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The Ring and the Book (Broadview literary texts)
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Manufacturer: Broadview Press
Author: Robert Browning
Publisher: Broadview Press
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price: $32.95
You Save: $ ( % )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Broadview Press
Author: Robert Browning
Publisher: Broadview Press
Average Customer Rating:
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The Ring and the Book (Broadview literary texts) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781551113722
ISBN: 1551113724
Label: Broadview Press
Manufacturer: Broadview Press
Book Pages: 824
Publication Date: 2001-08-27
Publisher: Broadview Press
Studio: Broadview Press
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781551113722
ISBN: 1551113724
Label: Broadview Press
Manufacturer: Broadview Press
Book Pages: 824
Publication Date: 2001-08-27
Publisher: Broadview Press
Studio: Broadview Press
Editorial Review of The Ring and the Book (Broadview literary texts)
In June, 1860, Browning purchased an "old yellow book" from a bookstall in Florence. The book contained legal briefs, pamphlets, and letters relating to a case that had been tried in 1698 involving a child bride, a disguised priest, a triple murder, four hangings and the beheading of a nobleman. Browning resolved to use it as the source for a poem. The result, The Ring and the Book, is certainly one of the most important long poems of the Victorian era and is arguably Browning's greatest work.
Browning retells from a variety of viewpoints the story of Count Guido Franceschini’s murder trial. The Ring and the Book is a long poem in blank verse, divided into twelve books. Always beautiful and readable, the work combines psychological fiction with a twist of detective novel. However, Browning’s writing works on multiple levels; it can be dense with allusion, historical references, self-reflexivity and meta-fictional tropes, and a well-edited volume is probably more useful with his work than with any other writer of the nineteenth century. This same proto-post-modernity contributes to the continuing interest in Browning’s poetry.
For this new edition, Collins and Altick have used for their copytext the 1868-69 version of the poem, which includes the last corrections Browning intended before his death. The textual scholarship of this edition is extraordinarily thorough, as are the explanatory notes. In addition to a substantial introduction, this edition includes selections from Browning’s correspondence concerning the process of composition, and a selection of contemporary reviews and reactions to the work.
No other teaching edition of The Ring and the Book exists.
Customer Reviews of The Ring and the Book (Broadview literary texts)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Awesome
Review: I've just read some Amazon reviewers' responses to T. S. Eliot's poetry as testimony to his possibly being the greatest poet ever. Such an evaluation practically proves Eliot's insistent point about the cultural impoverishment of the present.
Indeed, Browning's masterwork may very well be the ultimate poetic epic in the English language, rivaled certainly not by Spenser, Wordsworth, and Pound but only by Chaucer and Milton. The fact that even the "trial of the century"--the O. J. Simpson case--did not produce widespread renewed interest in its literary predecessor and equivalent would produce surprise and disappointment were I not so aware that, outside of Shakespeare, the academic canon has been foreshortened (and engendered) to a tradition that begins with Virginia Woolf and ends with Sylvia Plath.
In "Ring and the Book" Browning takes the sordid event of an enraged husband murdering his helpless bride--the daughter of a prostitute and rescue project of a priest--to "explain the ways of God to man." The reader of the poem becomes, in effect, a "privileged" juror in the trial of the murderer, positioned through Browning's protean and powerful rhetoric within the consciousness of each of the principals before finally being enabled to glimpse the "truth" that affords meaning to human mutability and suffering.
The poem no doubt will remain in dust closets, largely unread even by literature Ph.D's. But there's little chance of its ever becoming lost. Like the priest-hero of the poem, a few priests of the imagination will ever so often make the poem's discovery and be lured into the quest of pursuing its singular meanings.
[A reader recently wrote asking me about this edition, which led to the discovery that Amazon often uses the same review for any and every edition! (Be careful about ordering used editions for the same reason.) I was referring to the Penguin edition, which is now out of print. Beware of the "Kessinger Edition," which is really no edition at all but a bootleg, an uncredited reprint. Moreover, it's the version that a search of the title is apt to take you to. You might try the Collins and Altick edition on Broadview.]
