Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisThe edition brings together the known writings in poetry and prose of Edward Rushton (1756--1814). Blinded by trachoma after an outbreak on the slaving ship in which he was a young officer, Rushton returned to Liverpool to scratch a living as a publican, newspaper editor, and finally bookseller and publisher. In his day Rushton was a well-known Liverpool poet and reformer, with an impressively wide range of causes (the Liverpool Blind School, the Liverpool Marine Society, and many radical political groups). Many of his songs, particularly the marine ballads, were very familiar in Britain and America. In the later Victorian period, as a particular version of romanticism began to dominate literary sensibilities, Rushton’s overt politics fell from favour and he became rather obscure, at least by comparison with his like-minded (but much better off) friend William Roscoe. As the history of slavery abolition and other radical causes has come to be re-examined, the bicentenary of Rushton’s death, falling in November 2014, has suggested an opportunity to take a new look at his remarkable career and impressive body of work. There has never been a critical edition of Rushton’s poems. His own 1806 edition omits much, including what is his best-known work in modern times, the anti-slavery West-Indian Eclogues of 1787; the posthumous 1824 edition omits much from the 1806 collection while drawing in other work. The present edition works from the earliest datable sources, in newspapers, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides, providing a clean text with significant revisions and variants noted in the commentary. Unfamiliar words are glossed, and brief introductions and contextual commentaries, informed by the latest scholarship, are given for each piece of writing.Trade ReviewReviews 'A very welcome book and one which does justice to Edward Rushton’s remarkable and unique literary achievement.' John Whale'The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton (1756–1814), edited by Paul Baines and Franca Dellarosa’s Talking Revolution: Edward Rushton’s Rebellious Poetics 1782–1814 (a first-rate critical biography) taken together, are two volumes that enable Rushton’s work to join a large and sometimes quite riveting body of material at the intersection of working-class poetry and the literary history of abolitionism.' Jenny Davidson, SEL Review'Paul Baines’s The Collected Writings of Edward Rushton, is a triumph... space is given to Rushton’s poetry and prose in a manner that allows them to speak for themselves. Baines does not clutter the text with lengthy notes concerning textual variants, history, or glosses, instead confining these to a detailed but concise ‘commentary’ at the end of the volume.' Matthew Ward & Paul Whickman, Year's Work in English Studies'[This is] the first modern volume of [Rushton's] collected works (painstakingly edited by Paul Baines)... As Baines pointed out at the 2014 conference marking both the bicentenary of Rushton’s death and the publication of these books, the attempt to collect, collate and rationalise the fugitive poetry of a figure whose work was often ephemeral, unattributed or reproduced without permission on either side of the Atlantic was a formidable one. The scale of this undertaking is evidenced by the 102 pages of commentary that accompany the works themselves.' Ryan Hanley, The BARS Review, No. 48'[Baines] brings more attention to this fascinating writer.'Jeffrey N. Cox, Studies in English LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Abbreviations and Short Titles POEMS An Irregular Ode (1781) To the People of England (1782) The Dismember’d Empire (1782) West-Indian Eclogues (1787) The Neglected Tars of Britain (1787) Neglected Genius (1787) Poor Ben (1790) A Song Sung at the Commemoration of the Anniversary of the French Revolution, at Liverpool, July 14, 1791 (1791) The Fire of Liberty (1792) Seamen’s Nursery (1794) Stanzas on the Anniversary of the American Revolution (1794) The Tender’s Hold (1794) Blue Eyed Mary (1796) Elegy [To the Memory of Robert Burns] (c.1796) Sonnet [The Swallow] (c.1796) The Remedy [The Leviathan] (1797) Song [Mary le More] (1798) Written for the anniversary of the Liverpool Marine Society (1799) Song. From Hymns, &c. for the Blind (c. 1799) Lucy’s Ghost. A Marine Ballad (1800) Sonnet by a Poor Man. On the approach of the Gout (1801) Will Clewline (1801) Ode. Sung at St. John’s Chapel, Lancaster, on Tuesday last, being the Anniversary of the Lancaster Marine Society (1801) Ode. To France (1802) The Maniac (1804) Stanzas on Blindness (1805) To a Redbreast (1806) Solicitude (1806) Toussaint to his Troops (1806) On the Death of Hugh Mulligan (1806) To a Bald-Headed Poetical Friend (1806) The Ardent Lover (1806) The Lass of Liverpool (1806) Woman (1806) Mary’s Death (1806) The Halcyon (1806) The Shrike (1806) Briton, and Negro Slave (1806) Absence (1806) On the Death of a Much-Loved Relative (1806) Entreaty (1806) A Caution (1806) The Throstle (1806) The Complaint (1806) The Pier (1806) Mary (1806) The Origin of Turtle and Punch (1806) Parody (1806) The Farewell (1806) The Return (1806) To the Gout (1806) On the Death of Miss E. Fletcher (1806) The Chase (1806) The Winter’s Passage (1806) Stanzas on the Recovery of Sight (1809) Lines to the Memory of William Cowdroy (1814) The Fire of English Liberty (1824) Lines Addressed to Robt. Southey, Esq. (1817) The Exile’s Lament (1824) An Epitaph on John Taylor (1824) To the Memory of Bartholomew Tilski (1824) Jemmy Armstrong (1824) Superstition (1824) PROSE Expostulatory Letter to George Washington (1797) [Letter to Thomas Paine] (written c. 1800, published 1809) [Monthly Retrospect of Politics] (1810) Extracts from Letters (written 1805-1813, published 1814) A Few Plain Facts relative to the Origin of the Liverpool Institute for the Blind (written 1804, published 1817) An Attempt to prove that Climate, Food, and Manners, are not the Causes of the Dissimilarity of Colour (unknown date, published 1824) [Letter to Samuel Ryley, 12 August 1814] (written 1814, published 1903) [Mr Rushtons Remarks on the Slavery] (unknown date, previously unpublished) [Letter to Thomas Walker, 30 January 1806] (written 1806, previously unpublished) COMMENTARY Abbreviations and Short Titles Glossary Poems Prose Appendix One: poems possibly by Rushton Appendix Two: poems written to and about Rushton

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Book SynopsisPerhaps no great poet, in any language, has suffered more than Byron from being merely read about rather than actually read. As Bernard Beatty remarks in his introduction to this important collection of essays, the popular conception of ‘Byron’ still often approximates to ‘Rupert Everett with a limp’.Reading Byron is the product and summation of nearly sixty years devoted to studying and teaching his poetry. It argues that, far from being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Byron is serious, ethically orientated and rewarding to read. The book is in three parts: Poems – Life – Politics. Five new essays have been written especially for the first and largest section, which provides fresh perspectives on Byron’s major works. The volume continues with three of Beatty's lively lectures on unappreciated aspects of Byron the man, and three pithy essays on Byron as a complex, if not systematic, political thinker.While Beatty does not question the pre-eminent status of the ‘bright’ Don Juan, devoting a chapter to an unconventional reading of its final cantos, he argues powerfully that nineteenth-century readers, who responded on an unprecedented scale to the forceful poetic structures of the ‘dark’ Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, The Tales, Manfred, and Cain, were right to do so. Introduced by Jerome McGann (editor of the great Clarendon edition of the poet's works) and concluded in dialogue with Gavin Hopps (co-editor of the forthcoming Longman edition), Reading Byron is itself essential reading for any student or lover of Romantic poetry.Trade ReviewReviews 'This essay collection is a treasure trove containing the accumulated riches from a life of teaching and scholarship.' Peter Graham, Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Virginia Tech‘Bernard Beatty’s Reading Byron: Poems – Life – Politics offers a dazzling series of insights from a venerable Byron scholar… Beatty’s work is most distinguished across these three sections by its wonderfully refined close reading… Beatty thus achieves something close to his subject: a liveliness and a distinctive voice that is eminently readable despite the complexity of his thinking. I can think of few higher compliments.’ Jonathan Sachs, Review of English Studies‘This superb and thought-provoking book asks a lot of but offers a great deal to any reader of Byron. In Beatty's willingness to read Byron carefully, to seek and find in him ideas of depth and significance, while being able to laugh with him, we receive a blueprint for how to work with poets who, perhaps because and not in spite of their fame, have become more talked about than read. Reading Byron should become one of the cornerstones for anyone--student, scholar, or fan--who would go deeper and pay Byron's poetry the same attention that brought Beatty's work into being.’ Madeleine Callaghan, Review 19‘Beatty is intent on tracing in the poems what he calls a “Catholic trajectory”, a learning curve that takes Byron deeper and deeper into the recesses of the human soul. He offers, among other things, compelling accounts of “the darkness of sin” in “Lara” and the unexpected orthodoxy of Byron’s play Cain, usually characterized as a sceptic’s charter... Beatty writes throughout with enviable lucidity and expository grace, while allowing himself a few moments of the senior clubman.’ Seamus Perry, Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsIntroduction (by Jerome McGann)Author's Preface1. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: Types of History2. Acts of Will: Byron's Lara3. Understanding Manfred: The Sense of an Ending4. Cain: One Drama, Two Theologies5. Empty Spaces in Don Juan: A Reading of the Norman Abbey Cantos6. 1814: Byron at Albany7. 1816: Byron at Seaham8. 1819: From Venice to Ravenna9. Byron, Liberty and Licence10. Byron and the Paradoxes of Nationalism11. Byron as Political Icon12. Bernard Beatty in Conversation with Gavin Hopps

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Book SynopsisCan literature heal? The Poetics of Palliation argues that our answers to this question have origins in the Romantic period. In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature cures by making sufferers whole again. But this model oversimplifies how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. Poetics documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley explored palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.Trade Review'This erudite and beautifully written book stages a dialogue between historicist work on Romanticism and medicine, disability studies, and the emerging field of the health humanities. Starting from the premise that the Romantic period was the first to conceive of literature as the stuff of medical therapy, Pladek shows it was also the first to criticise a naïve version of that view. In five crisp chapters, she shows how writers as diverse as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, John Stuart Mill and Mary Shelley thought of literature as a palliative, not a cure, for human suffering. In each of these discussions, she reveals how romantic literature anticipated some of the most controversial ideas in the health humanities today, notably the notion that to be effective medicine must treat the whole person, and she also traces fascinating genealogies of a great many ideas in modern medicine that are assumed to have no romantic pedigree. The result is an interdisciplinary dialogue of the first order and a literary tour de force.'Neil Vickers, University College London‘The Poetics of Palliation offers a serious and expert engagement with the field of the health humanities as a legacy of Romantic literature and criticism. Extensively researched, it will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested the relationship between those two areas, as well as in the intertwined genealogies of therapeutic holism, the New Criticism, and certain strains of liberalism. A reparative reader in the sense proposed by Eve Sedgwick, Pladek maintains her commitment to literature’s ability to give and to model care, but without assuming that it can – or should – cure.’ Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley‘Pladek’s book reaffirms the importance of the Romantic period in its identification of the era as witnessing the origin of New Critical ideas of unity and wholeness in literature and therapeutic holism in the health humanities. It places the literature of the period center stage in debates that are still ongoing now.’ Sharon Ruston, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Therapeutic Holism: The Persistence of Metaphor2 From John Stuart Mill to the Medical Humanities3 ‘Soothing Thoughts’: William Wordsworth and the Poetry of Relief4 Palliating Humanity in The Last Man5 John Keats’s ‘Sickness Not Ignoble’6 Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s ‘Fictitious Condition’Works CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisDoes it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author’s ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process. Hughes’s extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book’s unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes’s techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes’s changing ideas about how poetry ‘ought’ to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes’s major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes’s poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century’s most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.Trade Review'The Page is Printed is the first book-length examination of Hughes to pay due attention to the poet’s complex and shifting attitudes towards composition, revision and creative collaboration. Drawing on authorship studies, archival methodologies and genetic criticism, and grounded in extensive research in Hughes’s papers, Smith provides the most detailed account to date of the workshop in which the poetry was forged. The result is a study rich in fresh and exciting insights into both individual poems and the oeuvre as a whole.'Alex Davis, University College Cork'An engaging and rigorous book that makes an important contribution to Ted Hughes studies. The Page is Printed will be enjoyed by scholars, students, and poets alike.’ Yvonne Reddick, University of Central LancashireTable of ContentsIntroduction: ‘transparent exposure of the poetic operations’ 1. The Professional Poet: The Transition from the Drafts of The Hawk in the Rain to the Process of Lupercal2. The Evolution of ‘Skylarks’ 3. ‘They wrote themselves’: The ‘Shock’ Composition of Ted Hughes’s Crow Poems4. Collaborative Composition: Negotiating Word and Image in the Drafts of Cave Birds and Remains of Elmet5. Writing Truth and the Truth of Writing: The Spontaneous Composition of Moortown Diary6. Birthday Letters: An Archive of Writing

