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Letters Of William Godwin Volume 1 Hardb
Pamela . Ed(S): Clemit
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Description for Letters Of William Godwin Volume 1 Hardb
Hardback. The first volume (1778-1797) of The Letters of William Godwin includes scores of texts newly transcribed from the original manuscripts and given scholarly annotation for the first time. They record the personal and professional interactions of an original thinker who had a lasting influence on progressive movements in Britain and Europe. Editor(s): Clemit, Pamela. Num Pages: 368 pages, Frontispiece and 10 halftones. BIC Classification: BJ; DSBF; HBJD1; HPS. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 239 x 184 x 36. Weight in Grams: 784.
William Godwin became a leading public intellectual during the crisis in British politics which followed the French Revolution. The impact of his social theories was acknowledged by almost every significant literary figure in Britain for the next quarter-century, and his influence endured much longer in Europe. He married Mary Wollstonecraft, the early advocate of women's rights, and was the father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. All of his letters are published for the first time in this edition. The first volume (1778-1797) includes scores of texts newly transcribed from the original manuscripts and given scholarly annotation for the first ... Read moretime. The letters trace the development of Godwin's personality from his background in English religious nonconformity, through his early struggle for recognition as a gifted writer, to his years of fame in the 1790s. They illuminate his most celebrated works, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) and the novel Caleb Williams (1794); his intervention in the treason trials of 1794; and his relations with publishers. They reveal his intellectual and emotional mentorship of a succession of creative men and women. They chart his education in a 'new language' of feeling through his courtship of Mary Wollstonecraft, and bear witness to the shock of her early death. Godwin's letters reflect the cultural history of his times, and throw light on many other literary, political, and artistic figures. These letters record the personal and professional interactions of an original thinker who had a lasting influence on progressive movements in Britain and Europe, and is still widely read today. Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
Oxford University Press United Kingdom
Place of Publication
Oxford, United Kingdom
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About Pamela . Ed(S): Clemit
Pamela Clemit is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Her other books include The Godwinian Novel (1993), also published by Oxford University Press. She has published a dozen or so scholarly and critical editions of William Godwin's and Mary Shelley's writings, including an Oxford World's Classics edition of Caleb ... Read moreWilliams (2009) and The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I: 1778-1797 (2011). She has been a visiting research fellow at the New York Public Library, at All Souls College, Oxford, and at Wadham College, Oxford. In 2016 she was awarded the Keats-Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award. Show Less
Reviews for Letters Of William Godwin Volume 1 Hardb
Pamela Clemit's long-awaited and impeccably edited first volume of Godwin's letters gifts all his readers with a compelling new perspective. ... When all six volumes of these letters are published, Clemit will have established one of the core texts of Romantic period literary studies.
Graham Allen, English
Two meticulously edited and annotated volumes of letters by Romantic philosopher ... Read moreWilliam Godwin give great insights into the Romantic movement and the trials of the literary life in the late 18th and early 19th century ... What we have here are 700 pages of meticulously chosen, prepared and annotated letters, a triumph of scholarship from Professor Pamela Clemit ... Both volumes read like a thriller or a love story ... It is wonderful to know that this is just the beginning: four more volumes of letters are planned. I can't wait to line them up on my bookshelf.
Tom Hodgkinson, The Idler
This volume offers new insights into the literary, political, religious, and educational life of the late eighteenth century, resituating Godwin in a remarkable intellectual world characterized by religious and political heterodoxy. Clemit is an exemplary editor, tackling challenging archival material with assiduous care and attention. Her detailed and informative annotations shed light on the myriad personal and literary allusions within the correspondence. ... This volume ... offers an unprecedented insight into the life and mind of an avant-garde writer and intellectual.
Stephen Burley, Notes and Queries
The first volume of Pamela Clemit's planned six-volume edition of William Godwin's letters deserves the whole gamut of epithets that have come to be associated with her work: meticulous, discriminating, thorough, with a fine sense of the value of her subject.
