after the triumph of The Ring and the Book in 1868-69. His first poem since the publication of that masterpiece, Balaustion's Adventure creates a charming and brave narrator who recalls in vivid detail a performance of Euripides' play Alcestis.

Browning began a poem on Louis Napoleon in 1860, but not until after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870 did he attempt a full-scale portrait of the French emperor. As an exercise in self-justification, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau falls into a familiar sub-genre of Browning's dramatic monologues. The most intriguing aspect of the poem lies in its biographical importance: the character and career of Napoleon III was a topic of sustained, sharp disagreement between Robert and Elizabeth Browning.

As always in this acclaimed series, a complete record of textual variants is provided, as well as extensive explanatory notes.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning%2C+Volume+X.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XVI

Mon, 15 Feb 1999

The Complete Works of Robert Browning, Volume XVI
With Variant Readings and Annotations

Edited by Susan Crowl, Roma A. King and Jr.

Robert Browning wrote Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day in his seventy-third year. The work is a capstone to the poet's long career, encompassing autobiography as well as influences bearing on the poet's life and career and on Victorian thought and culture in general. One of Browning's most complex works, Parleyings is also a work essential to understanding his genius and career as a whole. The Ohio/Baylor Browning edition offers keys to the complexity and interest of Parleyings through a definitive, emended text, full annotations for allusions both explicit and implicit in the text, and variant readings for the manuscript and all editions revised by Browning during his lifetime.

In form and structure, Parleyings is a series of seven poems written in Browning's own voice and addressed to figures influential in his development. The series is framed by a prologue and an epilogue, the whole amounting to some 3,500 lines. The poems are a formal contrast and a pendant to the great series of linked dramatic monologues in The Ring and the Book. They demonstrate the zest for innovation possessed by the master of the dramatic monologue in his ripe maturity. Interested readers as well as students and scholars of Browning will find a rich field of poetry and a critical mass of resources in Volume XVI of the Ohio/Baylor Browning edition.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning%2C+Volume+XVI.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

The Complete Works of Robert Browning Volume VI

Sat, 01 Jun 1996

The Complete Works of Robert Browning Volume VI
With Variant Readings and Annotations

By Robert Browning

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Complete+Works+of+Robert+Browning+Volume+VI.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.