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2022Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.Trade Review'Shelley’s Broken World is a considerable achievement: intellectually adventurous, with many unexpected twists and turns in the argument and in the material. Coffey writes with distinctive eloquence. The range of reading is very impressive, but I especially like the confidence with which Coffey draws on the whole of Shelley's output, from the grandest central things to all manner of usually unconsidered texts. The close reading, tremendously insightful on pauses and rhymes, is a constant pleasure.'Kelvin Everest, University of Liverpool'A major contribution to the rich field of current Shelley studies, Shelley's Broken World offers a strongly original reading of the poet’s work and thought as embracing "intermittence" in varied ways. Through illuminating readings of less discussed poems (including "Rosalind and Helen" and "Ginevra") as well as more familiar ones (Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, Epipsychidion), Bysshe Coffey unearths a Shelley whose poetry inhabits gaps, interruptions and pauses. This thoughtful, ambitious monograph, the first critical study to engage with the recently discovered "Marlow list" (a record of his books the poet left behind on departing for Italy in 1818), establishes its voice persuasively, striking out its own path with assurance while engaging generously with criticism since Shelley's death and taking on, impressively, the complex history of his text.'Michael Rossington, Newcastle University'Shelley’s Broken World brilliantly rips up what we thought we knew about the poet, so as to start thinking anew. With wit, erudition and conviction, Coffey probes a series of generative "limit-points" to Shelley’s expression: manifest yet non-palpable sensuous phenomena that resist reductive materialisms; the revisions and deletion of his compositional process; the gaps and omissions in the poet’s personal library. Bringing together the otherwise cloistered fields of prosody, history of the book and manuscript studies, Coffey restores to us to the freshness, vitality and elusiveness that define Shelley’s achievement.'Ewan James Jones, University of Cambridge'Once begun, few readers will wish to pause their reading of Bysshe Inigo Coffey’s dazzling account of the "pauses of matter and life" in Shelley’s poetry. Displaying its subtlety, intelligence, and generosity from the outset, Shelley’s Broken World seeks to do justice to F.R. Leavis’s notorious strictures on Shelley – which, Coffey shows, Leavis in fact revised toward the end of his life – by arguing that "Shelley had a firm grasp upon the weakness of the actual". The book does a superlative job of bearing out this claim. Along the way, it illuminates pretty much the whole of Shelley’s life and work, as well as a host of other figures from Heraclitus to Harold Bloom. I struggle to think of another book on Shelley that combines such breadth of scholarship, subtlety of appreciation, and critical sophistication as are so abundantly in evidence here.'Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge'This richly-documented and engagingly-written – indeed, elegant – book is a highly valuable, even innovative, contribution to the interpretation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings, English Romantic poetry in general, and the influence on both of philosophical, scientific, and earlier literary works sometimes overlooked, many of which have never been connected to Shelley or Romanticism as convincingly as they are here. It is, in addition, distinctive in Shelley scholarship in focusing on his openings of spaces, interstices, and silences in his work and their intimations of a fractured world where there are gaps between parts of it, yet where those parts are still turning out towards emerging connections, like words on a page. Coffey shows powerfully how these openings suggest states of between-ness and in-distinction that really lie at the heart of human awareness and its experiences of the material world, even though those levels are usually repressed in everyday consciousness. Such "concealed life in pauses and breaks" (Coffey’s phrase) is here brought forward, first, in older philosophies of both materiality and prosody that now emerge as influential on Shelley in ways we have too long ignored and, second, in his brilliant uses of the performative aspects of poems to call attention to moments of suspended animation caught between the dissolution and the renewal of thought, matter, and their relationships with each other. This process leads throughout to perceptive close readings of selected Shelley poems that are among the most revealing we now have, ones that general readers, students, and their teachers can apply to other works by him – and by some contemporaries and successors – not directly studied in this account. It is a pleasure to recommend an academic study that is at once a stylish "good read" and a provocative challenge for us all to examine Shelley the poet more carefully while, at the same time, learning how he expanded the possibilities of poetry in ways we have not understood until now.'Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona'Shelley’s Broken World is an exhilarating, original contribution to the study of Shelley’s poetry and poetics. It reads a series of passages from such seemingly disparate poems as Alastor, Epipsychidion, and the Triumph of Life with remarkable assurance and deft sensitivity to how the poetry is performed by and in the reader. Its goal is not so much to provide a reading of a particular poem as a whole, as to demonstrate how "various intermittences" – "poetic, cognitive, spiritual, bodily" – are a hallmark of Shelley’s poetic practice, and constitute a subject deeply in need of further understanding. These intermittences appear in both Shelley’s prosody itself and the thematics involving sleep, trance, madness, and death that the verse embodies and explores. Along the way, there are some eye-opening close readings. The splendid discussion of the title and opening two lines of Epipsychidion is in itself a revelation.'Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland'A fine study of Shelley’s airy arts of breath and pause, as diverting as it is scholarly. Bysshe Inigo Coffey has many new things to say about the poet’s extensive reading and the way it helped shape many of his greatest writings, and he traces the rich philosophical, religious, and scientific resonances of the poetry with great critical grace. Sympathetic and sharp-eyed, in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey offers a deeply informed and stylishly written account of the many ways that Shelley’s complex genius sought, in his own words "something beyond the present & tangible object".'Seamus Perry, University of Oxford'Percy Bysshe Shelley has long been known by poetry cognoscenti as the Marmite of poets. Carlyle (whom I hate) called him "Weak in genius, weak in character (for these two always go together); a poor thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being" and Charles Kingsley, a founder of Muscular Christianity, compared "the increase of Shelley-reading in Britain in the 1850s to another growing female addiction, the secret sipping of eau-de-cologne". Bysshe Inigo Coffey is without doubt an admirer, who sees Shelley’s poetic intelligence and sensuous experience in harmony like no other with an especially endearing "grasp upon the weakness of the actual". Through new research in the "Marlow List" Coffey meticulously places Shelley in his philosophical and scientific milieux, tracing Shelley’s reading in Kant and Rousseau as well as in medicine, geophysics, astronomy, anatomy and the life sciences. This is a work of scholarly elegance as well as depth on matters of pointing and crux, of "great, last fragments", through the full range of Shelley’s poetry but especially Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, and Epipsychidion.' Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter'This book explores inter alia how the dissolution of the boundary between mind and matter is expressed by Shelley in his dissolution of the boundary between philosophy and poetry. In this he resembles Lucretius, one of numerous poetic, scientific, and philosophical influences on Shelley presented by Coffey with rigorous scholarship. The eloquent passion of his book leaves us with the sense that Shelley was grappling with fundamental problems, and their solutions through poetic imagination, that - even if they no longer concern us - certainly should do.'Richard Seaford, University of Exeter'Shelley’s Broken World is a piercingly insightful and gracefully written book that both widens and sharpens our understanding of the poet’s intellectual and poetic engagement with the world. Bysshe Coffey has that rare talent: an ability to combine rigorous historical research with a sensitive, finely tuned ear for poetry. In this sophisticated study, Coffey shows how the pauses, fractures, absences, and breaks in Shelley’s canon are momentous. These textual spaces reflect and express the poet's thinking about politics, society, and human life in general. This book sets new standards in Shelley studies and indeed, Romantic studies.'Corinna Wagner, University of Exeter'Shelley was a polymath, and in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey provides one of the best attempts to comprehend the range, sophistication, and meaning of the poet’s mind. Coffey’s mastery of Shelley’s poetry and its contexts is remarkable, and, more importantly, he provides brilliant readings of how the two interact. The European literature and thought that inform poems such as Alastor and Epipsychidion are thoroughly explored, but Coffey is also adept at close readings which tease out Shelley’s sense of absence and vacancy enacted by form and metre. It is refreshing that Coffey manages to take the philosophical implications for any study of materiality seriously without succumbing to jargon or theoretical wandering. Furthermore, his book is part of a tradition, and he engages on every page with Shelley’s best critics and editors, while maintaining a confident and unique critical voice.'Will Bowers, Queen Mary University of London'This study should transform our understanding of Shelley’s work. Coffey writes like an angel, and he has an ear for the detailed nuances of metre and rhythm that is rare indeed; better still, he combines this gift with a painstaking archival scholarship and a deeply learned appreciation of the intellectual milieu in which Shelley worked.'Tim Kendall, University of Exeter'Not only is [this] a work of remarkable scholarship, demonstrating meticulous research and close reading and containing numerous archival revelations that will transform our understanding of Shelley, it is also an intense labour of love that realises the continuing vitality of Shelley’s poetry and philosophy for the activity of thinking and living. [...] It is an excellent conclusion to an excellent book. Characterized by an intensity and clarity of argument, a sensitivity for both the historical and the poetical, and perhaps above all a principled defence of the simultaneous weakness and power of thought, Shelley’s Broken World brings to life anew ‘the frail pauses of this simple strain’ (Shelley, Alastor).Robert Scott, The Review of English Studies'Bysshe Coffey’s Shelley’s Broken World is a broad-ranging study: one part old-fashioned history of ideas; one part monograph on Shelley’s heretofore underappreciated practice of bringing much of his verse to life within the pauses and “limit-points” of sensory perception, cognition, and prosody. [...] Coffey’s book will influence and enrich our understanding of Shelley’s achievement for a long time.'Michael J. Neth, Romantic Circles'This work is done with assurance by Coffey, in terms of Shelley’s relation to contemporaneous, and earlier, science, philosophy, and poetic repertoires. [...] This convivial aspect holds in a professional and not just thematic sense, as Coffey works closely within the Shelley editorial circle. [...] The provenance of the many insights in Shelley’s Broken World is impressively evidence-based. Coffey has an archival ace in the hole [...] able to pursue surprising investigations, and to shore up the grounds of several internal questions long held in Shelley Studies. At the same time, Coffey is a giftedly creative critic who can leap to his insights straight off. [...] Shelley’s Broken World’s greatest strengths are its professional content and its style, aligning scholarly argument to a temperament that redeems belles lettres through meticulous research.' Eric Lindstrom, The BARS Review‘Shelleyans will find much to enjoy and think over in Shelley’s Broken World. Coffey has a deep knowledge of Shelley’s corpus and the history of its reception and editing, and he shares this knowledge in an engaging prose style. He writes on neglected works, recounts editors’ debates about pointing, and traces obscure lines of thought weaving through the Marlow List with unpretentious delight. His close readings are thoughtful and judicious… gaps are full of possibilities.’ Steve Tedeschi, Wordsworth Circle‘Coffey shows how profoundly Shelley’s work engages with the philosophical, scientific, artistic, and cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Scholarly, thoughtful, and finely researched, Shelley’s Broken World presents fresh and invigorating readings of Shelley’s poems, employing hitherto unseen archive material. Elegantly written, this research monograph is an impressive achievement.’ University English Book Prize 2022Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Matter in the Margins2. Dynamics and Statics3. Their Own Eternity4. Intermitted Song: Alastor5. Kant, Purity, and the Devil: Peter Bell the Third6. Weak Verse: EpipsychidionCoda. The Broken World

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Book SynopsisThis volume offers the first fully scholarly translation into English of the Tale of Livistros and Rodamne, a love romance written around the middle of 13th century at the imperial court of Nicaea, at the time when Constantinople was still under Latin dominion. With its approximately 4700 verses, Livistros and Rodamne is the longest and the most artfully composed of the eight surviving Byzantine love romances. It was almost certainly written to be recited in front of an aristocratic audience by an educated poet experienced in the Greek tradition of erotic fiction, yet at the same time knowledgeable of the Medieval French and Persian romances of love and adventure. The poet has created a very 'modern' narrative filled with attractive episodes, including the only scene of demonic incantation in Byzantine fiction. The language of the romance is of a high poetic quality, challenging the translator at every step. Finally, Livistros and Rodamne is the only Byzantine romance that consistently constructs the Latin world of chivalry as an exotic setting, a type of occidentalism aiming to tame and to incorporate the Frankish Other in the social norms of the Byzantine Self after the Fall of Constantinople to the Latins in 1204.Trade Review'[The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne] is a fascinating text that will be of interest to a broad range of scholars including Byzantinists as well as anyone working on cross cultural literary and cultural interactions in the medieval Mediterranean.' Nicholas Morton, The Journal of Religious History, Literature & Culture'Agapitos captures every sound, rhythm, and movement with attention to the lyricism of the original language... The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne is a literary triumph and a solid step forward in the right direction in Byzantine and world literary studies.' Christina Christoforatou, Speculum‘Panagiotis Agapitos’ translation of the mid-thirteenth-century romance Livistros and Rodamne does justice to one of the great works of Byzantine literature through one of its great scholars. [Agapitos] restores the poetry to the poem, in terms of both its verse layout and the pleasures of its inventive diction and intricate structure.’ Adam J. Goldwyn, Byzantine and Modern Greek StudiesTable of ContentsPreface Introduction I. General issues 1. The genre of Byzantine romance 2. L&R in older scholarship 3. Textual history and editorial situation 4. Date, place of composition, primary audience II. Literary matters 1. A brief summary of L&R 2. Relation to the Komnenian and Ancient Greek novels 3. Relation to the Old French romances 4. Byzantine occidentalism? Exoticism in L&R 5. The ‘awe-inspiring mysteries’ of a poet’s art 6. Narrative and the organization of time 7. Narrative space and narrated spaces 8. L&R as an instruction manual on the ‘art of love’ 9. Eros, hybrid power and the politics of desire 10. Poetic language and the blended style in L&R III. The translation The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne Bibliography

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Book SynopsisEternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. It offers an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates, against the grain, the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the era: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The project's scope is two-fold: firstly, it analyses the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse and afterlife to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, it opens up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity. Every poet featured in the book seeks and finds their uniqueness in their apprehension of eternity. From Blake’s assertion of the Eternal Now to Keats’s defiance of eternity, Wordsworth’s ‘two consciousnesses’ versus Coleridge’s capacious poetry, Byron’s swithering between versions of eternity compared to Shelleyan yearning, and Hemans’s superlative account of everlasting female suffering, each poet finds new versions of eternity to explore or reject. This monograph sets out a paradigm-shifting approach to the aesthetic and philosophical power of eternity in Romantic poetry. Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘Demand No Direr Name’: Eternity in British Romantic Poetry1. ‘All is done as I have told’: Blake’s Eternal Prophecy2. Wordsworth: Sight, Vision, and Eternity3. Coleridge and the Hunger for Eternity4. ‘Heaven’s Brandy’: Byron’s Changing Eternity5. Desire and Eternity in Shelley’s Poetry6. Defying Eternity in Keats’s Poetry7. Hemans’s Records of Woman and the Eternity of Female SufferingAfterword: ‘To Open the Eternal Worlds'

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Book SynopsisThis book is about the intertextual relationships between the works of the Shelleys and the Brownings. While a lot of research has been done on the relationship between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Browning, virtually nothing has been said about the links between Mary Shelley and Robert Browning, and very little on the connections between the Shelleys and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Rieko Suzuki seeks to address this blind spot by focusing on three areas in particular: firstly, the way that Browning’s later poems reflect back on and re-engage with Shelley’s work; secondly, Mary Shelley’s influence on Browning’s early poems; and thirdly, Shelley’s presence in and influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s writing. In mapping out the various ways in which texts relate to other texts, the book also identifies a number of important thematic threads that run throughout the work of all four writers. These include theories of history and historical consciousness, providing a further dimension to the question of ‘influence’. They also include ideas about exile, gender, liberal politics and cultural heritage, central to almost all the texts discussed here, as the Shelleys and the Brownings, in different ways and in varying contexts, tried to negotiate the possibility of a more tolerant and resilient social, political and cultural environment.Trade Review'Rieko Suzuki has produced an intellectually engaging study which enhances our understanding of the literary connections and textual dialogues between the writings of the Shelleys and the Brownings, duly revitalizing our ideas of influence and intellectual transfer.'- Maria Schoina, Associate Professor of English Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki‘Rieko Suzuki's stimulating sequence of paired readings allow us to reconsider all four writers from perspectives both old and new.’ Jane Stabler, Review 19‘I would like to celebrate the fact that a book reconsidering the question of influence from Romanticism to Victorianism underscored by the notion of “coterie” should appear in the same year as the bicentenary of Percy Shelley's death.’ Naomichi Tashiro, Essays in English Romanticism'There is a tremendous amount of learning contained here, and most readers will find out something new from every single essay... Every page of this wide-ranging and deeply researched book uncovers an interesting connection or makes a telling point.' Brian Goldberg, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Frankenstein and Paracelsus2. Valperga and Sordello3. The Shelleys and Browning on Art, Aesthetics and Poetics4. The Cenci and The Ring and the Book5. The Triumph of Life and Fifine at the Fair6. Elizabeth Barrett and ShelleyCoda

