Description

This, the first large-scale biography of Thomson for forty years, is a companion volume to Professor Sambrook's highly praised, definitive edition of Thomson's poetical works in the Oxford English Texts series. Maintaining an even balance between biography, history, and literary criticism, this new Life provides the fullest available critical analysis of the whole body of Thomson's poems and plays. It adds some new and vivid touches to the familiar personal portrait of the good-natured, sentimental, indolent poet and also reveals his involvement in politics far more thoroughly and coherently than any earlier study of the poet. Providing a vivid portrait of the poet in his social, cultural, and political setting, James Thomson: A Life will be of interest to readers of eighteenth-century literature.