Victoria Myers, Keats-Shelley Journal
This volume's detailed and assiduously researched notes are never intrusive nor tendentious and enable the reader always to grasp the full significance and context of Godwin's correspondence and provide a fascinating parallel narrative of modern British history's most eventful and dramatic decade. The Letters of William Godwin - Volume 1: 1778-1797 is an indispensable resource for scholars of the late Enlightenment and Romantic eras in British history.
Rowland Weston, Cercles
[An] impeccable edition ... Standard benefits of meticulous editing - collating textual variants, determining chronology, annotating documents, providing background and context for the edition - are accomplished so effectively here that they prove as useful for comprehending the significance of Godwin as the letters that occasion them ... Clemit's authoritativeness in this volume can be measured from ... the lightness of her interpretive touch, especially given the weight of her knowledge.
Julie Carlson, Romanticism
Pamela Clemit's biographical notes are exemplary, succinct, informative and clearly presented, and the editorial apparatus laid out after each letter often include substantial quotations from the other side of the correspondence, allowing readers to follow both sides of the exchange ... students of the period will look forward with great anticipation to subsequent instalments of this project.
James Grande, The Charles Lamb Bulletin
This excellent first volume of the collected edition of Godwin's letters, scrupulously edited by Pamela Clemit. ... Clemit's introduction to Godwin's letters does a fine job of situating him in the overlapping social worlds he inhabited, including a wonderful mini-essay on the postal services that sustained this wealth of correspondence. ... this first volume of letters gives a wonderful slide show of the years when Godwin's reputation was at its height.
Jon Mee, Huntington Library Quarterly
This magnificent edition will help recuperate Godwin for Romantic period scholars, and Clemit's careful and illuminating research is evident throughout. The exemplary annotations balance accuracy, valuable contextual information, and conciseness. The letters ... will enable scholars to open up Godwin's oeuvre in ways never possible before. Going by this volume, we have five fascinating and expertly edited instalments to come.
David Fallon, BARS Bulletin and Review
Pamela Clemit judges the tone and texture of her notes perfectly, so that the glosses to each letter are at once self-contained, engaging and accessible, as well as skilfully integrated into the volume as a whole, helpfully gesturing forwards and backwards in order to elucidate the interconnectedness of Godwin's acquaintance and thought.
Kelly Grovier, TLS
[Clemit's] editorial work undoubtedly adds greatly to the value of these letters. She has left scholars in her debt and whetted our appetites for the succeeding volumes in this series.
H.T Dickinson, Enlightenment and Dissent
Clemit's fully comprehensive edition will be definitive, judging by the meticulous editorial work demonstrated here ... a magnificent achievement.
David O'Shaughnessy, The Review of English Studies
immaculately edited
John Barrell, London Review of Books
[a] dazzling first volume
John Bugg, European Romantic Review
This is a magnificent, definitive edition of William Godwin's letters... We think of editions of letters as valuable research tools, and so they are. But I read this volume cover to cover for the story. It has an imaginative, psychological, and topical consistency... This deep-structure 'feel' for the 1790s, however, springs not just from reading Godwin's letters. Much of it comes from Pamela Clemit's learned, concise, and perfectly balanced notes... She is an editor of superb critical acumen... I am struck by her taste and tact... As a result of Clemit's great work, I should think that a good deal of fine tuning, if not outright revisionism or probes in wholly new directions, might become possible in scholarship on 'Godwin and His Circle'.
Kenneth Johnston, Review 19
Many of the twenty-first-century stewards of Godwin's legacy have formed a choir of assenting praise for Clemit's achievement ... The comprehensive contextualisation given in each letter's annotation stands out ... Providing, when available, the passages from the letters which Godwin is responding and which respond to Godwin is at once so instructive and so appropriate that one begins to fantasize about a world in which every publisher had the resources to support the strategy as standard practice.
Lauren Neefe, Keats-Shelley Review
Immaculately edited
John Barrell, London Review of Books
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