1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads

Richard Cronin's 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballards...cheerfully decenters the publication...whose bicentennial is its putative occasion...In a wide-ranging essay, Gaull brings a lively reading to Malthus's Essay that illuminates how its primary subject focuses a range of interests across the social and cultural landscape of 1798...Stabler wonders how to assay the parade of sufferers in Lyrical Ballards in the scale of sentiment and satire. It's a good question [a fresh and decidedly helpful approach] to a volume whose trickiest poems, such as Simon Lee, frame this dilemma: does this poet make ridiculous the figure for whom he is always exhorting our sympathy?' - Susan J. Wolfson, The Wordsworth Circle

'This is, altogether, a suggestive and diverse collection - and a strong inauguration for a hand-some new series, Romanticism in Perspective.' - Seamus Perry, Times Literary Supplement