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Book SynopsisWinner of the ASLE-UKI Book Prize 2023. The commons and enclosure are among the most vital ways of thinking about poetry today, posing urgent ecological and political questions about land and resource ownership and use. Poetry & Commons is the first study to read postwar and contemporary poetry through this lens, by putting it in dialogue with the Romantic experience of agrarian dispossession. Employing an innovative transhistorical structure, the book demonstrates how radical Anglophone poetries since 1960 have returned to the 'enclosure of the commons' in response to political and ecological crises. It identifies a 'commons turn' in contemporary lyric that contests the new enclosures of globalized capital and resource extraction. In lucid close readings of a rich field of experimental poetries associated with the 'British Poetry Revival', as well as from Canada and the United States, it analyses a landscape poetics of enclosure in relationship with Romantic verse. Canonical Romantic poetry by Wordsworth and Clare is understood through the fine-grain textures of the period’s vernacular and radical verse and discourse around enclosure, which the book demonstrates contain the seeds of neoliberal political economy. Engaging with the work of Anne-Lise François and Anna Tsing, Poetry & Commons theorizes commoning as marking out subsistence 'rhythms of resource', which articulate plural, irregular, and tentative relations between human and nonhuman lifeworlds.Trade Review'This is an excellent, highly original, and necessary study of poetry and radical thought. In tracing both the persistence (and permutations) of the concept of the commons alongside a probing reading of lyric poetry in the Romantic and British and North American postwar periods, Poetry & Commons makes anew the case for thinking about lyric in the neoliberal era.'- David Farrier, Professor of Literature and the Environment, University of Edinburgh'Daniel Eltringham’s brilliant Poetry & Commons traces the transhistorical relationship between a poetry of the common word and the continuing resistance to ongoing practices of enclosure, dispossession, and extraction. Few critics have so precisely articulated the conceptual range with which the commons is necessarily entangled: from a romantic-era politics of enclosure to contemporary ecopoetics; from land rights and the right to roam to the interdependencies of "earth’s human and nonhuman tenants"; and, ultimately, from the origins to the outputs of the Anthropocene. Throughout, Eltringham has his finger on the pulse of the poet’s temporally open practice of "commoning historical languages of resistance". Poetry & Commons constitutes a major expansion of our understanding of the literary commons.'- Stephen Collis, Professor of English, Simon Fraser University‘Through meticulous, expansive research and illuminating close readings… Eltringham’s negotiation of entangled Romantic and contemporary forms of enclosure and commoning offers an abundantly original, thorough and politically sharp analysis of both the cultural history of the commons and the kinds of conceptual work the commons perform in mapping the historically inflected relationship between human and more-than-human worlds.’ Mandy Bloomfield, Review of English Studies‘[O]riginal and discerning… Eltringham marshals an eloquent and superbly researched argument, covering the literary and social implications of the issues and controversies involved in land use, and this study makes a genuinely significant intervention in current debates.’ Roger Ebbatson, Green Letters‘Original, rigorous and timely, this book puts Romantic-era poetry into fruitful dialogue with post-war and contemporary British avant-garde poetry. In doing so, Eltringham reveals why the figure of the commons might matter now more than ever, in the face of market-driven, neoliberal forms of enclosure, entwined with ecological crisis. Eltringham compellingly demonstrates how we can use historical knowledge in the contemporary moment by tracing the ways in which recent poets revisit, revise and revivify ideas of the commons and practices of commoning. The book’s materialist approach offers an inventive take on some well-known poems by canonical Romantic writers, as well as introducing readers to a wealth of new poetic and contextual materials. The judges especially valued its meticulous research, astute in-depth analysis and illuminating discussions of both poetry and politics. But there are moments of humour and hope too. As Eltringham wryly points out, “sheep and poetry are uneasy companions;” yet his book amply reveals how such unlikely alliances might model productive forms of collectivity and resistance.’ Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (UK and Ireland) Book PrizeTable of Contents

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Book SynopsisThis study of the poetry and drama of Percy Bysshe Shelley reads the letters and their biographical contexts to shed light on the poetry, tracing the ambiguous and shifting relationship between the poet’s art and life. For Shelley, both life and art are transfigured by their relationship with one another where the ‘poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one’ but is equally bound up with and formed by the society in which he lives and the past that he inherits. Callaghan shows that the distinctiveness of Shelley’s work comes to rest on its wrong-footing of any neat division of life and art. The dazzling intensity of Shelley’s poetry and drama lies in its refusal to separate the twain as Shelley explores and finally explodes the boundaries between what is personal and what is poetic. Arguing that the critic, like the artist, cannot ignore the conditions of the poet’s life, Callaghan reveals how Shelley’s artistry reconfigures and redraws the actual in his poetry. The book shows how Shelley’s poetic daring lies in troubling the distinction between poetry as aesthetic work hermetically sealed against life, and poetry as a record of the emotional life of the poet.Trade ReviewReviews'Callaghan reads Shelley’s letters and their biographical concerns to illuminate his poetry, tracing the shifting relationship between the poet’s poetry and life. She shows that Shelley refused and exploded the boundaries between the personal and poetic by reconfiguring life events within his poetry and drama. The boundary between the poet’s life and art is a difficult one for a critic and often less useful than close textual analysis. Callaghan makes a case for the ways in which Shelley transmutes the personal into transformative poetry with Shelley’s understanding that ‘the poet man are of two different natures’ and that the ‘poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’, where truth and eternity clash.' Tears in the Fence'Callaghan is a confident judge and writer … an able close reader, whose readings are equally adept at handling the discursive tenor of Shelley’s often philosophically involved poetry and the intricacies of his metrical and stanzaic patterning, and a diligent scholar with an impressive command of the secondary literature on Shelley’s work. She is clearly unafraid of overturning critical commonplaces that have become established in Shelley studies and, moreover, she makes a compelling case for taking the early poetry more seriously on artistic terms than it has been so far. Shelley’s Living Artistry will make study of his correspondence much more central to future accounts of his work. Shelley’s Living Artistry is, then, a notable contribution to contemporary study of Shelley and, in particular, provides a useful reminder of the different genres and modes in which he wrote and the often taut relations between them.' Ross Wilson, Cambridge Quarterly‘A valuable, ranging and deeply informed contribution…to any reader sympathetic to neo-formalism, and indeed any reader sympathetic to Shelley (who can be as frustrating a poet as a brilliantly incandescent one), this study will repay attention.’Christopher Stokes, The BARS Review‘In Shelley’s Living Artistry: Letters, Poems, Plays, Madeleine Callaghan offers a stimulating and absorbing account of the way that Shelley self-consciously stages his artistic development in his poetry and his efforts to "[transmute] the dross of the personal into the gold of art"...In short, Shelley’s Living Artistry makes a convincing case for reading Shelley’s poetry "through the lens of the letters" so as to bring into focus important aspects of his artistry and develop "a fuller consideration of Shelley’s poetic achievement".’Jonathan Quayle, English: Journal of the English Association‘Shelley’s art, in Callaghan’s monograph, is living. It is not something that has been created or recreated, but rather like the statue of Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, needs only to be touched to feel its living warmth.’ Dana Van Kooy, European Romantic Review'This is a compellingly argued book, and it represents a serious and substantial addition to Shelley scholarship. What is particularly refreshing, however, is that Callaghan is not simply an expert scholarly reader of Shelley. She quite clearly loves his poetry and is not afraid to say so, or to reach for superlatives when only superlatives will do. It is this passion for the poetry and for understanding the depths of Shelley’s artistry that drives her close reading and animates her account of individual texts. Surely a poet as attuned to the revolutionary potential of reading as was Shelley would be pleased to have found such a reader.' Daisy Hay, Keats-Shelley JournalTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts1. ‘Painted fancy’s unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab2. ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna3. ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook4. ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo5. ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci6. ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry7. ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems8. ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of LifeBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisF.T. Prince (1912-2003) is now emerging as one of the most distinctive voices of twentieth-century Anglophone poetry. Born in South Africa, he came to England in the 1930s, where he studied alongside Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden. First published by T.S. Eliot, and celebrated in his day by poets as various as Siegfried Sassoon and John Ashbery, his poems have long intrigued readers with their formal experiments, Baroque influences, and intellectual puzzles. During his own lifetime, he found fame with the war poem ‘Soldiers Bathing’ (1942), and was known chiefly as a Milton scholar. However, this collection of specially commissioned essays sheds new light on his achievements and reveals his central place in the story of modern poetry. Enthralled by the canon, yet embraced by the avant-garde, he has influenced poets from Geoffrey Hill to Susan Howe, a unique conduit between modernism and the Movement, British regionalism and American cosmopolitanism. Yet his poetry is not merely of interest for its continuing influence on wider tradition. Subtle, original, and various, F.T. Prince’s poetry asks important questions about power, responsibility, and collective memory.Trade ReviewReviews 'Reading F. T. Prince, the first book-length collection of critical responses, emerging from a centenary conference at Southampton University, offers a welcome opportunity for reassessment and celebration [of Prince].' Tim Dooley, Times Literary Supplement'Reading F. T.Prince develops something of a consensus about which poems matter most. A good many works are discussed, but only a few recur repeatedly. This is an impressive collection, which helps to make further work possible.' Sean Pryor, The Review of English StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsChronologyIntroduction Will MayPart One: Styling Prince1. F.T. Prince’s Syllabics Derek Attridge2. The Intaglio Element in Prince’s Verse Gareth Farmer3. F.T. Prince: Truth in Style Peter RobinsonPart Two: Debts and Legacies4. Learned Poetry: F.T. Prince, Milton and the Scholar-Poet Michael Molan5. ‘We see all things as they might be’: F.T. Prince and John Ashbery Oli Hazzard6. F.T. Prince’s Overlooked Lustre of Rhetorical Language Todd SwiftPart Three: Bodies of Knowledge7. ‘My soldiers’: F.T. Prince and the Sweetness of Command Adam Piette8. ‘The completed story incomplete’: F.T. Prince and the Portrayal of National Bodies David Kennedy9. Fugitive Pieces: F.T. Prince and Sculpture Natalie PollardSelected BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis book considers William Wordsworth’s use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion. Through the iconographical approach, the author steers a middle course between The Excursion’s two very different interpretive traditions, one focusing upon the poem’s philosophical abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. Fresh readings are also offered of Wordsworth’s other major works, including The Prelude.Yen explores Wordsworth’s iconography in The Excursion by tracing allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth’s prose and poetry. He analyses how the iconographical images in The Excursion contribute to, and impose limitations on, the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth’s writings, particularly the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. Shedding light on a vital aspect of Wordsworth’s poetic method, this study reveals the visual etymologies – together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities – of five categories of apparently ‘collateral’ images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.Trade Review'Yen’s rich and fascinating study of The Excursion builds on Fiona Stafford’s recent revaluing of the local to focus on “the quiet functioning of local detail” at a linguistic and metaphorical level through mediated images of rural landscape. Yen works sensitively within the form of the long poem, with its extended passages of argument and reflection, to tease out “intratextual and intertextual recurrences” that resonate across the whole. Across five categories of “envisioning”; “rooting”, “dwelling”, “flowing”, and “reflecting” Yen pulls out the threads of allusion that link the language of the text into larger political events of the time, arguing for an iconographic power held in the figurative language of landscape. Methodologically sophisticated, the work both draws on and challenges the tenets of New Historicism so that, rather than displacing history, it seeks to awaken the history inherent within the allusive force of landscape imagery through a process of iconological interpretation. The writing is characterised by a remarkable attention to nuances of meaning, whilst the interpretation of political cartoons and symbols of the French Revolution grounds the argument in visual evidence. Brandon Yen’s study treats The Excursion with the respect it deserves as a major work of the late Revolutionary period.'Sally Bushell, Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature, Lancaster University.‘It is a crucial book for students of The Excursion, but its positioning of that poem will also revitalize study of Wordsworth more generally… Yen’s impressively researched book should prompt critics to return to The Excursion with fresh eyes.’ David Stewart, European Romantic Review‘An outstanding and persistent feature of the book is Yen’s seamless integration of the poetry into his prose. This creates a hybrid voice, at once presenting the poetry for reconsideration and providing an enlightening interpretation of it. Ultimately, through this hybrid voice, Yen emerges as an advocate for renewed and increased scholarly attention to The Excursion.’ Brandon Wernette, The BARS Review'The most ambitious, learned, wide-ranging, and important book on The Excursion to date, one that firmly establishes the poem as the central text in Wordsworth’s re-imagining of British iconographic tradition and his reconfiguring of the post-revolutionary landscape.' Alison Hickey, The Review of English Studies‘Yen matches the number and complexity of Wordsworth’s local details with his own. I found the iconographical lens most productive in chapter 4, where Yen explicates a political tension within the iconography of rural cottages.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Yen takes a risk in downplaying the literal in Wordsworth and in locating a “new direction” not in new materials but in new modes of reading.' Lawrence Evalyn, Northeastern UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of IllustrationsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionPart 1: Themes and IconographyThe Excursion, Paradise Lost, and Paradise RegainedWordsworth's IconographyPart 2: EnvisioningIntroductionCastles in the AirLight and Ascent‘Speculative Height’The Wanderer's RevisitingPart 3: RootingIntroductionOak, Mountain Ash, the Liberty TreeTwo Ironic ImagesA Cosmopolitan VisionPart 4: DwellingIntroductionThe Devon Cottage and the Lakeland CottageThe Cottage of the ‘Wedded Pair’The Widower’s CottageThe ‘Cabinet for Sages Built’Part 5: Flowing and ReflectingIntroductionFlowingReflectingBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWhat kinds of pleasure do we take from writing and reading? What authority has the writer over a text? What are the limits of language’s ability to communicate ideas and emotions? Moreover, what are the political limitations of these questions? The work of the French cultural critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–80) poses these questions, and has become influential in doing so, but the precise nature of that influence is often taken for granted. This is nowhere more true than in poetry, where Barthes’ concerns about pleasure and origin are assumed to be relevant, but this has seldom been closely examined. This innovative study traces the engagement with Barthes by poets writing in English, beginning in the early 1970s with one of Barthes’ earliest Anglophone poet readers, Scottish poet-theorist Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947–75). It goes on to examine the American poets who published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other small but influential journals of the period, and other writers who engaged with Barthes later, considering his writings’ relevance to love and grief and their treatment in poetry. Finally, it surveys those writers who rejected Barthes’ theory, and explores why this was. The first study to bring Barthes and poetry into such close contact, this important book illuminates both subjects with a deep contemplation of Barthes’ work and a range of experimental poetries.Trade ReviewReviews 'Roland Barthes had little interest in poetry, but, surprisingly, his occasional remarks on the subject and thoughts about literature in general played a provocative role, Callie Gardner shows, for poets in the UK and especially the US and contributed especially to arguments about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. Gardner’s lucid and wide-ranging discussion shrewdly illuminates the odd fortunes of literary ideas.' Professor Jonathan Culler, Cornell University'Callie Gardner's subtle and shifting account of how the work of Roland Barthes has been read and re-used by English-speaking poets since the 1970s is a tour de force that will long resonate with poetry specialists and literary theorists alike.' Dr Andy Stafford, Leeds UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: A Great Indelicacy • ‘Insular and Pragmatical Minds’: Barthes’ First Readers in English • Barthes and the Poets 1. Barthes and Forrest-Thomson • ‘S/Z’ • ‘Drinks with a Mythologue’ • ‘L’effet du réel’ • Poems with Footnotes • ‘After Intelligibility’ • Poetic Artifice • Conclusion2. Barthes in America • Robert Duncan’s ‘Kopóltuš’ • Ron Silliman’s Nine Poets • Bernadette Mayer’s Experiments • Lyn Hejinian’s Erotics of Materials • Conclusion3. Barthes in Journals • Approaching Poetry Journal Culture • Poetics and Art Journalism: New York and Paris • Barthes in the ‘Language-Centred’ Poetics Journals • Wch Way • Michael Palmer’s Barthes • L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s Barthes • ‘Code Words’ • Open Letter • Barthes in Poetics Journal • UK Poetics • Barthes and Oulipo • Conclusion 4. Barthes and Love • Reading A Lover’s Discourse • ‘Lonely Girl Phenomenology’ • Anne Carson: Nuance and Eros • Deborah Levy: The Suburbs of Hell • Kristjana Gunnars: Roland Barthes in Winnipeg • Gunnars’ Transition: Longing to Zero • Conclusion5. Rejections of Barthes • Rejection and/as Influence • The Signifier as Fetish • Barthes and Race • John Yau and ‘The Death of the Author’ • Queer Barthes • New Narrative Writing and Queer Subjecthood • Acker, Barthes, Bataille • Conclusion Conclusion: Nothing Better Than A Theory BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisWilliam Gilbert, poet, theosophist and astrologer, published The Hurricane: A Theosophical and Western Eclogue in Bristol in 1796, while he was on intimate terms with key members of Bristol literary culture: Coleridge published an extract from The Hurricane in his radical periodical The Watchman; Robert Southey wrote of the poem’s ‘passages of exquisite Beauty’; and William Wordsworth praised and quoted a long passage from Gilbert’s poem in The Excursion. The Hurricane is a copiously annotated 450 line blank verse visionary poem set on the island of Antigua where, in 1763, Gilbert was born into a slave-owning Methodist family. The poem can be grouped with other apocalyptic poems of the 1790s—Blake’s Continental Prophecies, Coleridge's Religious Musings, Southey's Joan of Arc—all of which gave a spiritual interpretation to the dramatic political upheavals of their time. William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism presents the untold story of Gilbert’s progress from the radical occultist circles of 1790s London to his engagement with the first generation Romantics in Bristol. At the heart of the book is the first modern edition of The Hurricane, fully annotated to reveal the esoteric metaphysics at its core, followed by close interpretative analysis of this strange elusive poem.Trade Review'Paul Cheshire is unquestionably the world authority on William Gilbert and The Hurricane. Based on extensive original research, this ground-breaking study will return Gilbert to the forefront of critical attention, locating him in relation to more famous contemporaries and setting-out for the first time his esoteric brand of Romanticism and its many affinities with more familiar Romantic authors and texts, ideas and concepts. Presenting its key text—The Hurricane—in full at its centre, the book fills a conspicuous gap in current understandings and opens numerous new avenues for further research.'Nicholas Roe, Wardlaw Professor of English Literature, University of St Andrews 'This is an unusual book about an unusual man. In his engagingly written, intensively researched study of the life and work of William Gilbert, Paul Cheshire illuminates the hermetic vision underpinning Gilbert’s allegorical poem The Hurricane, and widens its scope to explore the influence of western esoteric thought on the imagination of the Romantic poets in a manner which touches on issues still alive and vital in our own transitional times.'Lindsay Clarke, Whitbread Prize-winning author of The Chymical Wedding and The Water Theatre'William Gilbert was a leading member of the utopian, apocalyptic and artistic movement of the 1790s, a remarkable period in British – and European – history. He was a major influence on the Romantic poets, and his presence is felt in Coleridge’s masterpiece, Kubla Khan. Paul Cheshire’s remarkable biography brings this forgotten genius to life, restoring him to his proper place in our artistic and radical history.' Nicholas Campion, Associate Professor in Cosmology and Culture, University of Wales Trinity Saint David'Other scholars have worked on The Hurricane and William Gilbert; Cheshire’s account draws on their work and goes a considerable way beyond it (not least in considering the horrors of slavery in this context). The fascination of this neglected figure is made plain, as are the critical implications of a work with both esoteric roots and Romantic repercussions.' Michael Caines, Times Literary Supplement ‘Cheshire makes an admirable case for remembering Gilbert… [a] tantalizing study.’ Christy Edwall, The Wordsworth Circle'Paul Cheshire has done us a service in providing here not only a book that places the poem [The Hurricane] in its cultural and historical milieu but a fully annotated scholarly edition of the poem itself. It is an important new contribution to the expanding literature on Romanticism in Bristol and comes highly recommended. For both its language and its themes, The Hurricane is a poem well worth revisiting.' Steve Poole, The Regional Historian'A provocative and illuminating study of William Gilbert… We may hope that Cheshire’s indefatigable and imaginative research will continue to help us rediscover the eccentric and fearless genius who proudly declared: “I am not understood. ’Tis well. / I understand myself. It is better.”' Marsha Keith Schuchard, Common Knowledge'William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism provides an excellent basis for further scholarly work, both on Gilbert, and on the esoteric in Romantic culture more generally.'Jacob Lloyd, The BARS Review‘Cheshire’s readings transform Gilbert’s poem from something inscrutable to something deeply interesting… Cheshire makes a compelling case that “esoterism” is important but overlooked in all the Romantics, expanding how they may be read. The book further expands the geographies of Romanticism through its attention to the sea and Antigua as crucial sites for revolutionary thinking.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century FictionTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroductionPart One: William Gilbert in Romantic Culture1. A Magus of the 1790s: William Gilbert in Bristol and London2. Bristol and the First Romantics3. ‘With no unholy madness’: Gilbert and Coleridge4. ‘My astrological friend’: Gilbert and Southey5. The Calenture: Gilbert and WordsworthPart Two: The HurricaneThe Hurricane a Theosophical and Western Eclogue. To which is subjoined, A Solitary Effusion in a Summer’s Evening. 6. The Hurricane and Hermetic Geography7. Decoding the Allegory of the ‘Theosophical and Western Eclogue’8. Son of a Saintly Slave OwnerPart Three: Conclusion 9. Esoteric RomanticismBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis is not a commentary on Juvenal Satire 10 but a critical appreciation of the poem which examines it on its own and in context and tries to make it come alive as a piece of literature, offering one man’s close reading of Satire 10 as poetry, and concerned with literary criticism rather than philological minutiae. In line with the recent broadening of insight into Juvenal’s writing this book often addresses the issues of distortion and problematizing and covers style, sound and diction as well. Much time is also devoted to intertextuality and to humour, wit and irony. Building on the work of scholars like Martyn, Jenkyns and Schmitz, who see in Juvenal a consistently skilful and sophisticated author, this is a whole book demonstrating a high level of expertise on Juvenal’s part sustained throughout; a long poem (rather than intermittent flashes). This investigation of 10 leads to the conclusion that Juvenal is an accomplished poet and provocative satirist, a writer with real focus, who makes every word count, and a final chapter exploring Satires 11 and 12 confirms that assessment. Translation of the Latin and explanation of references are included so that Classics students will find the book easier to use and it will also be accessible to scholars and students interested in satire outside of Classics departments.Trade ReviewReviews 'A meticulous, sophisticated, and humane treatment, designed for undergraduates, of Juvenal’s thought and poetic craft in his Satire 10.' Dr Ian Goh, University of Exeter'This would be a very good book to put into the hands of somebody who is coming to the text of Juvenal for the first time and wants to see what all the fuss is about. Murgatroyd tells us that this book is aimed at ‘senior undergraduates and above’, but in fact his language is at all times accessible to anybody with an interest in the subject-matter—all Latin is well translated into fluent English and the author’s style can even be chatty and light-hearted to suit the highly unsolemn nature of some of the Latin under discussion.' John Godwin, Classics for All

