Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian visual world

"The first of eight volumes of Hopkins's Collected Works to be published, Oxford Essays and Notes presents a remarkable cache of previously unpublished papers, including forty-five essays which Hopkins produced during his undergraduate career at Oxford (1863-1867), only seven of which were reproduced in the 1959 edition of Journals and Papers. Topics range from Platonic philosophy to theories of the imagination, from ancient history to then-contemporary politics and voting rights. Also included are notes from a commonplace book, a remarkable 'dialogue' about aesthetics (featuring a fictionalized John Ruskin figure), and the lecture notes Hopkins prepared in the winter of 1868 while teaching at John Henry Newman's Oratory School in Birmingham - writings in which he explores, for the first time, the theories of inscape and instress so central to his poetic practice. The edition is fully annotated and provides a detailed introduction that situates historically Hopkins's academic and creative efforts."--Jacket.