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The unknown masterpeice of English literature
Review: As an English major at the University of Pittsburgh, I was never exposed to this series of dramatic monologues. It's a pity, because when I finally stumbled across it, Browning went from being just another 19th-century poet to my favorite English language poet of them all, at one fell swoop. The Ring and the Book is based on a real-life murder trial in 17th century Rome. The story is told from multiple perspectives, changing with every new section of the book; we hear from the "Man on the Street", the murderer, the victim on her death-bed, and even the Pope. The details of the story are far too convoluted to explain in summary and do anything resembling justice to the book, but it can be safely said that once you've begun, you're in for a whirlwind ride through a carnival of a trial that makes the O.J. Simpson affair look like a parking-ticket dispute by comparison. The truly stand-out feature of The Ring and the Book is not in the story itself, however, but in the telling. Browning handles the English language like a virtuoso emulating angel's choruses on a Stradivarius. If the book suffers any single flaw, it is the simple fact that at times, Browning writes these lines almost TOO well, making it difficult for the reader to pay attention to the actually progression of the story, as said reader becomes entraced by the beauty of the poetry. (In particular, I consider Caponsacchi's description of the flight from Arezzo beginning at line 1152 of Book VI to be one of the best written passages in literature of all time.) Dramatic blank verse hasn't seen genius of this level since Milton wrote of the angelic Fall. It's a pity this book isn't more widely recognized and discussed, for it deserves recognition as one of the best-constructed poetic stories of history, and the pinnacle of 19th century authorship.
Review Summary: Awesome
Review: I've just read some Amazon reviewers' responses to T. S. Eliot's poetry as testimony to his possibly being the greatest poet ever. Such an evaluation practically proves Eliot's insistent point about the cultural impoverishment of the present.
Indeed, Browning's masterwork may very well be the ultimate poetic epic in the English language, rivaled certainly not by Spenser, Wordsworth, and Pound but only by Chaucer and Milton. The fact that even the "trial of the century"--the O. J. Simpson case--did not produce widespread renewed interest in its literary predecessor and equivalent would produce surprise and disappointment were I not so aware that, outside of Shakespeare, the academic canon has been foreshortened (and engendered) to a tradition that begins with Virginia Woolf and ends with Sylvia Plath.
In "Ring and the Book" Browning takes the sordid event of an enraged husband murdering his helpless bride--the daughter of a prostitute and rescue project of a priest--to "explain the ways of God to man." The reader of the poem becomes, in effect, a "privileged" juror in the trial of the murderer, positioned through Browning's protean and powerful rhetoric within the consciousness of each of the principals before finally being enabled to glimpse the "truth" that affords meaning to human mutability and suffering.
The poem no doubt will remain in dust closets, largely unread even by literature Ph.D's. But there's little chance of its ever becoming lost. Like the priest-hero of the poem, a few priests of the imagination will ever so often make the poem's discovery and be lured into the quest of pursuing its singular meanings.
[A reader recently wrote asking me about this edition, which led to the discovery that Amazon often uses the same review for any and every edition! (Be careful about ordering used editions for the same reason.) I was referring to the Penguin edition, which is now out of print. Beware of the "Kessinger Edition," which is really no edition at all but a bootleg, an uncredited reprint. Moreover, it's the version that a search of the title is apt to take you to. You might try the Collins and Altick edition on Broadview.]
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The unknown masterpeice of English literature
Review: As an English major at the University of Pittsburgh, I was never exposed to this series of dramatic monologues. It's a pity, because when I finally stumbled across it, Browning went from being just another 19th-century poet to my favorite English language poet of them all, at one fell swoop. The Ring and the Book is based on a real-life murder trial in 17th century Rome. The story is told from multiple perspectives, changing with every new section of the book; we hear from the "Man on the Street", the murderer, the victim on her death-bed, and even the Pope. The details of the story are far too convoluted to explain in summary and do anything resembling justice to the book, but it can be safely said that once you've begun, you're in for a whirlwind ride through a carnival of a trial that makes the O.J. Simpson affair look like a parking-ticket dispute by comparison. The truly stand-out feature of The Ring and the Book is not in the story itself, however, but in the telling. Browning handles the English language like a virtuoso emulating angel's choruses on a Stradivarius. If the book suffers any single flaw, it is the simple fact that at times, Browning writes these lines almost TOO well, making it difficult for the reader to pay attention to the actually progression of the story, as said reader becomes entraced by the beauty of the poetry. (In particular, I consider Caponsacchi's description of the flight from Arezzo beginning at line 1152 of Book VI to be one of the best written passages in literature of all time.) Dramatic blank verse hasn't seen genius of this level since Milton wrote of the angelic Fall. It's a pity this book isn't more widely recognized and discussed, for it deserves recognition as one of the best-constructed poetic stories of history, and the pinnacle of 19th century authorship.