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Book SynopsisOriginally a courtly art, ballet experienced dramatic evolution (but never, significantly, the prospect of extinction) as attitudes toward courtliness itself shifted in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As a result, it afforded a valuable model to poets who, like Wordsworth and his successors, aspired to make the traditionally codified, formal, and, to some degree, aristocratic art of poetry compatible with “the very language of men” and, therefore, relevant to a new class of readers. Moreover, as a model, ballet was visible as well as valuable. Dance historians recount the extraordinary popularity of ballet and its practitioners in the nineteenth century, and The Pointe of the Pen challenges literary historians’ assertions – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit – that writers were immune to the balletomania that shaped both Romantic and Victorian England, as well as Europe more broadly. The book draws on both primary documents (such as dance treatises and performance reviews) and scholarly histories of dance to describe the ways in which ballet's unique culture and aesthetic manifest in the forms, images, and ideologies of significant poems by Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Barrett Browning.Trade Review'[Tontiplaphol] offers an extended close reading of ballet's influence in the nineteenth-century novel, (as well as poetry), and persuasively argues that literary historians have missed seeing how it "relies rhetorically and structurally on nineteenth-century ballet's evolving aesthetic and significance." [...] Ballet had a considerable influence on American as well as English poetry of the nineteenth century, and Tontiplaphol's book deftly demonstrates how we might begin to see and study it.'Jessica L. Jessee, Review 19Table of ContentsIntroduction: Every Savage Can Dance: English Poets and Ballet1. Sprightly Dance and Other Measured Motion: Wordsworth and Balletic Expressivity2. Classic Pas – Sans Flaw: Byron, Shelley, and the Balletic Body3. Tiptoe Aspirations: Barrett Browning and Balletic Mobility

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Book SynopsisIn Poetry & Translation the acclaimed poet and translator Peter Robinson examines the activity of translation practised by poets and others, and the way in which the various practices of translating have continued in parallel with the writing of original poetry. While some attention is paid to classic statements of the translator’s cultural role, readers should not expect to find formalized theoretical debate along the lines already developed in translation studies courses and their teaching handbooks. Instead, Poetry & Translation seeks to raise issues and matters for discussion - not to close them down. The aim of the book is to increase knowledge of, and thought about, the interactive processes of reading and writing poetry composed in mother tongues and in translations. Poetry & Translation will be of value to all devoted readers and students of poetry or translation, to students involved in classical and modern languages, and to those taking part in creative writing courses, whether as students or as teachers.Trade Review'Informative as well as argued, polemical as well as seeking out common ground, and written in a no-nonsense, clear style, Poetry & Translation shows quite simple things to be complex and more nuanced than thought, but has also a refreshing directness about dealing with things that have often been made to seem too complex to deal with. It is also written from the triple perspective of poet, translator and critic. A fine book.' Professor Patrick McGuinness, University of Oxford'Scholars and practitioners of poetry translation will welcome this intelligent and insightful new book.'Gregary J. Racz, Metamorphoses, Vol. 20, No. 1'Robinson’s monograph is a splendid achievement, and should occupy a very desirable place on the shelves of Translation Studies sections in libraries everywhere – even though its argument lays waste to so many of its neighbours.'Adam Piette, Translation and Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2'In this erudite and well-written work, Peter Robinson builds a very strong and highly commendable case for the feasibility of what he terms ‘‘the art of the impossible’’, namely translating poetry.'Peter Flynn, Translation Studies'Vigorously and wittily argued, Robinson’s book is an excellent and provocative contribution to a complex debate.'Justin Quinn, Times Literary SupplementTable of Contents Preface 1. On First Looking 2. What Is Lost? 3. Thou Art Translated 4. The Art of the Impossible 5. Nostalgia for World Culture 6. Translating the ‘Foreign’ 7. The Quick and the Dead Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWritten by one of the editors of the new complete works of Henry Vaughan, Keeping the Ancient Way is the first book-length study of the poet by a single author for twenty years. It deals with a number of key topics that are central to the understanding and appreciation of this major seventeenth-century writer. These include his debt to the hermetic philosophy espoused by his twin brother (the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan); his royalist allegiance in the Civil War; his loyalty to the outlawed Church of England during the Interregnum; the unusual degree of intertextuality in his poetry (especially with the Scriptures and the devotional lyrics of George Herbert); and his literary treatment of the natural world (which has been variously interpreted from Christian, proto-Romantic, and ecological perspectives). Each of the chapters is self-contained and places its topic in relation to past and current critical debates, but the book is organized so that the biographical, intellectual, and political focus of Part One informs the discussion of poetic craftsmanship in Part Two. A wealth of historical information and close critical readings provide an accessible introduction to the poet and his period for students and general readers alike. The up-to-date scholarship will also be of interest to specialists in the literature and history of the Civil War and Interregnum.Trade Review'Keeping the Ancient Way is the first book-length study of Henry Vaughan in nearly two decades and will take its place among the finest studies of the poet. [...] The book’s strength is its focus on biography and intellectual and political history in the first part and poetic craftsmanship in the second. This context provides the framework for critical readings that will be of interest to specialists in the literature and history of the Civil War and Interregnum and will be invaluable to students of Henry and Thomas Vaughan alike. Keeping the Ancient Way is a great achievement.'Donald R. Dickson, Seventeenth-Century News Table of ContentsIntroductionPart One: Biographical and Historical Contexts1. Henry Vaughan and Breconshire2. Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan3. Henry Vaughan and the Civil Wars4. Henry Vaughan and the Interregnum5. Henry Vaughan and the ChurchPart Two: Literary Practices6. Henry Vaughan and the Art of Allusion7. Henry Vaughan and George Herbert8. Henry Vaughan and the Scriptures9. Henry Vaughan and the Book of Nature10. Henry Vaughan and the Practice of PoetryEpilogue

