Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume offers a fresh translation of a generous selection of Lorca’s suites, a body of work that Federico García Lorca left largely unpublished upon his death in 1936. Composed between 1920 to 1923, these poems are closest in spirit and technique to Lorca’s Songs (1927) and his Poem of the Deep Song (1931). In 1926 the poet suggested they could be released together to form a ‘boxed set’, yet this plan, like other earlier efforts, fell through. Lorca’s suites reveal a poet who is interested in creating a modern style founded on popular oral lyric and fragmented narrative. But they also show a poet who explores his heart and his sexual orientation, and who may have hesitated too long about publication. Lorca achieved the fullest expression of a personal yearning in his long poem In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits. Out of an impossible contradiction between self-discovery and wariness of disclosure rises the blue world of the ideal—a timeless world that all readers of Lorca will want to take into account, inasmuch as it forms a counterpoint to the rest of his work.Trade Review'Federico García Lorca, Selected Suites is a valuable contribution to the bibliography on the poet and offers both the specialist and the general reader of poetry the opportunity to access these little-known poems [...] The high quality of these translations stems from Quance's extensive knowledge about Lorca's poems, and the personal, literary, and cultural context in which they were written.' W. Michael Mudrovic, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC)Table of ContentsTABLE OF CONTENTS1) Blue River/Río azul2) Night/Noche3) Mirror Suite/Suite de los espejos4) Garden of the Dark-Haired Girls/Jardín de las morenas5) Capriccios/Capriccios6) Moments of Song/Momentos de canción7) Palimpsests8) Songs Beneath the Moon/Canciones bajo la luna9) Pictures of the Sea/Estampas del mar10) Three Prints of the Heavens/Tres estampas del cielo11) Fairs/Ferias12) Shadow/Sombra13) Four Yellow Ballads/Cuatro baladas amarillentas14) Pools in the Stream/Remansos15) Summer Hours/Horas de verano16) The Return/El regreso17) Secrets/Secretos18) White Album/Album blanco19) The Forest of Clocks/La selva de los relojes20) Cross/Cruz21) Water Suite/Suite del agua22) Three Twilights/Tres crepúsculos23) Countries/Países24) Little Stories of the Wind/Historietas del viento25) Riverside Reveries/Ensueños del río26) Madrigals/Madrigales27) Castle of Fireworks/Castillo de fuegos artificiales28) Water Jets/Surtidores29) Herbals/Herbarios30) Snail/Caracol31) In the Wood of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el bosque de las toronjas de luna32) In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el jardín de las toronjas de lunaAPPENDIXNOTESSELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis volume offers a fresh translation of a generous selection of Lorca’s suites, a body of work that Federico García Lorca left largely unpublished upon his death in 1936. Composed between 1920 to 1923, these poems are closest in spirit and technique to Lorca’s Songs (1927) and his Poem of the Deep Song (1931). In 1926 the poet suggested they could be released together to form a ‘boxed set’, yet this plan, like other earlier efforts, fell through. Lorca’s suites reveal a poet who is interested in creating a modern style founded on popular oral lyric and fragmented narrative. But they also show a poet who explores his heart and his sexual orientation, and who may have hesitated too long about publication. Lorca achieved the fullest expression of a personal yearning in his long poem In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits. Out of an impossible contradiction between self-discovery and wariness of disclosure rises the blue world of the ideal—a timeless world that all readers of Lorca will want to take into account, inasmuch as it forms a counterpoint to the rest of his work.Trade Review'Federico García Lorca, Selected Suites is a valuable contribution to the bibliography on the poet and offers both the specialist and the general reader of poetry the opportunity to access these little-known poems [...] The high quality of these translations stems from Quance's extensive knowledge about Lorca's poems, and the personal, literary, and cultural context in which they were written.' W. Michael Mudrovic, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC)Table of ContentsTABLE OF CONTENTS1) Blue River/Río azul2) Night/Noche3) Mirror Suite/Suite de los espejos4) Garden of the Dark-Haired Girls/Jardín de las morenas5) Capriccios/Capriccios6) Moments of Song/Momentos de canción7) Palimpsests8) Songs Beneath the Moon/Canciones bajo la luna9) Pictures of the Sea/Estampas del mar10) Three Prints of the Heavens/Tres estampas del cielo11) Fairs/Ferias12) Shadow/Sombra13) Four Yellow Ballads/Cuatro baladas amarillentas14) Pools in the Stream/Remansos15) Summer Hours/Horas de verano16) The Return/El regreso17) Secrets/Secretos18) White Album/Album blanco19) The Forest of Clocks/La selva de los relojes20) Cross/Cruz21) Water Suite/Suite del agua22) Three Twilights/Tres crepúsculos23) Countries/Países24) Little Stories of the Wind/Historietas del viento25) Riverside Reveries/Ensueños del río26) Madrigals/Madrigales27) Castle of Fireworks/Castillo de fuegos artificiales28) Water