Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Poems of Robert Browning: Volume Five: The Ring and the Book, Books 1-6

The Poems of Robert Browning: Volume Five: The Ring and the Book, Books 1-6

Woolford, John
Karlin, Daniel
Phelan, Joseph

Paperback

Series: Longman Annotated English Poets

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 1032160446
ISBN13: 9781032160443
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Apr 14 2025
Pages: 750
Weight: 1.88
Height: 1.50 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

The Ring and the Book, published serially in 1868-9, is one of the most daring and innovative poems in the English language. The story is based on the trial of an Italian nobleman, Guido Franceschini, for the murder of his wife Pompilia in Rome in 1698.

Browning's discovery of the 'old yellow book', a bundle of legal documents and letters relating to the trial, on a second-hand market stall in Florence, sparked an imaginative engagement with this sordid tale of domestic cruelty, adultery, and greed which grew, through four years of arduous labour, into an epic peopled not by gods and warriors but by concrete, recognisably human beings. Fusing the technique of the dramatic monologue, the form he had made his own, with the grandeur of classical epic and the vivid realism of the modern novel, Browning created a unique hybrid form that allowed him not only to bring to life an entire historical period but also to reflect on the process of artistic creation itself - the forging of the golden 'ring' of the poem from the 'pure crude fact' of its historical original.

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