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Book SynopsisThe Dinner at Gonfarone’s is organised as a partial biography, covering five years in the life of the young Nicaraguan poet, Salomón de la Selva, but it also offers a literary geography of Hispanic New York (Nueva York) in the turbulent years around the First World War. De la Selva is of interest because he stands as the largely unacknowledged precursor of Latino writers like Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez, writing the first book of poetry in English by an Hispanic author. In addition, through what he called his pan-American project, de la Selva brought together in New York writers from all over the American continent. He put the idea of trans-American literature into practice long before the concept was articulated.De la Selva’s range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva’s own poetry – his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection – The Dinner at Gonfarone’s highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Rubén Darío, José Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, all of whom were part of de la Selva’s extensive network.Trade Review'Peter Hulme’s The Dinner at Gonfarone’s is a masterful, well-written literary history of the origins of modern literary pan-Americanism that offers the first in-depth biography in English of the early life and work of its seminal figure, Salomón de la Selva.' Jonathan Cohen, author of A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee'The Dinner at Gonfarone’s is a brilliant pioneering study of the transcultural origins of literary Nueva York. Hulme is able to recreate and delineate an important community of American writers in the continental sense of the word, thereby illuminating a relatively unknown aspect of New York’s cultural history.' Steven F. White, Professor of Hispanic Studies, St. Lawrence UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Setting the Scene: New York in 1914The Hispanic PresenceThe Poetic WatersModernity and Modernism2. American Geopolitics in the New Century (1898-1914)The Famous StatesPan-AmericanismRoosevelt’s VisionThe Shakespearean Allegory3. The Changing of the Poetic Guard (1915)Growing up in New York!Rubén Darío in HospitalBefriending Pedro, Loving EdnaThe First Dinner4. New York through Spanish Eyes (1916)Courting ArcherThe Recently Married PoetEdwin Markham on Staten IslandWilson’s Crime in Santo DomingoA Tale from Faerieland5. Goading the Bull Moose (1917)Confronting RooseveltMamita SchaufflerChicago!Introducing Edna6. The Pan-American Dream (1918)Is America Honest?Translating PoetryTropical TownFalling in Love AgainFighting for England7. The Last Dinner (1919)Nueva York!A Soldier ReturnsThe Dinner at Gonfarone’sThe Gulf of MisunderstandingNicaragua Has MeAftermathLeaving New YorkIn MexicoLater lifeTaking accountBiographiesAcknowledgementsSelect BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisHow do the writings of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé speak to our time? Why should we continue to read these poets today? How might a contemporary reading of their poetry differ from readings delivered in previous centuries? Twenty-First-Century Symbolism argues that Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé prefigure a view of human subjectivity that is appropriate for our times: we cannot be separated from the worlds in which we live and evolve; human beings both mediate and are mediations of the environments we traverse and that traverse us, whether these are natural, urban, linguistic, or technological environments. The ambition of the book is therefore twofold: on the one hand, it aims to offer new readings of the three poets, demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary debates, putting them into dialogue with a philosophical corpus that has not yet played a role in the study of nineteenth century French poetry; on the other, the book relies on the three poets to establish an understanding of human subjectivity that is in tune with our twenty-first century concerns.Trade Review‘This excellent monograph will find a broad, enthusiastic readership in the fields of French literature and critical theory, encompassing a wide variety of areas such as ecocriticism, phenomenology, affect, and various branches of the digital humanities. The field of nineteenth-century French literature will benefit enormously from this study, which significantly refreshes the way in which we approach well-known texts (too well-known, one often feels) using ambitious, cutting-edge critical lenses.’ David Evans, University of St Andrews‘What Lübecker provides us with is a new set of readings that are additive—we learn more about the three poets, rather than necessarily needing to rethink or revise what we knew about them already. Verlaine may be thought of, variously, as an impressionist or musical poet, but here Lübecker exposes his environmental activist side. Similarly, Baudelaire may be predominantly known as the poet of modernity, but here Lübecker reveals his more ecological dimensions… This study will be of significant interest to both specialists of nineteenth-century literature and critical theorists exploring new modes of conceptualizing the literary in relation to environmental debate.’ Helen Abbott, Modern & Contemporary France‘In this eloquent book, Nikolaj Lübecker provides a fresh way of reading three of the major poets of nineteenth-century France… Lübecker, true to the ecological and non-anthropocentric ethos of the book, stays in the background, letting the texts speak among themselves, and yet he subtly performs operations, like Mallarmé, that trouble our critical certainties.’ Patrick Bray, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroductionTwenty-First-Century Symbolism: Individuation and Practice: Verlaine, Baudelaire, MallarméChapter 1: Haiku-Verlainei. Discrete Ecstasiesii. Haiku-individuationiii. Individuation in Simondoniv. Verlainian HaikuConclusionChapter 2: The Verlaine-Environmenti. Verlaine and the Imageii. Three Verlaine-Readers: Bernadet, Richard and Scottiii. Verlaine Todayiv. The Verlaine-EnvironmentCoda: In the Grass…Chapter 3: Affectivity and Ecology in Baudelaire’s Twilighti. The Affective Ecology of ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’: Baudelaire and Massumiii. Phenomenology and Spiritual Materialism: Poulet and Poeiii. The Politics of Atmospheres: Chambers and RancièreConclusionChapter 4: Baudelaire and the Power of Colouri. The Process-Relational World of Colourii. The Colour of the Sun: Baudelaire with Cézanneiii. Baudelaire Was Never Modern: Art as Ecological PracticeCoda: From Baudelaire to MallarméChapter 5: Mallarmé and the Individu-Livrei. The Book-Event: Politics and Beautyii. The Book as Practiceiii. The Production of the Individu-LivreChapter 6: Mallarmé’s Demonic Media Theoryi. Demonic Modulationsii. Mallarméan Individuation and Twenty-First-Century Mediaiii. Mallarmé and Cyberneticsiv. The Livre and the Anti-LivreCoda: Is Mallarmé Digital?ConclusionBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisJohn Keats was a trained surgeon who studied at Guy’s Hospital, London while simultaneously making his way as a poet. This book focuses attention on an important but hitherto neglected Keats manuscript: the notebook he maintained during this period. Reconstructing the lively medical world that played a formative role in Keats’ intellectual and imaginative development, it seeks to show the intriguing connections between Keats’ medical knowledge and his greatest poetry. It offers new research on Keats’ medical career – including a new edition of his medical Notebook compiled from the manuscript – and recovers the various ways in which Keats’ creativity found expression in his two careers of medicine and poetry, enriching both. Topics explored include the ‘hospital poems’ Keats wrote at Guy’s; the medical milieu of his daily life; his methods of working as revealed by his medical Notebook and other archival sources; and the medical contexts that informed his composition of Endymion and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820).John Keats’ Medical Notebook: Text, Context and Poems reveals how Keats’ visceral knowledge of human life, gained during his medical training at Guy’s, transformed him into ‘a mighty poet of the human heart’.Trade ReviewReviews ‘John Keats’s Medical Notebook is an ingenious roadmap to conceptual issues in the teaching of Romantic medicine; its informed annotations and originality of research reveal the depth of Keats’s knowledge and comprehension of what he had learned in theoretical and practical medical science.’Hermione de Almeida, Walter Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tulsa 'Readers of Keats--and most assuredly not only those interested in Medicine--will find much of value in Ghosh's book. In clean, precise, and accessible prose that belies the depth of archival research that went into the book's making, Ghosh convincingly makes her case for a new focus on the medical Notebook, adding a fresh and forceful voice to those in the field arguing for renewed attention to the young Keats. If the medical Notebook "was a dynamic repository of evolving knowledge" for Keats, Ghosh's study will be one for us.'James Robert Allard, Review 19'John Keats’ Medical Notebook is well written and well referenced... A scholarly contribution to the literature about Keats, the book provides new insights and analyses of his medical student days and how medical training influenced his brilliant and remarkable poetry.'Arpan K. Banerjee, Hektoen International Journal‘There is a generosity in the care that has been taken in preparing this new edition that reveals an investment in the future work that will undoubtedly be generated by this project, as much as in its own attendant literary analysis.’ Meegan Hasted, European Romantic Review‘Ghosh’s careful explications help guide the reader through the sometimes obscure and complex medical material, while the provision of concise biographical detail and relevant intellectual context of the people mentioned is also helpful. Clear explanations of terminology are not only essential for non-medical literary scholars, the contextualisation of nineteenth-century medical vocabulary will surely be welcomed, too, by those with a knowledge of modern-day medicine.’ Octavia Cox, Romantic TextualitiesTable of ContentsIntroductionJohn Keats' Medical Notebook: An Annotated Edition1. John Keats' Medical Notebook: An Overview2. John Keats' 'Guy's Hospital' Poetry3. Keats' Medical Milieu4. John Keats at Guy's: Scholar and Poet5. Endymion and the Physiology of Passion6. 'The Only State for the Best Sort of Poetry'Conclusion

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.This volume contributes to the vibrant, ongoing recuperative work on women’s writing by shedding new light on a group of authors commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The neologism ‘interfeminism’ – coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’ – locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst also forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths that have traditionally overshadowed them. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing in its own right, this volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the interwar and postwar periods pave the way for the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterise second and third wave feminism.The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of a substantial group of women authors of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. Additional exploration of the popular magazines Woman’s Weekly and Good Housekeeping and new material from the Vera Brittain archive add an innovative dimension to original readings of the literature of a transformative period of British social and cultural history.List of contributors: Natasha Periyan, Eleanor Reed, Maroula Joannou , Lola Serraf, Sue Kennedy, Ana Ashraf, Chris Hopkins, Gill Plain, Lucy Hall, Katherine Cooper, Nick Turner, Maria Elena Capitani, James Underwood, and Jane Thomas.Trade Review'This new collection of essays is a welcome addition to scholarship on twentieth-century women’s writing. [...] This is a recuperative project that insists on a dismissal of middlebrow from our critical lexicon in favour of an appreciation of ‘interfeminism’. Latent throughout are attempts to answer unspoken questions: did this period produce women’s writing that merits critical attention? And just how innovative was it? Where was its energy? Its revolt? Its exigency? Everywhere, this collection asserts, we just have to read it.'Lydia Fellgett, Women: A Cultural ReviewTable of ContentsIntroductionSue Kennedy and Jane ThomasPart I: Women Within and Beyond: Visions of ‘This Island’ 1930-19601. 'Pacifism , Fascism and The Crisis of Civilization’: Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson and Nancy Mitford in the 1930sNatasha Periyan2. Lower-Middle-Class Domestic Leisure in Woman’s Weekly, 1930 Eleanor Reed3. ‘Unsettled’ and ‘Unsettling’ Women: Migrant Voices After the WarMaroula Joannou Part II: Women Bearing Witness: The Temperature of War4. Supporting and Resisting the Myth of the Blitz: Ambiguity in Susan Ertz's Anger in the Sky (1943)Lola Serraf5. ‘The Lure of Pleasure’: Sex and the Married Girl in Marghanita Laski’s To Bed with Grand Music (1946)Sue Kennedy6. The Ambivalence of Testimony in The Heat of the Day (1949), Elizabeth BowenAna Ashraf7. Re-presenting Wrens: Nancy Spain's Thank you Nelson (1945), Eileen Bigland's The Story of the WRNS (1946), Vera Laughton Matthews' Blue Tapestry (1948) and Edith Pargeter's She Goes to War (1942) Chris HopkinsPart III: Women Writing Men: Interwar, War and Aftermath8. ‘We must feed the men’: Pamela Hansford Johnson’s Maternal Plotting. Too Dear For My Possessing (1940), An Avenue of Stone (1947) and A Summer to Decide (1948)Gill Plain9. Men of the House: Oppressive Husbands and Displaced Wives in Second World War and Post-War Literature (Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier)Lucy Hall 10. British Women Writing War: The Case of Storm Jameson Katherine CooperPart IV: New Realities for Women: A Forward Glance11. Barbara Comyns and New Directions in Women’s WritingNick Turner12. A New Reality: Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958)Maria Elena Capitani13. Stevie Smith: Poetry and PersonalityJames Underwood14. ‘Whoever She Was’: Penelope Mortimer, Beyond the Feminine MystiqueJane Thomas

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Book SynopsisWendy Cope is one of Britain’s most popular poets: her first two collections have together sold almost half a million copies, and in 1998, when Ted Hughes died, she was the BBC listeners’ choice to succeed him as Poet Laureate. She is also contrarian and sometimes controversial, and has been celebrated as one of the finest parodists of her, or any, generation. It is perhaps surprising, then, that her popular appeal has been met with critical near-silence. After five major collections, Cope has received only piecemeal critical attention, mostly confined to book reviews. This is the first in-depth study of her poetry. Drawing on Cope's published work, archival material and correspondence, Rory Waterman considers her main collections, her works for children and her uncollected poems, with many close readings, and detailed considerations of her cultural and literary contexts and her poetic development.Table of ContentsIntroduction1. ‘I learned to get my own back’: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986)2. ‘He thinks you’re crazy’: Serious Concerns (1992)3. ‘Still warm, still warm’: If I Don’t Know (2001)4. ‘Your anger is a sin’: Family Values (2011)5. ‘About the human heart’: Anecdotal Evidence (2018)6. ‘The gift of changing’: Cope’s Poems for Children7. ‘They waited patiently’: Uncollected Cope

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Book SynopsisThis book explores Wordsworth’s extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth’s response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth’s patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage – a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth’s vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.Trade Review‘For its rigorous research and elucidation of the impact of transport upon the evolving experience of landscape and tourism from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Yoshikawa’s work offers both an insightful and significant contribution to current scholarship.’ Jules Gehrke, Journal of British Studies 'Yoshikawa’s archival work, as ever, is outstanding, and her claims are generally so well grounded as to seem almost obvious once the evidence is presented ... Yoshikawa’s book allowed us to take imaginative journeys while marking advancements in the thriving subdisciplines of Romantic literary geography.' Paul Westover, The Wordsworth Circle‘Saeko Yoshikawa in her new William Wordsworth and Modern Travel: Railways, Motorcars and the Lake District, 1830–1940 includes chapters… with an abundance of fascinating information, anecdotes, and illustrations.’ Eric C. Walker, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Wordsworth and Railways2. The Railway Controversy in Wordsworth's Lake District3. The Arrival of Motorcars4. Romantic Motorists, Romantic Cyclists5. The First World War and the Lake District6. Post-War Motoring in the Lake District, 1920s-30s7. Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar PeriodEpilogue: 'Access for All'

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Book SynopsisIn his Essay of 1815, Wordsworth asserts that ‘a pure and refined scheme of harmony’ must prevail in all ‘higher poetry’. This idea of a structured and complex form of ‘harmony’ was similarly noted earlier in The Prelude (1805), where Wordsworth famously claimed that the human mind is ‘framed even like the breath / And harmony of music’.Musical Wordsworth presents an original understanding of Wordsworthian harmony by examining an organised but dynamic sense of musicality that shapes his poetic theory and practice. This book is the first study to draw on music psychology and aesthetics to interpret the function and mechanism of Wordsworth’s aural structure and movement. Engaging with scholarship from the fields of literature and music, it defines Wordsworth’s poetry and the imagination through musical conceptions, and establishes various modes and forms of poetic listening as experiences of musical performance and appreciation. Each chapter explores a pair of musical abstractions – Lyricism and Musicality; Breath and Harmony; Repetition and Resonance; Expectation and Surprise; Rhythm and Dynamics; Rest and Silence. Musical Wordsworth will be of interest to students and researchers of Romantic poetry, long nineteenth-century literature, and music.Table of ContentsIntroduction: ‘That voice of unpretending harmony’1. Lyricism and Musicality 2. Breath and Harmony: Nature and the Romantic Imagination 3. Repetition and Resonance: The Soundscape of Memory 4. Expectation and Surprise: From Disorientation to Sublime Breakthrough 5. Rhythm and Dynamics: Listening to Urban Poetics 6. Rest and Silence: Voices of Collective Memorialisation Coda: ‘The music in my heart’

