Knowing Edward Lear

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The proposed research will lead to a book entitled *Knowing Edward Lear* for Oxford University Press, as well as to a range of collaborations with the BBC, Harvard University, the Ashmolean Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Society of Literature, The Tennyson Society/Lincolnshire County Heritage Service, and other institutions. I will offer the first comprehensive critical study of Lear, examining his nonsense poetry alongside his natural-history drawings, landscape paintings, travel writings, correspondence, and diaries. Throughout, I aim to study Lear's achievement in relation to a broad range of scientific, religious, socio-political and cultural contexts -- contexts which emerge from within, but which also extend well beyond, the nineteenth century. My book's governing line of enquiry concerns Lear's conflicted relationships with different forms of knowledge, and his fascination with how knowledge itself might be conceived and valued. Although he sometimes laments his being in a state of 'knowingnothingatallaboutwhatoneisgoingtodo-ness', this predicament also becomes an ethical stance; elsewhere he writes that 'we ought to know and feel the uncertainty of life continually'. So while Lear often seeks confirmation, clarity, understanding, another part of him wants to escape from knowledge, or senses that knowingness might be an avoidance of the range of experiences that life has to offer. A life lived in and through art is often, for him, a negotiation between these two impulses, and also an attempt to reconcile them. Acts of pictorial, musical, and verbal composition become not so much artifacts, but rather forms of activity, spaces in which to nurture a different sense of knowledge -- a knowledge Iris Murdoch described as 'an attentive truthful patience with the contingent'.A key feature of the research will be its combination of close reading with broader cultural enquiry. Sustained analysis of Lear's style and archival study of his manuscripts, draft pictures, unpublished letters, and diaries will be complemented by intensive historical research. I aim to show, for example, how the Lear family's dissenting background informed the poet's responses to contemporary debates about Original Sin, the Fall, and sexuality; how his early pioneering work as an ornithological draughtsman led him to ask searching questions about new forms of scientific and social taxonomy; how his chronic struggle with epilepsy and depression informed his interest in emerging medical debates about relations between mind and body; and how his travels across Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East helped to shape his enquiries into the politics of empire. One particularly original aspect of the research is my revealing of connections across the tremendous range of Lear's work. His 'Book of Nonsense' has never been out of print since it was first published in 1846, but that year was significant for Lear in other ways too: he published an innovative travel book, and he was also chosen by Queen Victoria to be her personal drawing master. Lear was in touch with many luminaries of the age -- from Charles Darwin to the Viceroy of India, from Tennyson to Ruskin and the members of Pre-Raphaelite circle. My research breaks new ground by showing the effect these relationships had on his work.My book's final section maps Lear's legacy, largely uncharted in previous scholarship, from the beginnings of the modernist experiment to the present moment -- roughly, from T. S. Eliot's telling Stravinsky that Lear should be read alongside Mallarmé, to John Ashbery's recent claim that Lear is his 'all-time favourite poet'. Lear's achievement and influence, I argue, is part of a larger story about how modern writers have been increasingly drawn to serio-comic tones and forms as a way of reflecting upon the place of art in the modern world.