Table of Contents

1. Introduction; Simon Kövesi and Erin Lafford.- 2. Poetry’s Variety: John Clare and the Poetic Scene in the 1820s and 1830; David Stewart.- 3. ‘Sweet the Merry Bells Ring Round’: John Clare’s songs for the drawing room; Kirsteen McCue.- 4.‘Sea Songs Love Ballads &c &c’: John Clare and Vernacular Song; Stephanie Kuduk Weiner.- 5.  John Clare’s Landforms; Sara Lodge.- 6. John Clare’s Ear: Metres and Rhythms; Andrew Hodgson.- 7. The Shepherd’s Calendar and Forms of Repetition; Sarah Houghton-Walker.- 8. John Clare’s Dynamic Animals; James Castell.- 9.  Multispecies Work in John Clare’s ‘Bird Nesting’ Poems; Katey Castellano.- 10.  Biosemiosis and Posthumanism in John Clare’s Multi-Centered Environments; Scott Hess.- 11.  Common Distress: John Clare’s Poetic Strain; Michael Nicholson.- 12. ‘fancys or feelings’: John Clare’s Hypochondriac Poetics; Erin Lafford.- 13. ‘A song in the night’: reconsidering John Clare’s later asylum poetry; James Whitehead.- Index.

About the Author

Simon Kövesi is Professor of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University, UK, editor of the John Clare Society Journal, and author of John Clare: Nature, Criticism and History (2017).

Erin Lafford is a postdoctoral research fellow in English at the University of Derby, UK. She is currently completing her first book, John Clare and the Poetry of Illness.