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Book SynopsisThis book, by the eminent poetry critic Neil Corcoran, examines the ways in which the work of significant modern Irish, British and American poets interacts with or ‘negotiates’ different contexts – historical, social, political, artistic and aesthetic. In Part 1 important work by David Jones, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney and Bob Dylan is shown to negotiate poetic methods – both traditional and modernist – and also the work of major earlier writers to produce strikingly original new forms; and Derek Mahon’s prose is read in the light of these concerns. The books shows how, by negotiating in this way, their work engages profoundly with complex and sometimes terrible histories, including the First World War and the Northern Irish Troubles. Part 2 discusses the ways in which ‘ekphrastic’ work – poems which engage with visual art – by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Graham, John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath and Ciaran Carson negotiates comparable poetic and historical inheritances while also inventively responding to work by significant artists, notably Parmigianino, Poussin, de Chirico, Klee and members of the St Ives School. The book is a signal contribution to current critical debates about these poets, situating them in original or newly clarified contexts, and it offers exemplary close readings of noteworthy poems.Trade Review'Corcoran has long been one of our finest critics of modern and contemporary poetry. His blend of elegance and insight is consistently wonderful. This book contains essential reading on David Jones, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Graham, and many others. The way he enriches the poetry that he discusses is galvanising, and these essays are a hugely welcome shot in the arm.'- Alan Gillis, Professor of Modern Poetry, University of EdinburghTable of ContentsPrefacePart I. Negotiating Poems1. Spilled Bitterness: David Jones’s In Parenthesis between Myth and History 2. Robert Graves and Modern Poetry3. Irelands and Englands of the Mind: Seamus Heaney reading Shakespeare and Modern English Poetry4. Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Antaeus and Anchises 5. The Mahon Prose6. Beacon and Black Hole: Bob Dylan, Suze Rotolo and Two Songs of PartingPart II. Poems Negotiating Paintings 7. Our Infant Sight: An Elizabeth Bishop Collage8. W.S. Graham, Looking9. Doubting Ashbery 10. The Enigma of Arrival: Sylvia Plath reading de Chirico, Yeats and Klee11. Against Time: On Ciaran Carson’s Still Life

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Book SynopsisFranz Fühmann’s magnum opus.At the Burning Abyss is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fühmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology’s seductions—Nazism, then socialism—and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl’s enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl’s “unlivable life,” as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of “the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure.” In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its “courage to resist inhumanity.” At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency. Table of ContentsAt the Burning AbyssTranslator’s NoteNotes

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Book SynopsisYves Bonnefoy’s final poetic work, a collection of reflections about poetry, legacy, and life. The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France’s greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dream-like tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. His oeuvre has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi.Together Still is his final poetic work, composed just months before his death. The book is nothing short of a literary testament, addressed to his wife, his daughter, his friends, and his readers throughout the world. In these pages, he ruminates on his legacy to future generations, his insistence on living in the present, his belief in the triumphant lessons of beauty, and, above all, his courageous identification of poetry with hope.Trade Review"Undoubtedly one of the major French poets of the last six decades. . . . Illuminating and deeply moving." * World Literature Today *Table of ContentsTOGETHER STILL URSA MAJOR What’s that Sound? And that, Again? Ursa Major Farther, Higher! Yes, Hello? You, Again! Star Seven THE BARE FOOT Inside, Outside? The Milky Way The Bare Foot, the Things Voices in the Treetops TOGETHER MUSIC AND MEMORY POEMS FOR TRUPHÉMUS The Room, the Garden A Café The Paintings Other Paintings Light, in an Empty Room BRIEFWEGE After the Fire Nisida Briefweg, in Warbende PERAMBULANS IN NOCTEM I In the Painter’s Studio The Translator’s Task The Walk in the Forest Hours in This Journal I Don’t Keep II Arms that Open At the Dawn of Time In the Other Trunk The Other Stairway The Low Door So Many Good Things! Perambulans in Noctem Bibliographic Notes In Memoriam: A Translator’s Note

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Book SynopsisListening has always mattered in poetry, but how does poetry change when listening has been transformed? In Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric, the field of sound studies, which has revolutionised research in contemporary music, is brought into dialogue with new lyric criticism. Examining poetry as mediated by performance, technology and translation, this book discovers how contemporary poetry has been re-energised by the influence of recorded sound and influenced by the creative methods that emerged with it. It offers an exploration of contemporary poetry’s acoustic contexts, moving beyond traditional analysis of poetic form to consider the social, political and ecological dimensions of a poem's sounds and silences. Through lucid engagement with a range of richly innovative English-language poetry from the UK and USA, it argues for the centrality of listening to a form of composition in which language not only represents sonic experience but is part of it. With reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s distinction between hearing and listening, alongside other key theorists of sound and noise, it shows how poetry offers insights into sensory perception, and how it charts acoustic relationships between language and the environment.Table of Contents Listening to Lyric and Noise Song: Denise Riley's Lyric and Rock Echoes Noise: Sean Bonney's Resistance Acousmatics: Sounded/Silent Text in Caroline Bergvall's Drift Synaesthesia: Tuning in to Carol Watts and Mei-Mei Berssenburgge Echo: Claudia Rankine and Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo Improvisation: Tom Raworth's Intuition Performance: Listening Bodies Resounding: Tim Atkins, Peter Hughes and Jeff Hilson

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2022Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought. Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points. He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.Trade Review'Shelley’s Broken World is a considerable achievement: intellectually adventurous, with many unexpected twists and turns in the argument and in the material. Coffey writes with distinctive eloquence. The range of reading is very impressive, but I especially like the confidence with which Coffey draws on the whole of Shelley's output, from the grandest central things to all manner of usually unconsidered texts. The close reading, tremendously insightful on pauses and rhymes, is a constant pleasure.'Kelvin Everest, University of Liverpool'A major contribution to the rich field of current Shelley studies, Shelley's Broken World offers a strongly original reading of the poet’s work and thought as embracing "intermittence" in varied ways. Through illuminating readings of less discussed poems (including "Rosalind and Helen" and "Ginevra") as well as more familiar ones (Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, Epipsychidion), Bysshe Coffey unearths a Shelley whose poetry inhabits gaps, interruptions and pauses. This thoughtful, ambitious monograph, the first critical study to engage with the recently discovered "Marlow list" (a record of his books the poet left behind on departing for Italy in 1818), establishes its voice persuasively, striking out its own path with assurance while engaging generously with criticism since Shelley's death and taking on, impressively, the complex history of his text.'Michael Rossington, Newcastle University'Shelley’s Broken World brilliantly rips up what we thought we knew about the poet, so as to start thinking anew. With wit, erudition and conviction, Coffey probes a series of generative "limit-points" to Shelley’s expression: manifest yet non-palpable sensuous phenomena that resist reductive materialisms; the revisions and deletion of his compositional process; the gaps and omissions in the poet’s personal library. Bringing together the otherwise cloistered fields of prosody, history of the book and manuscript studies, Coffey restores to us to the freshness, vitality and elusiveness that define Shelley’s achievement.'Ewan James Jones, University of Cambridge'Once begun, few readers will wish to pause their reading of Bysshe Inigo Coffey’s dazzling account of the "pauses of matter and life" in Shelley’s poetry. Displaying its subtlety, intelligence, and generosity from the outset, Shelley’s Broken World seeks to do justice to F.R. Leavis’s notorious strictures on Shelley – which, Coffey shows, Leavis in fact revised toward the end of his life – by arguing that "Shelley had a firm grasp upon the weakness of the actual". The book does a superlative job of bearing out this claim. Along the way, it illuminates pretty much the whole of Shelley’s life and work, as well as a host of other figures from Heraclitus to Harold Bloom. I struggle to think of another book on Shelley that combines such breadth of scholarship, subtlety of appreciation, and critical sophistication as are so abundantly in evidence here.'Ross Wilson, University of Cambridge'This richly-documented and engagingly-written – indeed, elegant – book is a highly valuable, even innovative, contribution to the interpretation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings, English Romantic poetry in general, and the influence on both of philosophical, scientific, and earlier literary works sometimes overlooked, many of which have never been connected to Shelley or Romanticism as convincingly as they are here. It is, in addition, distinctive in Shelley scholarship in focusing on his openings of spaces, interstices, and silences in his work and their intimations of a fractured world where there are gaps between parts of it, yet where those parts are still turning out towards emerging connections, like words on a page. Coffey shows powerfully how these openings suggest states of between-ness and in-distinction that really lie at the heart of human awareness and its experiences of the material world, even though those levels are usually repressed in everyday consciousness. Such "concealed life in pauses and breaks" (Coffey’s phrase) is here brought forward, first, in older philosophies of both materiality and prosody that now emerge as influential on Shelley in ways we have too long ignored and, second, in his brilliant uses of the performative aspects of poems to call attention to moments of suspended animation caught between the dissolution and the renewal of thought, matter, and their relationships with each other. This process leads throughout to perceptive close readings of selected Shelley poems that are among the most revealing we now have, ones that general readers, students, and their teachers can apply to other works by him – and by some contemporaries and successors – not directly studied in this account. It is a pleasure to recommend an academic study that is at once a stylish "good read" and a provocative challenge for us all to examine Shelley the poet more carefully while, at the same time, learning how he expanded the possibilities of poetry in ways we have not understood until now.'Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona'Shelley’s Broken World is an exhilarating, original contribution to the study of Shelley’s poetry and poetics. It reads a series of passages from such seemingly disparate poems as Alastor, Epipsychidion, and the Triumph of Life with remarkable assurance and deft sensitivity to how the poetry is performed by and in the reader. Its goal is not so much to provide a reading of a particular poem as a whole, as to demonstrate how "various intermittences" – "poetic, cognitive, spiritual, bodily" – are a hallmark of Shelley’s poetic practice, and constitute a subject deeply in need of further understanding. These intermittences appear in both Shelley’s prosody itself and the thematics involving sleep, trance, madness, and death that the verse embodies and explores. Along the way, there are some eye-opening close readings. The splendid discussion of the title and opening two lines of Epipsychidion is in itself a revelation.'Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland'A fine study of Shelley’s airy arts of breath and pause, as diverting as it is scholarly. Bysshe Inigo Coffey has many new things to say about the poet’s extensive reading and the way it helped shape many of his greatest writings, and he traces the rich philosophical, religious, and scientific resonances of the poetry with great critical grace. Sympathetic and sharp-eyed, in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey offers a deeply informed and stylishly written account of the many ways that Shelley’s complex genius sought, in his own words "something beyond the present & tangible object".'Seamus Perry, University of Oxford'Percy Bysshe Shelley has long been known by poetry cognoscenti as the Marmite of poets. Carlyle (whom I hate) called him "Weak in genius, weak in character (for these two always go together); a poor thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being" and Charles Kingsley, a founder of Muscular Christianity, compared "the increase of Shelley-reading in Britain in the 1850s to another growing female addiction, the secret sipping of eau-de-cologne". Bysshe Inigo Coffey is without doubt an admirer, who sees Shelley’s poetic intelligence and sensuous experience in harmony like no other with an especially endearing "grasp upon the weakness of the actual". Through new research in the "Marlow List" Coffey meticulously places Shelley in his philosophical and scientific milieux, tracing Shelley’s reading in Kant and Rousseau as well as in medicine, geophysics, astronomy, anatomy and the life sciences. This is a work of scholarly elegance as well as depth on matters of pointing and crux, of "great, last fragments", through the full range of Shelley’s poetry but especially Alastor, Peter Bell the Third, and Epipsychidion.' Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter'This book explores inter alia how the dissolution of the boundary between mind and matter is expressed by Shelley in his dissolution of the boundary between philosophy and poetry. In this he resembles Lucretius, one of numerous poetic, scientific, and philosophical influences on Shelley presented by Coffey with rigorous scholarship. The eloquent passion of his book leaves us with the sense that Shelley was grappling with fundamental problems, and their solutions through poetic imagination, that - even if they no longer concern us - certainly should do.'Richard Seaford, University of Exeter'Shelley’s Broken World is a piercingly insightful and gracefully written book that both widens and sharpens our understanding of the poet’s intellectual and poetic engagement with the world. Bysshe Coffey has that rare talent: an ability to combine rigorous historical research with a sensitive, finely tuned ear for poetry. In this sophisticated study, Coffey shows how the pauses, fractures, absences, and breaks in Shelley’s canon are momentous. These textual spaces reflect and express the poet's thinking about politics, society, and human life in general. This book sets new standards in Shelley studies and indeed, Romantic studies.'Corinna Wagner, University of Exeter'Shelley was a polymath, and in Shelley’s Broken World Coffey provides one of the best attempts to comprehend the range, sophistication, and meaning of the poet’s mind. Coffey’s mastery of Shelley’s poetry and its contexts is remarkable, and, more importantly, he provides brilliant readings of how the two interact. The European literature and thought that inform poems such as Alastor and Epipsychidion are thoroughly explored, but Coffey is also adept at close readings which tease out Shelley’s sense of absence and vacancy enacted by form and metre. It is refreshing that Coffey manages to take the philosophical implications for any study of materiality seriously without succumbing to jargon or theoretical wandering. Furthermore, his book is part of a tradition, and he engages on every page with Shelley’s best critics and editors, while maintaining a confident and unique critical voice.'Will Bowers, Queen Mary University of London'This study should transform our understanding of Shelley’s work. Coffey writes like an angel, and he has an ear for the detailed nuances of metre and rhythm that is rare indeed; better still, he combines this gift with a painstaking archival scholarship and a deeply learned appreciation of the intellectual milieu in which Shelley worked.'Tim Kendall, University of Exeter'Not only is [this] a work of remarkable scholarship, demonstrating meticulous research and close reading and containing numerous archival revelations that will transform our understanding of Shelley, it is also an intense labour of love that realises the continuing vitality of Shelley’s poetry and philosophy for the activity of thinking and living. [...] It is an excellent conclusion to an excellent book. Characterized by an intensity and clarity of argument, a sensitivity for both the historical and the poetical, and perhaps above all a principled defence of the simultaneous weakness and power of thought, Shelley’s Broken World brings to life anew ‘the frail pauses of this simple strain’ (Shelley, Alastor).Robert Scott, The Review of English Studies'Bysshe Coffey’s Shelley’s Broken World is a broad-ranging study: one part old-fashioned history of ideas; one part monograph on Shelley’s heretofore underappreciated practice of bringing much of his verse to life within the pauses and “limit-points” of sensory perception, cognition, and prosody. [...] Coffey’s book will influence and enrich our understanding of Shelley’s achievement for a long time.'Michael J. Neth, Romantic Circles'This work is done with assurance by Coffey, in terms of Shelley’s relation to contemporaneous, and earlier, science, philosophy, and poetic repertoires. [...] This convivial aspect holds in a professional and not just thematic sense, as Coffey works closely within the Shelley editorial circle. [...] The provenance of the many insights in Shelley’s Broken World is impressively evidence-based. Coffey has an archival ace in the hole [...] able to pursue surprising investigations, and to shore up the grounds of several internal questions long held in Shelley Studies. At the same time, Coffey is a giftedly creative critic who can leap to his insights straight off. [...] Shelley’s Broken World’s greatest strengths are its professional content and its style, aligning scholarly argument to a temperament that redeems belles lettres through meticulous research.' Eric Lindstrom, The BARS Review‘Shelleyans will find much to enjoy and think over in Shelley’s Broken World. Coffey has a deep knowledge of Shelley’s corpus and the history of its reception and editing, and he shares this knowledge in an engaging prose style. He writes on neglected works, recounts editors’ debates about pointing, and traces obscure lines of thought weaving through the Marlow List with unpretentious delight. His close readings are thoughtful and judicious… gaps are full of possibilities.’ Steve Tedeschi, Wordsworth Circle‘Coffey shows how profoundly Shelley’s work engages with the philosophical, scientific, artistic, and cultural climate of the nineteenth century. Scholarly, thoughtful, and finely researched, Shelley’s Broken World presents fresh and invigorating readings of Shelley’s poems, employing hitherto unseen archive material. Elegantly written, this research monograph is an impressive achievement.’ University English Book Prize 2022Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Matter in the Margins2. Dynamics and Statics3. Their Own Eternity4. Intermitted Song: Alastor5. Kant, Purity, and the Devil: Peter Bell the Third6. Weak Verse: EpipsychidionCoda. The Broken World

