Jack Stillinger

The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography is a book written by Jack Stillinger. It is a comprehensive analysis of the initial manuscript of the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, a prominent philosopher and economist of the 19th century. The book provides an in-depth exploration of the early draft of the autobiography, which was discovered in 1972, and compares it to the final version published in 1873. The book delves into the life of John Stuart Mill, his upbringing, education, and his intellectual development. It also covers his relationship with his father, James Mill, who was a prominent philosopher and economist. The author provides a critical analysis of the manuscript, highlighting the differences between the early draft and the final version of the autobiography. The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography is an essential read for scholars of philosophy, economics, and intellectual history. It provides a unique insight into the life of one of the most influential thinkers of the 19th century and sheds light on the process of writing an autobiography. The book is well-researched and meticulously written, making it an excellent resource for anyone interested in the life and work of John Stuart Mill.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Anthony Munday's Zelauto: The Fountaine of Fame, 1580 is a play set in ancient Greece that explores themes of love, power, and fame. The play follows the story of Zelauto, a young man who becomes obsessed with gaining fame and fortune. He is willing to do anything to achieve his goal, including betraying his friends and manipulating those around him. Along the way, he falls in love with a woman named Emelia, but his desire for fame and power ultimately drives them apart. The play also features other characters, such as the wise philosopher Archimago and the villainous Alcander, who add depth and complexity to the story. Munday's writing is characterized by its poetic language and vivid imagery, which bring the world of ancient Greece to life. Overall, Zelauto: The Fountaine of Fame, 1580 is a thought-provoking and engaging play that explores timeless themes that are still relevant today.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

In Romantic Complexity, Jack Stillinger examines three of the most admired poets of English Romanticism--Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth--with a focus on the complexity that results from the multiple authorship, the multiple textual representation, and the multiple reading and interpretation of their best works.Specific topics include the joint authorship of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads, an experiment of 1798 that established the most essential characteristics of modern poetry; Coleridge's creation of eighteen or more different versions of The Ancient Mariner and how this textual multiplicity affects interpretation; the historical collaboration between Keats and his readers to produce fifty-nine separate but entirely legitimate readings of The Eve of St. Agnes; and a number of practical and theoretical matters bearing on the relationships among these writers and their influences on one another.Stillinger shows his deep understanding of the poets' lives, works, and the history of their reception, in chapters rich with intriguing questions and answers sure to engage students and teachers of the world's greatest poetry.

Using the 180-year history of Keats's Eve of St. Agnes as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, Stillinger's book explores the nature and whereabouts of `meaning' in complex works. A proponent of authorial intent, Stillinger argues a theoretical compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of interpretive democracy tha includes the endlessly multifarious reader's response as well as Keats's guessed-at intent. Stillinger also ruminates on the process of constructing meaning, and posits an answer to why Keats's work is considered canonical, and why it is still being read and admired.

The first publication in the Grolier Club’s Fine Printing New Series, John Keats’s Letters from a Walking Tour reproduces 12 letters written during the poet’s tour of the Lake District, in which Keats provides striking passages on the mountains, waterfalls, and lakes he experienced on his journey and philosophizes on landscape scenery and the imagination. The edition also includes articles written after the journey by Keats’s companion on the tour, Charles Brown. Only 225 numbered copies were published of this beautiful edition, which was bound by Judi Conant in navy silk with a tan leather spine label titled in gilt, gray cloth, and a marbled board slipcase. Edited with a foreword and notes by the distinguished Keatsian Jack Stillinger, it includes a portrait frontispiece, map, and facsimile letter.

Stillinger establishes and documents the existence of numerous different authoritative versions of Coleridge's best-known poems: sixteen or more of The Eolian Harp, for example, eighteen of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and comparable numbers for This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, Kubla Khan, Christabel, and Dejection: an Ode. Such multiplicity of versions raises a number of theoretical and practical questions about the constitution of the Coleridge canon, the ontological identity of any specific work in the canon, the editorial treatment of Coleridge's works, and the ways in which multiple versions complicate interpretation of the poems as a unified (or, as the case may be, disunified) body of work. Providing much new information about the texts and production of Coleridge's major poems, Stillinger's study offers intriguing new theories about the nature of authorship and the constitution of literary works.

Most theories of interpretation and editing depend on a concept of single authorship. But literary works can and frequently do have multiple authors, sometimes with divided and even conflicting intentions among them. Stillinger explores multiple authorship in the case of Keats and his helpers who assisted in the creation of Isabella; John Stuart Mill and his wife in the writing of Mill's Autobiography; the author revising earlier versions of himself, as with Wordsworth in The Prelude; and the author interacting collaboratively with sources and influences (Coleridge in Biographia Literaria).

One of the deans of literary criticism in America, M. H. Abrams is Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of two landmark books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism, and general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. This volume collects the essays, written over three decades, which—together with his books—testify to his preeminence. The essays examine Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s innovations in their theories about the language of poetry; the prevalence, sources, and significance of a key Romantic image, the “correspondent breeze”; the pervasive revolutionary spirit of Romanticism; the defining characteristics and chief exemplars of the most distinctive poetic genre of the age, the “greater Romantic lyric”; the relation of Coleridge and Wordsworth to modernist poetics and literature; the philosophic and scientific backgrounds of Coleridge’s thinking; and the numerous manifestations of apocalypticism in the Romantic period.

In method the essays represent a combination of historical and biographical interpretation, explication of specific texts, and the study of sources, genre, and style; less formally, they represent the application of knowledge and intuition based on several decades of reading, thinking, and life experience.

Jack Stillinger's concern is with the words of Keats's texts: “I wish,” he says, “to get rid of the wrong ones and to suggest how to go about constructing texts with a greater proportion of the right ones.” He finds that in the two best modern editions of Keats, one third of the texts have one or more wrong words. Modern editors have sometimes based their texts on inferior holograph, transcript, or printed versions; sometimes combined readings from separate versions; sometimes retained words added by copyists and early editors (who frequently made “improvements” when they thought the poems needed them); and sometimes, of course, introduced independent errors of their own.The heart of this book is a systematic account of the textual history of each of the 150 poems that can reasonably be assigned to Keats. In each history Stillinger dates the work, as closely as it can be dated; gives the details of first publication; specifies the existing variant readings and their sources; and suggests what might be the basis for a standard text.