Richard Gravil 1940 - 2019
About Dr. Richard Gravil taught at the University of Victoria, B.C., the University of Lodz, Poland and the University of Otago, New Zealand. He concluded his teaching career as Course Leader of the University of Exeter MA in Anglo-American Literary Relations.
He was co-founder of the ground-breaking journal, Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations was Chairman of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation. He edited The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth which was published in 2015.
The Wordsworth Conference Foundation
Richard Gravil, was the Chair and founder of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation
Richard, working together with Nick Roe, who formed the Conference Foundation, wrote its bylaws, and restructured the summer conference so that it could continue and be economically viable to support the Wordsworth Trust. Richard took the conference to Rydal Hall from its original Forest Side venue in Grasmere. Richard’s Romantic Dialogues, based largely on lectures and papers that he delivered at this conference, is still recognized as a seminal work in Transatlantic studies, and what used to be “an oddly neglected academic field” has now become mainstream.
”I think most of us will remember Richard, with his cap and his wooden stick, as the leader of our walks, whether the early-morning strolls up to Rydal Cave and the Upper Falls, or the vigorous Wainwrights that fill up our afternoons and make the Wordsworth conference like none other in the world.”
Bruce Graver
Richard Gravil, died suddenly on a mountainside in Majorca. He is fondly remembered.
EDITED COLLECTIONSWordsworth: The Prelude. Casebook. Edited with W. J. Harvey. Macmillan, 1972
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels. Casebook. Macmillan, 1974.
Coleridge’s Imagination: Essays in Memory of Pete Laver. Edited with Lucy Newlyn and Nicolas Roe. Cambridge University Press, 1986. 'An attractive and stimulating anthology of critical essays' —Peter Morgan, English Studies. 'These papers are all full of interest, and, whether by accident or editorial design, ... gratifyingly interconnected or contrasted.' —W. J. B. Owen, Review of English Studies.
The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland. Edited with Molly Lefebure. Macmillan, 1990. 'The Coleridge Connection' is much more than a case history of one man's compulsion to create vicarious selves. It is an attempt to account for the variety of those selves, and for the different kinds of creative "symbiosis" which each relationship involved'. ' —Lucy Newlyn
Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel. In Memory of Bill Ruddick. Ashgate, 2001. 'The issues raised by this collection are such that it calls in return for another volume of discussion rather than a brief review. Equally, it could serve well as the core text for a seminar on all these issues in the novel...' —John Beer, Charles Lamb Bulletin
The Republic of Poetry: Anglo-American Continuities from Bradstreet to Postmodernity. A Special Double-Issue of Symbiosis, April 2003.
Essays‘Wordsworth’s Ontology of Love in The Prelude’, Critical Quarterly, 16:3 (1974): 231–49.
‘Romantic Irony and Existential Engagement: Continental Theory and English Poetry’. Acta Universitatis Lódziensis, 66 (1980): 3–26.
‘Lyrical Ballads (1798): Wordsworth as Ironist’. Critical Quarterly, 24:4 (1982): 39–57. [Revised in Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 2003]
‘Wordsworth's Second Selves: Hill, Heaney, Hughes and some Contemporaries’, The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 14, No.4 (1983).
‘Imagining Wordsworth: 1797-1807-1817’. In Gravil, Newlyn and Roe, eds, Coleridge’s Imagination, CUP, pp. 129–142.
‘"Some Other Being": Wordsworth in The Prelude’. In The French Revolution in English Art and Literature, ed. J. R. Watson, The Year’s Work in English Studies 19 (1989):127–143. Collected in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, Detroit, 1993.
‘"Knowledge not Purchased with the Loss of Power": Pestalozzi and the "spots of time."’ European Romantic Review 8:3 (Summer, 1997): 231–61.
‘James Fenimore Cooper and the Spectre of Edmund Burke.’ Romanticism on the Net. 14 (May 1999). Online. Internet.
‘Incautious utterance’? ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘The System of Nature’. Romanticism, 6.1 (Spring 2000) pp. 35–54. [Revised in Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 2003].
‘Regicide and Ethnic Cleansing: Fenimore Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish.’ Symbiosis, 4.2 (October 2000).
‘Negotiating Mary Barton’. In Richard Gravil, ed., Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel. London and Vermont: Ashgate, 2001.
‘The Androgyny of Bleak House’. In Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the English Novel. London and Vermont: Ashgate, 2001.
'Emily Dickinson (and Walt Whitman): The Escape from Locksley Hall', in The Republic of Poetry: Anglo-American Continuities from Bradstreet to Postmodernity. A special issue of Symbiosis, 7.1 (April 2003).
‘The Wordsworthian Metamorphosis of Natty Bumppo’, in Joel Pace and Matthew Scott, eds, Wordsworth in American Literary Culture, Palgrave, 2005.
'The Somerset Sound: or, "the Darling Child of Speech"' [on Thelwall as poet] The Coleridge Bulletin, n.s. 26 (Winter 2005), 1–21.
‘"The Sunless Land": Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Virgil and Ossian'. For Mary Wedd. Charles Lamb Bulletin n.s. 136 (October 2006) pp.113-130.
'The first 'Poem to Coleridge': a dialogic reading of Wordsworth's Intimations'. Humanities-Ebooks Essays Online. 2007.
'Is The Excursion a Metrical Novel?' In Grasmere 2010: Selected Essays from the Wordsworth Summer Conference. Humanities-Ebooks, 2010.