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Book SynopsisThe ‘country house poem’ was born in the seventeenth century as a fruitful way of flattering potential patrons. But the genre’s popularity faded – ironically, just as ‘country house society’ was emerging. It was only when the power and influence of the landed classes had all but ebbed away that poets returned to the theme, attracted perhaps by the buildings’ irresistible dereliction, but equally by their often very personal histories. This is the first complete anthology of modern country house poems, and it shows just how far (as Simon Jenkins points out in his Foreword) poems can ‘penetrate the souls of buildings’. Over 160 distinguished poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer fascinating perspectives on stately exteriors and interiors, gardens both wild and cultivated, crumbling ruins and the extraordinary secrets they hide. There are voices of all kinds, whether it’s Edith Sitwell recreating her childhood, W. B. Yeats and Wendy Cope pondering Lissadell, or Simon Armitage’s labourer confronting the Lady who’s ‘got the lot’. We hear from noble landowners and loyal (or rebellious) servants, and from many an inquisitive day-tripper. The book’s dominant note is elegiac, yet comedy, satire, even strains of Gothic can be heard among these potent reflections. Hollow Palaces reminds us how poets can often be the most perceptive of guides to radical changes in society. The book is illustrated by Rosie Greening.

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Book SynopsisEbook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. The years following the Second World War saw an exponential increase in the translation of contemporary foreign poetry in Italy. The practice was at its most prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, when publishing houses across the board almost doubled the number of foreign poetry titles in their catalogues. This remarkable phenomenon, however, has received scant critical attention, which has been limited to an aesthetic perspective. Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field, 1939–1977 is one of the first studies to examine the sociological significance of publishing poetry translations. Drawing on untapped archival materials, it investigates from an interdisciplinary perspective the processes and products of poetry translation, and how they impacted on publishing, cultural, literary, and political dynamics in Italy. It explores the internal reconfiguration of Italian culture, and how Italy sought to position itself in the world, without neglecting the contradictions of national and transnational cultural networks and movements. The book argues that translation was a means to modify power relationships in the field of poetry publishing and the contemporary literary arena; this ultimately changed the map of Italian cultural production and its transnational networks, thus anticipating the further developments provoked by globalisation in the 1980s.Trade Review"An insightful analysis of the way that the translation of foreign poetry helped shape the Italian publishing industry and its power dynamics – enormously well-researched and highly readable."Liz Wren-Owens, Cardiff UniversityTable of ContentsINTRODUCTIONPublishing and Poetry Translation: A Methodological IntroductionCHAPTER 1Publishing, culture, and poetry: a field investigationCHAPTER 2Editors, Habitus and Translation: publishing strategies in poetry translationCHAPTER 3Contemporary foreign poetry anthologies for new cultural and publishing horizonsCHAPTER 4Towards Globalisation, by a way of conclusionAppendix 1Appendix 2Works Cited

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Book SynopsisDon Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain's major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Table of ContentsBiographical OutlinePrologue1. For the Hell of It: Nil Nil (1993)2. Which Man I Am: God's Gift to Women (1997)3. Not Your Name, Not Mine: The Eyes (1999)4. Shrewd Obliquity of Speech: Landing Light (2003)5. Breath, You Invisible Poem: Orpheus (2006)6. None of This Matters: Rain (2009)Coda: 40 Sonnets (2015) and Zonal (2020)

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Book SynopsisEducating the Romantic Poets: Life and Learning in the Anglo-Classical Academy, 1770-1850 explores how the public and endowed grammar schools and the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge trained some of the most important writers, critics, and public figures of the Romantic period. These institutions are recognized here as intentional partners and are discussed collectively as the “Anglo-classical academy”. The book shows how they not only schooled students in “classics, maths, and divinity” but also in accepted social behaviours, cultural values, political beliefs, and literary tastes. In so doing, this academy gave shape to the literature and spirit of the age. By discussing the schools and the universities together and by focusing upon pedagogies and daily life as well as the texts and topics studied, this book shows as no other has done how writers and readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries became such fluent linguists, skilled prosodists, and perceptive critics. As each chapter explores and comments upon the relational, intellectual, and cultural aspects of the Anglo-classical educational experience, it directs readers’ attention to the ways in which this information can be used to reread texts, reassess certain Romantics’ literary careers, and launch new lines of research.Table of ContentsPreface Introduction England’s Public and Grammar Schools: First Lessons England’s Public and Grammar Schools: Lessons in Grammar, Memory, and Composition England’s Public and Grammar Schools: Lessons in Classical Literature, Rhetoric, Oratory, and Composition Training Religious Instruction and Worship in the Anglo-Classical Academy Oxford and Cambridge in the Romantic Period: “Operose ignorance” or “Good habits, and the principles of virtue and wisdom”? University Life The Curriculum of the English “Confessional” University: Heroes, Shepherds, and “Holding acquaintance with the stars" Pedagogies of Oxford and Cambridge in the Georgian Period The Educators of Oxford and Cambridge in the Georgian Period Leadership at Oxford and Cambridge Conclusions

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Book SynopsisThe modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens’s first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens’s poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Pure Good of Theory Thomas Gould and Ian Tan I Reading Stevens Theorizing Almost Successfully Lisa M. Steinman The Reader In/Of Stevens Ariane Mildenberg The Event in Stevens as Poetic Justification: Alain Badiou, Poetic Performativity and the Implied Reader Ian Tan II Theory and Form Stevens’s Queer Ecologies Bart Eeckhout The Pursuits of Philosophy and the Sounds of Poetry: Stevens and Heidegger Wit Pietrzak Stevens, Adorno and the Worldly Poetics of Lyric Unworlding Zachary Tavlin III Experience and Affect Wider Than the Sky: Stevens, Consciousness and the Incipient Cosmos Kathryn Mudgett What Stevens’s Poetry can offer to Theorists of Consciousness Charles Altieri ‘Emotionally We Arrive all the Time’: Stevens and Affect Theory Marta Figlerowicz IV Theology and Post-Theology From Philosophy to Theology: Stevens’s Angel and the Real Stephen Sicari Two Cathedrals: Stevens and George Santayana's Sonnet Exchange Kelly MacPhail The The: Stevens’s Neighborliness Thomas Gould V Postures and Dispositions ‘A war between the mind and the sky’: Fictions, Fools, and the Consequences of Empire Johanna Skibsrud Damned Universal Cock: Stevens’s Ecstatic Present Rachel Trousdale A Collect of Style Krzysztof Ziarek

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Book SynopsisShows how poetic recitation and the interweaving of music and poetry contributed to the advent of a German identity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.The art of reciting a text out loud, known as Vortragskunst, be it in a private circle or in a concert hall, originated in German-speaking countries in the 1760s, and by the nineteenth century had become a well-established practice subjected to an artistic blossoming unparalleled in the rest of Europe.In this book Jacqueline Waeber explains and examines how and why this happened, focusing on the origins of poetic recitation and its development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period essential to the development of modern German literature and theatre, bookended by the two main figures who contributed to the theoretical and aesthetical tenets of poetic recitation, the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724-1803) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Poetic recitation quickly gained attraction for the Lied and the musical melodrama, both musical genres that were driven by a search for new declamatory styles. As a result, poetic recitation became increasingly 'musicalized' by the frequent addition of a musical accompaniment. As the book shows, this intertwining of music and poetry made a huge contribution to the advent of German identity through the reappraisal of its language.

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Book SynopsisComprehensive survey of the Middle English lyric, one of the most important forms of medieval literature. Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award The Middle English lyric occupies a place of considerable importance in the history of English literature. Here, for the first time in English, are found many features of formal and thematic importance: they include rhyme scheme, stanzaic form, the carol genre, love poetry in the manner of the troubadour poets, and devotional poems focusing on the love, suffering and compassion of Christ and theVirgin Mary. The essays in this volume aim to provide both background information on and new assessments of the lyric. By treating Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds - poems dealing with love, with religious devotion, with moral, political and popular themes, and those associated with preaching - it provides the awareness of their characteristic cultural contexts and literary modalities necessary for an informed critical reading. Full account is taken of the scholarship upon which our knowledge of these lyrics rests, especially the outstanding contributions of the last few decades and such recent insights as those of gender criticism. Also included are detailed discussions of the valuable information afforded by the widely varying manuscript contexts in which Middle English lyrics survive and of the diverse issues involved in editing these texts. Separate chapters are devotedto the carol, which came to prominence in the fifteenth century, and to Middle Scots lyrics which, at the end of the Middle English lyric tradition, present some sophisticated productions of an entirely new order. Contributors: Julia Boffey, Thomas G. Duncan, John Scattergood, Vincent Gillespie, Christiania Whitehead, Douglas Gray, Karl Reichl, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alan J. Fletcher, Bernard O'Donoghue, Sarah Stanbury and Alasdair A. MacDonald. THOMAS G. DUNCAN is Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of St AndrewsTrade ReviewA very successful collection of articles on the shorter poems of medieval England and Scotland. * ARCHIV *An important collection. [...] The essays in this collection are of great significance, covering everything from manuscript context to political approaches to Middle Scots lyrics. * THE YEAR'S WORK IN ENGLISH STUDIES *This comprehensive companion is a welcome resource, providing a variety of approaches and a wealth of examples. * ECONOMIA *An expertly assembled and immaculately produced volume which will not be easily surpassed as an introduction to this important field. * ANGLIA *A most welcome addition to studies of the medieval lyric. Admirably combines informative and precisely detailed contextual material with critically acute and original readings. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Proves a most useful guide to the Middle English lyric and its modern scholarship. * ENGLISH STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Thomas G. Duncan Middle English Lyrics: Metre and Editorial Practice - Thomas G. Duncan The love lyric before Chaucer - John Scattergood Moral and Penitential Lyrics - Vincent Gillespie Middle English Religious Lyrics - Christiania Whitehead Middle English Courtly Lyrics: Chaucer to Henry VIII - D Gray The Middle English Carol - Karl Reichl Political Lyrics - Thorlac Turville-Petre The Lyric in the Sermon - Alan J Fletcher 'Cuius Contrarium': Middle English Popular Lyrics - Bernard O'Donoghue Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics - Sarah Stanbury Lyrics in Middle Scots -

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Book SynopsisTraherne's voice can be heard as never before. THE TABLET Thomas Traherne [1637? - 1674], a clergyman of the Church of England during the Restoration, was little known until the early twentieth century, when his poetry and Centuries of Meditations were discovered. There have beensince miscellaneous publications of his poetry and devotional writings. The Works of Thomas Traherne brings together all of Traherne's extant works in a definitive, printed edition for the first time. It will include both his published and unpublished works, and his notebooks, presenting them insofar as possible by manuscript, giving due attention to their physical aspects and to their integrity as manuscript books. Volumes II and III make available the Commentaries of Heaven, preserved in one manuscript held at the British Library. Organised topically, it was intended to cover the whole of the alphabet but extends only through `A' and part of `B', with 95prose articles altogether. It possesses the characteristics of a commonplace book, encyclopaedia and dictionary, and contains poetry, meditations, philosophical discourse, and polemic. The unusual range of subjects treated, from `Abhorrence' to `Ant', `Aristotle' to `Atom', shows Traherne to be an imaginative and compelling writer in his approach to Christian theology, while maintaining both his integrity and orthodoxy as a priest.Trade ReviewThe Commentaries is a huge work that is absolutely essential for students and scholars of Traherne. This is the first time it has been published in its entirety, and its publication will undoubtedly spark new explorations into Traherne's work. [...] Ross's project as a whole is an exciting prospect for Traherne scholars, but the publication of the Commentaries alone is a monumental achievement and one that will be of tremendous significance. * SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEWS *Table of ContentsIntroduction List of Topics Commentaries of Heaven Textual Emendations Appendices Glossary

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Book SynopsisAn examination of the ways in which late medieval lyric poetry can be seen to engage with contemporary medical theory. This book argues that late medieval love poets, from Petrarch to Machaut and Charles d'Orléans, exploit scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the lyric subject and his body. Just as humoraltheory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to heal, poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. The specific case of blindness, a disability that according to the theories of love that predominated in the late medieval West foreclosed the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which to explore poets' circumvention of the logical limits of contemporary medical theory. Reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval French and Italian poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the middle ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy. Julie Singer is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University, St Louis.Trade ReviewAn ambitious volume, meticulously researched and bringing together a wealth of material. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Singer's study is an admirable blend of philology, cultural history, and disability studies. It is well researched and has the unusual merit of giving almost equivalent space to both Italian and French texts and criticism. * SPECULUM *[M]eticulously researched and bringing together a wealth of material. * MEDIUM AEVUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction: On Rhetoric and Remedy The Love-Imprint Medical Blindness, Rhetorical Insight Irony, or the Therapeutics of Contraries Metaphor as Experimental Medicine Metonymy and Prosthesis Blindfold Synecdoche Epilogue. Just Words Bibliography

