Duncan WU
Author
Duncan Wu is Raymond A. Wagner Professor in Literary Studies at Georgetown University. He is an internationally acknowledged authority on Romanticism and the world's leading authority on the life and work of William Hazlitt.
He is the author of twenty-two books about the Romantic period and Victorian poetry, including the widely used textbook Romanticism: An Anthology (Wiley); Hazlitt: The First Modern Man (Oxford University Press, 2008); The New Writings of William Hazlitt (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Wordsworth's Poets (Carcanet; 2003). He lives in McLean, Virginia.
His anthology Dog-eared - Poems About Humanity's Best Friend was published by Basic Books in the US in 2020.
His poetry collection, Origin Myths will be published by Shearsman Books in 2025.
The fifth edition of his seminal Romanticism will be published by Wiley in 2025.
LATEST RELEASE
Dog-eared by Duncan Wu
Dogs are at once among the most ordinary of animals and the most beloved by mankind. But what we may not realize is that for as long as we have loved dogs, our poets have been seriously engaged with them.
In this collection, English professor Duncan Wu digs into the wealth of poetry about our furry friends -- who have been domesticated longer than any other species -- to show not only how attitudes toward dogs have changed over the centuries, but how those changes have been refracted through the prism of literature. While it's natural for dog lovers to understand their canine companions as whimsical, and to sentimentalize them, the greatest poets have transcended that impulse, and written about dogs in a way that engages with the more serious aspects of their lives -- and ours.
Dogs have, in short, insinuated themselves into nearly every facet of human thought. And to see them as anything less than of central significance in our cultural perceptions is to underestimate them. Rich and inviting, Dog-eared is a definitive, spellbinding collection of poetic musings about humans and dogs.
LATEST RELEASE
Dog-eared by Duncan Wu
Dogs are at once among the most ordinary of animals and the most beloved by mankind. But what we may not realize is that for as long as we have loved dogs, our poets have been seriously engaged with them.
In this collection, English professor Duncan Wu digs into the wealth of poetry about our furry friends -- who have been domesticated longer than any other species -- to show not only how attitudes toward dogs have changed over the centuries, but how those changes have been refracted through the prism of literature. While it's natural for dog lovers to understand their canine companions as whimsical, and to sentimentalize them, the greatest poets have transcended that impulse, and written about dogs in a way that engages with the more serious aspects of their lives -- and ours.
Dogs have, in short, insinuated themselves into nearly every facet of human thought. And to see them as anything less than of central significance in our cultural perceptions is to underestimate them. Rich and inviting, Dog-eared is a definitive, spellbinding collection of poetic musings about humans and dogs.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
by Duncan Wu
