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Over the Land and Over the Sea

Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings

Edward Lear

Edited by Peter Swaab

Cover Picture of Over the Land and Over the Sea: Selected Travel Journals and Nonsense Writing
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Categories: 19th Century, Art, Humour
Imprint: Fyfield Books
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. May 2012)
9781847779533
£18.95 £17.05
Paperback (265 pages)
(Pub. May 2005)
9781857547597
£18.95 £17.05
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  •     Through the silent-roaring ocean
               Did the Turtle swiftly go;
                      Holding fast upon his shell
               Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.
        With a sad primaeval motion
        Towards the sunset isles of Boshen
                  Still the Turtle bore him well.
                      Holding fast upon his shell...

                                     from 'The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo'
       
    Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun.

    This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.
    Edward Lear
    Edward Lear was born in London in 1812. The youngest of a family of twenty children, he was largely brought up by his sister Ann. His first commission as a young artist, to make drawings of the parrots in the London Zoo, established his reputation as an ornithological illustrator and led ... read more
    Peter Swaab
    Peter Swaab, Reader in English at University College London, has published Lives of the Great Romantics: Wordsworth (Pickering, 1996) and essays on Wollstonecraft, Hopkins, James, and Gunn, and a life of Charles Lamb for the New DNB . He edited Over the Land and Over the Sea: Selected Nonsense and ... read more
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