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Book SynopsisJohn Gower's works examined as part of a tradition of "official" writings on behalf of the Crown. John Gower has been criticised for composing verse propaganda for the English state, in support of the regime of Henry IV, at the end of his distinguished career. However, as the author of this book shows, using evidence from Gower's English, French and Latin poems alongside contemporary state papers, pamphlet-literature, and other historical prose, Gower was not the only medieval writer to be so employed in serving a monarchy's goals. Professor Carlson also argues that Gower's late poetry is the apotheosis of the fourteenth-century tradition of state-official writing which lay at the origin of the literary Renaissance in Ricardian and Lancastrian England. David Carlsonis Professor in the Department of English, University of Ottawa.Trade Review2013 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title * . *David Carlson has written a book that contributes enormously to our knowledge of the dynamics of late-medieval literary patronage in general and to our understanding of John Gower's relationship to Richard II and Henry IV in particular. In its detailed exposition of difficult verse texts it stands as a model for literary scholars, and in its nuanced elucidation of contemporary responses to political events (especially the Lancastrian usurpation), it offers some valuable lessons for the historian as well. * SPECULUM *An important book for everyone interested in political writing - argued, as one would expect from Carson, on the basis of a wealth of detail which is submitted to skeptical scrutiny. * MEDIUM AEVUM *A crucial addition to the history of ways in which literary production and politics were interconnected in fourteenth-century England. * PARERGON *A game-changing study. ... An outstanding inquiry, blending source study, political criticism, and sensitive analyses. ... Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Gower in History Official Verse: The Sources and Problems of Evidence The State Propaganda Occasions of State and Propagandistic Verse in Mid-Century Walter Peterborough's Victoria belli in Hispania [1367] and its Official Source Compulsion in Richard Maidstone's Concordia [1392] Official Writing at the Lancastrian Advent English Poetry in Late Summer 1399 The Cronica tripertita and its Official Source Gower after the Revolution: Client and Critic Bibliography

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Book SynopsisOffers an entirely new way of interpreting and examining Anglo-Saxon texts, via theories derived from cognitive studies. A major, thoughtful study, applying new and serious interpretative and critical perspectives to a central range of Old English poetry. Professor John Hines, Cardiff University Cognitive approaches to literature offernew and exciting ways of interpreting literature and mentalities, by bringing ideas and methodologies from Cognitive Science into the analysis of literature and culture. While these approaches are of particular value in relation to understanding the texts of remote societies, they have to date made very little impact on Anglo-Saxon Studies. This book therefore acts as a pioneer, mapping out the new field, explaining its relevance to Old English Literary Studies, and demonstrating in practice its application to a range of key vernacular poetic texts, including Beowulf, The Wanderer, and poems from the Exeter Book. Adapting key ideas from three related fields - Cognitive Literary/Cultural Studies, Cognitive Poetics, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory - in conjunction with more familiar models, derived from Literary Analysis, Stylistics, and Historical Linguistics, allows several new ways of thinking about Old English literature to emerge. It permits a systematic means of examining and accounting for the conceptual structures that underpin Anglo-Saxon poetics, as well as fuller explorations, at the level of mental processing, of the workings of literary language in context. The result is a set of approaches to interpreting Anglo-Saxon textuality, through detailed studies of the concepts, mental schemas, and associative logic implied in and triggeredby the evocative language and meaning structures of surviving works. ANTONINA HARBUS is Professor in the Department of English at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.Trade ReviewOffers fresh approaches to understanding the contemporary reception of Anglo-Saxon poetry and modern encounters with these texts. * YEAR'S WORK IN ENGLISH STUDIES *Cognitive Approaches to Old English Poetry marks an ambitious foray by Anglo-Saxonist Antonina Harbus into new realms of analysis afforded by the 'cognitive approaches' of her title. It will be of particular interest to those who want to understand the implications of current trends in literary study to embrace the terms and ideas of cognitive science. * THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction Conceptual Metaphors Conceptual Blending Text World Theory Cognitive Cultural Studies Anglo-Saxon Perspectives on Autobiographical Memory and the Self Cognitive Approaches to the History of Emotions and the Emotional Dynamic of Literature Conclusion Bibliography

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Book SynopsisAn examination of how greatly the sagas and other literature of Iceland shaped the poems of William Morris. The work of William Morris (1834-1896) was hugely influenced by the medieval sagas and poetry of Iceland; in particular, they inspired his long poems "The Lovers of Gudrun" and Sigurd the Volsung. Between 1868 and 1876, Morris not only translated several major sagas into English for the first time with his collaborator the Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon (1833-1913) but he also travelled on horseback twice across the Icelandic interior, journeys which led him through the best known of the saga sites. By looking closely at his translations of the sagas and the texts on which he based them, the journals of his travels in Iceland, and his saga-inspired long poems and lyric poetry, this book shows how Morris conceived a unique ideal of heroism through engaging with Icelandic literature. It shows the sagas and poetry of Iceland as crucial in shaping his view of the best life a man could live and spurring him on in the subsequent passions on which much of his legacy rests. IAN FELCE gained his PhD from Cambridge University.Trade ReviewFelce gives a nuanced and persuasive account of Morris' personal development toward atheism and socialism through his reading and rewriting of medieval Icelandic literature. * MEDIEVALLY SPEAKING *Felce's immaculate introductory account of Old Norse saga literature should be required reading for all aspiring Morris scholars. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *Morris contributed immensely to the knowledge and dissemination of the literature and culture of medieval Iceland, restoring to England, he believed, its northern heritage, a contribution Felce succeeds in explaining with scholarly detail, sensitive argument, cogent examples, and wide references to previous scholarship. * REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES *Felce makes a strong case that during his first 'Norse period', Morris developed via his encounters with Norse literature an ideal of heroism and secular endurance and action that profoundly affected his subsequent life and social engagement. * ENGLISH *Table of ContentsIntroduction 'The Lovers of Gudrun' and the Crisis of the Grail Quest The Sagas of Icelanders and the Transmutation of Shame Grettir the Strong and the Courage of Incapacity Heimskringla, Literalness and the Power of Craft Sigurd the Volsung and the Fulfilment of the Deedful Measure The Unnameable Glory and the Fictional World Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFirst full study and edition of the works of George Lauder, "the poet whom Scotland forgot". The Scottish poet George Lauder began as a "university wit", by imitating anti-papal satires popular in the Italian Renaissance. He set off for London as a young man, looking for patronage, but instead became an officer in the army, seeing service in France, the Low Countries, Germany, Denmark and Sweden -- an experience which provides the backdrop to the poetry of his mature years. At the Restoration he wrote a lengthy poem of advice to Charles II, and his final masterwork was a poetic conflation of the Gospel accounts of the life of Christ. Lauder was influenced by Ben Jonson, William Drummond, and by the Metaphysical and the Caroline styles. His personal library testifies to his wide range of interests, and to his acquaintance with European literature in neo-Latin and other languages. This volume traces Lauder's career, collects all his surviving verse (presented with full notes and commentary), and examines his interactions with certain of the greatest intellectuals of the Dutch Golden Age. Lauder was a British patriot and a loyal supporter of the House of Orange; above all, however, he is the author of a unique corpus of highly accomplished poetry. ALASDAIR A. MACDONALD is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature of the Middle Ages, University of Groningen, Netherlands.Table of ContentsGeorge Lauder: Scoto-British European Cultural contexts Arms and the man Lauder as poet Lauder's library George Lauder: the Man and his Art Texts The poetic corpus Treatment of texts Poems by Lauder Poems to Lauder Lauder Correspondence Commentary to poems by Lauder Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFirst full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower. Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. By attending to the ways in which birds were actually observed and experienced, this book aims to offer new perspectives on how and why they were meaningful in five major poems -- The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, The Parliament of Fowls and Confessio Amantis. In a consideration of sources from Isidore of Seville and Anglo-Saxon place-names to animal-sound word lists and Bartholomew the Englishman, the author shows how ornithological truth and knowledge are integral to our understandings of his chosen poems. Birds, he argues, are relevant to the medieval mind because their unique properties align them with important religious and secular themes: seabirds that inspire the forlorn Anglo-Saxon pilgrim; unnamed species that confound riddling taxonomies; a belligerent owl who speaks out against unflattering literary portraits. In these poems, human actions and perceptions are deeply affected by the remarkable flights and voices of birds. MICHAEL J. WARREN is currently Visiting Lecturer at Royal Holloway University, where he gained his PhD.Trade ReviewIn his soaring exploration of the avian, Warren urges us to look beyond the human preoccupations of medieval poetry to see how writers have persistently attempted to...bridge the gap between human and bird, at least temporarily, by inviting us to listen more closely to the melody those 'smale foweles' make all around us. * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT *Warren's handling of medieval material in a way that reminds us of both the innate value of the species we run the risk of destroying and the dangers of human exceptionalism is a welcome and, moreover, a significant contribution to the field. * MEDIUM ÆVUM *[I]t is not a bad thing for a book to leave readers wanting more when the readings are this perspicacious. ...Birds in Middle English Poetry contributes significantly to ecocritical, literary, and medieval studies. It shows that asking new questions of familiar texts reveals exciting insights into how medieval people understood their natural environment and how allegory operates. It invites us to remember the dynamic importance of birds in the Anthropocene and concludes with a generous glossary of bird names that will facilitate further study. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER *Combining ornithological and literary history, this book is an important contribution to environmental history and ecocriticism, unpacking the complex relationships between human and other creatures and their shared environments. * PARERGON *Birds in Medieval English Poetry is a valiant attempt at focussing exclusively on the birds and their special role within the medieval discourse on animals and recommended reading for all interested in matters animal. * ANGLIA *[B]y thinking with actual birds-by suggesting that the birds in these texts might be every bit as real and variable as the human characters-Warren complicates our sense of both the real and the textual. Each is ambiguous, paradoxical, and strange, each interacting unpredictably to tell us something new about the shared world of humans and birds. * Speculum *Table of ContentsIntroduction Native Foreigners: Migrating Seabirds and the Pelagic Soul in The Seafarer Avian Pedagogies: Wondering with Birds in the Exeter Book Riddles A Bird's Worth: Mis-Representing Owls in The Owl and the Nightingale 'Kek Kek': Translating Birds in The Parliament of Fowls Birds' Form: Enabling Desire and Identities in Confessio Amantis Epilogue Glossary: Old and Middle English bird names Bibliography

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Book SynopsisIntroduces Skelton and his work to readers unfamiliar with the poet, gathers together the vibrant strands of existing research, and opens up new avenues for future studies. John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences. This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen; JOHN SCATTERGOOD is Professor (Emeritus) of Medieval and Renaissance English at Trinity College, Dublin. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton,A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg WaiteTrade ReviewOverall, the collection is a rigorous and generous portrait of a man whose creative vernacularizing force was instrumental in both defying and moulding his own time. -- PARERGONThe book does an excellent job of situating Skelton in his literary, political, and cultural milieus. The essays are concise and accessible, and will serve as excellent springboards for more detailed study. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *This volume provides a much needed critical introduction to the important early Tudor poet John Skelton. * MEDIUM AEVUM *the chapters here strike an excellent balance between providing security, in the form of contextual scaffolding, and providing sharper edges, in the form of fresh or vivid accounts of how to understand Skelton's work. * CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY *Skelton's myriad contradictions often frustrate rather than engage readers, so this concise but rewarding Critical Companion, featuring contributions from a dozen heavyweight scholars, sheds welcome light on this perplexing writer's perplexing paradoxes. The volume elucidates Skelton's quirks and peculiarities by locating him squarely in the intellectual climate that informs his writing. Cogency, polish, and organizing design-virtues rarely associated with Skelton-are the signature characteristics of this collection, an indispensable volume for any reader of Skelton. * SPECULUM *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Sebastian Sobecki John Skelton (?1460-1529): A Life in Writing - John Scattergood Religion - Thomas Betteridge Law and Politics - Sebastian Sobecki Classical Literature - John Scattergood Humanism - David R. Carlson Satires and Invectives - John A. Burrow Lyrics and Short Poems - Julia Boffey Skelton's Voice and Performance - Elisabeth Dutton Literary Tradition - Jane Griffiths Skelton and the English Language - Greg Waite Skelton's English Works in Manuscripts and Print - Carol Meale Skelton's English Canon - A S G Edwards Reception and Afterlife - Helen Cooper A Skelton Bibliography - Nadine Kuipers

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Book SynopsisResponses from the nineteenth century onwards to the medieval French poet. Medieval Paris' paradigmatic poet, François Villon, has long captured the imaginations of creative writers. Attracted by his beguilingly pseudo-autobiographical literary persona and a body of work that moves seamlessly between bawdy humour, bitterness, devotion, and regret, Villon's heirs have been many and varied. A veritable "poet's poet", his oeuvre has appealed to fellow versifiers in particular, providing a rich source for translation and imitation. This book explores creative responses to Villon by British and North American poets, focusing on translations and imitations of his work by Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and Robert Lowell. They are presented as exemplary of the greater trend of rendering Villon into English, transporting the reader from the first verse translations of his work in the nineteenth century, to post-modern adaptations and parodies ofVillon in the twentieth. By concentrating on the manner in which individual poets have reacted to Villon, and to one another, the study unravels multiple layers of poetic relations. It argues that the relationships that exist between the translated or imitated texts are collaborative as much as they are competitive, establishing a canon of Villon in English poetry whose allusions are not only to the French source, but to the parallel corpus of English translations and imitations. CLAIRE PASCOLINI-CAMPBELL holds degrees in medieval and comparative literatures from the University of St Andrews and University College London.Trade ReviewBy concentrating on the manner in which individual poets have reacted to Villon, and to one another, the study unravels multiple layers of poetic relations. * CHOICE *François Villon in English Poetry: Translation and Influence is a taut, enticing, and precise study with appeal to readers interested not only in the reception of medieval literature, but also in poetry and poetics, Translation Studies, and Comparative Literature. * TRANSLATION AND LITERATURE *Chapter 4 addresses Pound, and especially his opera, Le Testament de Villon: it is a pleasure, to see attention paid to a work so little known, and Pascolini-Campbell's analysis is illuminating. * FRENCH STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction Then and Now: The Legend of Villon in the Middle Ages and in Modernity Villon and Swinburne: Finding and Singing Villon Villon and Rossetti: Poetics of Strangeness Villon and Pound: Modernity and the 'Mediaeval Dream' Villon and Bunting: Prison-Writing and Parody Villon and Lowell: Imitation and the Visible Translator Conclusion Appendices Bibliography

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