Born in 1812 : Edward Lear, Robert Browning and Charles Dickens. A Reader’s Story

• Autor(a) principal: Boucherie, Marijke
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/27914
• topic: Lear, Edward, 1812-1888 - Crítica e interpretação; Browning, Robert, 1812-1889 - Crítica e interpretação; Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 - Crítica e interpretação; T. S. Eliot; Joyce, James, 1882-1941

Struck by the coincidence of the bicentenaries in 2012 of Edward Lear, Robert Browning and Charles Dickens, all born in 1812, I accepted the challenge, presented to me by a friend, to relate the three authors in a single text that would also include the ninetieth birthday of the publication of respectively Ulysses by James Joyce and “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot. My article uses the random element of a calendar year as a structuring element in a story of reading which shows the relationships between the five authors to be simultaneously prospective and retrospective. My conclusion is that the five authors, be they canonical poets and novelists, or “nonsense” poets and popular authors ultimately are all wordsmiths whose art is simultaneously time-bound and universal.