Jets/Surtidores29) Herbals/Herbarios30) Snail/Caracol31) In the Wood of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el bosque de las toronjas de luna32) In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits/En el jardín de las toronjas de lunaAPPENDIXNOTESSELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe characteristic alliterative poem of the 14th and 15th centuries tells a story of incident and adventure: it is pre-eminently the poetry of narrative. Yet it is also, more than any other kind of medieval verse, remarkable for passages of vivid description, taking advantage of the extraordinary rich verbal resources of the alliterative poets and the characteristic strengths of the alliterative line. Memorable examples are the green chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the storm at sea in Patience, the dream-landscape in Pearl, and the mysterious tomb in St Erkenwald; there are violent battle-scenes, descriptions of hunting and hawking, beautiful meadows and terrifying mountains, purling streams and wild rivers. Here is a seeming contradiction, or at least a tension that needs to be explored. The descriptive passages are digressions that interrupt the narrative; the story must pause to take in a visual effect. In Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, Thorlac Turville-Petre explores this relationship between description and narrative, and the contribution of description to the narrative. Passages from all the major alliterative poems are analysed, and translated as necessary, so that the book may meet the needs of students as well as scholars familiar with the language and the topics discussed.Trade ReviewReviews 'These essays cap Thorlac Turville-Petre's nearly half-century career devoted to the alliterative poetic tradition. They ably explore a variety of paradoxes, most notably the tensions between narrative progress and descriptive stasis, and between the perceived 'otherness' of alliterative language and style and various forms of familiarisation (appeals to lived experience, manifold connections with other Middle English writing, as well as with previously unnoted inspirations outwith English). Above all, the essays testify to the power of skills almost forgotten in today's academy, for Turville-Petre's careful unpacking of the poets' capacity to visualise rests always upon an impressive readerly attentiveness.'Ralph Hanna, Professor of Palaeography (Emeritus) and Emeritus Fellow at Keble College, Oxford.‘This book can be approached as a treasury of close readings of the Gawain group and related Middle English alliterative romances, with attention to sources, representation, and locality. On that basis, the book deserves praise, indeed gratitude, for its interpretive precision.’Eric Weiskott, Modern Philology‘[Offers] an informative summary of Turville-Petre’s body of work and provides a critical anthology of vivid passages of alliterative description […] Elegantly written and intellectually engaging.’Alex Mueller, The Review of English Studies'Thorlac Turville-Petre has produced a vade mecum for readers of Middle English alliterative poetry. The most important poems all receive attention. Two preliminary chapters define the corpus and introduce readers to its language and form. The bibliography lists preferred editions. Yet this is not a companion in the sense popularized by Cambridge University Press and Boydell & Brewer. A new “companion to Middle English alliterative poetry” would be welcome, but Turville-Petre offers something more interesting: he reads the poems. His subject is poetic technique, especially descriptive technique and the way that descriptions sit within the flow of narrative.' Ian Cornelius, Anglia'The book as a whole is the work of a scholar immersed in the corpus of late-medieval alliterative verse. Turville-Petre's command of the material is impressive and the texts are lovingly described in clear and crisp prose. That alliterative poets excel at descriptio is a commonplace of criticism, and this study will provoke further analysis of their context and rhetoric.' Richard J. Moll, The Medieval ReviewTable of ContentsAbbreviations1. Introduction2. The Vocabulary of Description3. Narrative and Description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight4. Morte Arthure: A Hero for our Time5. Alexander’s Entry into Jerusalem in the Wars of Alexander6. Authenticity and Interpretation in St Erkenwald7. Landscapes and Gardens8. Siege Warfare9. Storms10. ConclusionBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn late December 1817, when attempting to name “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature,” John Keats coined the term “negative capability,” which he glossed as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the “poetical Character” Keats notes that “it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.Trade Review‘That this book ranges so richly, so variously, and so widely will be welcome to all readers, not least because it embodies the Shakespearean aspects of negative capability.’ Nicholas Roe, Wardlaw Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews‘Keats's Negative Capability will ... prompt [its readers] to think again and anew and unceasingly on what negative capability was, is, and can become.’ Jonathan Mulrooney, Associate Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross‘[A] wonderfully diverse collection that equally tells the story of Keats while profitably poking and probing the discursive, diffusive, and cultural powers of the term [negative capability]… in the spirit of an intelligently designed Keatsian smorgasbord, the collection has something for everyone.’ G. Kim Blank, The Wordsworth Circle'This book significantly and provocatively reconfigures our understanding of Keats's poetry and letters, his authorial intentions, his aesthetic philosophy, and his global legacy.'Rebecca Nesvet, Review 19'[A] thought-provoking collection of commentary and innovative thinking... The work here will not provide statements of ‘fact and reason’, but instead will stimulate future scholarship on Keats and Romantic legacy for many years to come.'Anna Mercer, The Hazlitt Review'[The essays'] disagreements about what negative capability can and can’t mean give the volume a conversational dynamism; even their anxiety resembles the urgency of a spirited argument between friends... As Jonathan Mulrooney’s afterward notes, the collection’s dissonance is “its most Keatsian” feature.'Brittany Pladek, European Romantic Review'The collection will be essential to students and scholars of Keats as Rejack's analysis of John Jeffrey's role in transcribing 'Negative Capability' refreshes our understating of the concept. Contributors to this collection have risen to Rejack's editorial challenge and, produced prominent and diverse readings, which extend in variety across a range of critical approaches, including feminism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. Keats's 'Negative Capability' remains a vital concept, which continues to provoke readers and writers alike to reflect on its myriad values and virtues in the present and will continue to do so in the future.'Amina Brik, The BARS ReviewTable of ContentsPreface - Nicholas RoeIntroduction. Disquisitions: Reading Negative Capability, 1817–2017 - Brian Rejack and Michael TheunePart I. ‘swelling into reality’: New Contexts for Negative Capability Keats’s Negative Capability: On Pantomime and ‘Irritable Reaching’ - Brian Bates John Keats’s Jeffrey’s ‘Negative Capability’; or, Accidentally Undermining Keats - Brian Rejack Keats’s ‘Negative Capability’ and Hazlitt’s ‘Natural Capacity’ - Michael Theune ‘that strong excepted soul’: Nineteenth-Century Women Read Keats - Carmen Faye MathesPart II. ‘examplified throughout’: Forms of Negatively Capable Reading’ Negatively Capable Reading - Cassandra Falke Knowledge’s ‘gordian shape’: Keats and the Disciplines - Kurtis Hessel ‘Irritable Reaching’ and the Conditions of Romantic Mediation - Jeanne Britton ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts’: Pluralities and the Historical Present in Keats and Hazlitt - Emily RohrbachPart III. ‘pursued through Volumes’, Volume I: Negative Capability in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Poetry Beyond the Great Divide: Negative Capability and Postwar American Poetics - Robert Archambeau Versions of Negative Capability in Modern American Poetry and Criticism - Eric Eisner ‘giddily off into the unknown’: Negative Capability and Naturalism in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics - Arsevi Seyran ‘Darkling I listen’: Jorie Graham and Negative Capability - Thomas GardnerPart IV. ‘pursued through Volumes’, Volume II: Adaptations, Appropriations, Mutations Negative Capability in the Twenty-First Century and Romantic Self Annihilation in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials - Suzanne L. Barnett Negative Capability in Psychoanalysis: Keats and Retroactive Judgment in Bion, Freud, Lacan, and Milner - David Sigler Zen and the Art of Negative Capability - Anne C. McCarthy Negative Capability in Dialogic Context - Walter L. ReedAfterword: Reading Keats’s Negative Capability - Jonathan MulrooneyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisFor the modern world Greek tragedy is represented almost entirely by those plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides whose texts have been preserved since they were first produced in the fifth century BC. From that period and the next two hundred years more than eighty other tragic poets are known from biographical and production data, play-titles, mythical subject-matter, and remnants of their works quoted by other ancient writers or rediscovered in papyrus texts. This edition includes all the remnants of tragedies that can be identified with these other poets, with English translations, related historical information, detailed explanatory notes and bibliographies. Volume 1 includes some twenty 5th-century poets, notably Phrynichus, Aristarchus, Ion, Achaeus, Sophocles’ son Iophon, Agathon and the doubtful cases of Neophron (author of a Medea supposedly imitated by Euripides) and Critias (possibly author of three other tragedies attributed to Euripides). Volume 2 will include the 4th- and 3rd-century tragedians and some anonymous material derived from ancient sources or rediscovered papyrus texts.Remnants of these poets’ satyr-plays are included in a separate Aris & Phillips Classical Texts volume, Euripides Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama, edited by Patrick O’Sullivan and Christopher Collard (2013).Trade Review‘The most valuable element of the volume is the introductory discussions for each author and for each title, as well as the commentary notes to the testimonies and fragments.' Felice Stama, Bryn Mawr Classical Review ‘Our general opinion on Cropp's work is highly positive: well documented, scientifically up-to-date and rigorous, but at the same time easy to consult.’ Paolo B. Cipolla, Exemplaria Classica (translated from Italian).‘The clear translations, appropriately designed commentaries, and especially the excellent introductions to the individual poets and plays, in which Cropp includes both older and recent interpretations, while frequently adding his own thought-provoking suggestions, will find a grateful readership.’ Hauke Schneider, Gymnasium (translated from German)Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroductionTragedy in the fifth century: a sketchSourcesThis editionTexts, Translations and NotesThespis (TrGF 1) Choerilus (TrGF 2) Phrynichus (TrGF 3) Pratinas (TrGF 4) Polyphrasmon (TrGF 7) Aristias (TrGF 9) Euphorion, Euaeon (TrGF 12, 13) Aristarchus (TrGF 14) Neophron (TrGF 15) Euripides I, II (TrGF 16, 17) Ion (TrGF 19) Achaeus (TrGF 20) Iophon (TrGF 22)Philocles I (TrGF 24) Xenocles I (TrGF 33) Agathon (TrGF 39) Critias? (TrGF 43) Diogenes of Athens (TrGF 45) Abbreviations and references Indexes (Poets; Titles; Sources; General)

Read more less

Book SynopsisRoger Rosenblatt, writing in the New York Times in 2016, described Paul Muldoon as `one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems - word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.’ This is a selection (chosen by poet John Kinsella) of some of the more linguistically innovative and overtly 'experimental' poems from Muldoon’s extensive and verbally rich oeuvre. Muldoon is always innovative and `electric’, but the focus in this selection is on linguistic `departures’ in his own practice. Both inside and outside the avant-garde, Muldoon is ultimately a maverick whose unique voice is nonetheless steeped in the politics of a bilingual Irish poetics, with a forensic dissection of `New World’–`Old World’ (false) verbal dynamics. We see and hear his poems in juxtaposition and proximity, in terms of those elements of his work that are possibly less appreciated and discussed by those who cast him as a lyrical purist who 'plays' with language. Muldoon’s is a poetry that is compelled, propelled and is 'political' in complex arrays, and isn't about `gameplay’ per se, but a politics of language. Muldoon has a driving purpose in all he writes, and the reader and listener may begin to get a sense of the possibilities of this purpose through engaging with this book.Trade Review'These writings think of our relation to place as not just as a function of "where we are but [also] where we have been and where we can perceive ourselves as having been, or imagine ourselves being"... For Kinsella, it is Muldoon's verse vagabondage through the thorny linguistic, historical, and mythological borderlands of his two homes that best captures this "multi-layered and cumulative picture of place". Not just "the prince of the quotidian", Kinsella's Muldoon is the laureate of polysituatedness.' James Jiang, Australian Book Review

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe quarrel between the poet Alexander Pope and the publisher Edmund Curll has long been a notorious episode in the history of the book, when two remarkable figures with a gift for comedy and an immoderate dislike of each other clashed publicly and without restraint. However, it has never, until now, been chronicled in full. Ripe with the sights and smells of Hanoverian London, The Poet and Publisher details their vitriolic exchanges, drawing on previously unearthed pamphlets, newspaper articles and advertisements, court and government records, and personal letters. The story of their battles in and out of print includes a poisoning, the pillory, numerous instances of fraud, and a landmark case in the history of copyright. The book is a forensic account of events both momentous and farcical, and it is indecently entertaining.Trade Review‘Drawing on deep familiarity with the period and its personalities, Pat Rogers has given us a witty and richly detailed account of the ongoing war between the greatest poet of the eighteenth century and its most scandalous publisher. Cleverly presented as the trial of Pope v. Curll, with scores of documents as “exhibits” and with posterity as jury, the narrative fully justifies the author’s comment that “Pope and Curll are both inherently funny.”’ – Leo Damrosch, author of the bestselling The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.This book offers the first full-length study of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets and clarifies its ‘place’ – in multiple ways – in literary history as a work celebrated for ‘making it new’, yet deeply engaged with the literary past. It argues that Smith’s sonnets are constituted by three intertwined concerns: with tradition, place and the sonnet form itself, whereby the subjects of Smith’s sonnets – across birds, rivers, the sea, plants and flowers – are bound up with the literary context in which she wrote. Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet shows that Smith’s verse engages more deeply with tradition than has hitherto been realised and revises our understanding not only of Smith’s career but also of the sonnet in eighteenth-century England. The book also illuminates Smith’s place in posterity, as a popular poet – influencing figures ranging from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Constable – who was subsequently obscured in literary history. It reveals the complex processes underpinning Smith’s reception and paradoxical position from the late eighteenth century to the present day, and shows that the appropriation of place itself was an important way in which aspects of literary tradition have been negotiated and understood by Smith, her predecessors, contemporaries and successors.Trade Review‘[Roberts] offers fascinating readings of some of Smith’s now long-forgotten precursors, placing the poet within a lively and constantly evolving English sonnet tradition.’ Claire Knowles, European Romantic Review‘Roberts provides something new and even overdue with her meticulous accounting of the nine editions of Smith’s name-making Elegiac Sonnets and Smith’s evolution as a poet over the corresponding sixteen years… [Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet] is valuable as a thorough and authoritative account of Smith’s influential poetry, with (as promised in the title) broader implications for understanding place and form in Romanticism, particularly in her proposal that the sonnet is an importantly Romantic poetic form.’ Lawrence Evalyn, Eighteenth-Century Fiction'Roberts provides something new and even overdue with her meticulous accounting of the nine editions of Smith’s name-making Elegiac Sonnets and Smith’s evolution as a poet over the corresponding sixteen years… The monograph is valuable as a thorough and authoritative account of Smith’s influential poetry.' Lawrence Evalyn, Northeastern UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1 The Eighteenth-Century Sonnet2 Tradition3 Innovation4 Wider Prospect5 Botany to Beachy HeadBibliography

Read more less

Book SynopsisPoetry is an ancient verbal art, which has its roots in the oral epics and fragments that survive from classical times. Dictionaries of English, by contrast, are a comparatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the ‘hard words’ that Robert Cawdrey gathered in A Table Alphabeticall in 1604 and extending to the present edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with its ongoing revisions. This innovative collection of essays is the first volume to explore the ways in which dictionaries have stimulated the imaginations of modern and contemporary poets from Britain, Ireland, and America, while also considering how poetry has itself been a rich source of material for lexicographers. As well as gauging the influence of major dictionaries like the OED, the essays single out encounters with more specialised works and broach uses of words that are not typically included in dictionaries. In doing so, the contributors not only cast familiar questions of ambiguity and etymology in a fresh light, but they also reveal a number of surprising and energising points of contact, from Hugh MacDiarmid’s rediscovery of Scots to Tina Darragh’s visual appropriations of dictionary pages. As such, Poetry & the Dictionary will prove an indispensable volume for all readers – academic or not – who find themselves fascinated by the language’s many involutions.Trade ReviewReviews ‘This fascinating collection of essays offers a set of new perspectives on experimental poetics as a tradition and as a current practice. This will be a book of substantial interest to scholars, critics, students and readers of contemporary poetry.’ Professor Andrew Roberts, University of Dundee'This collection affords the poet, the lexicographer, and the literary scholar a fruitful and rich cross-disciplinary dive into the mechanics of both language and lyricism... a worthy collection of essays.'D. A. Lockhart, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America'Readers who want to know about W.H. Auden's "love affair with the OED" (p. 83) will find enlightenment here, while the poems and essays of T.S. Eliot are individually indexed in a highly professional index at the back of the book. [...] Equally rewarding for the curious reader is Tara Stubbs's essay on Marianne Moore, an American poet of the early 20th-century.' Patrick Hanks, International Journal of Lexicography'For readers willing to engage with this more academic text, Poetry & the Dictionary will provide a degree of poetic and intellectual investigation that may ultimately lead to polyvocal poetry.’ Renée M. Sgroi, Carousel Magazine'Looking through a … broader scope, Piers Pennington and Andrew Blades's Poetry & the Dictionary tracks the centuries-long relationship between the terms of their book's title … remind[ing] us that the dictionary itself cannot be "depersonalized," that no "picture" it presents is necessarily clear.' Chelsie Malyszek, LA Review of BooksTable of ContentsPart 1: Poetry and the Dictionary1. IntroductionAndrew Blades and Piers Pennington2. ‘When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary’: Poets and Dictionaries, Dictionaries and PoetsCharlotte Brewer3. Poetry in the Oxford English Dictionary: A Quantitative ProfileDavid-Antoine Williams4. Lexicography in Modern PoetryMatthew SperlingPart 2: British and Irish Poetry and the Dictionary5. Jamieson, Jargons, Jangles, and Jokes: Hugh MacDiarmid and DictionariesMichael Whitworth6. Not even inventedDeborah Bowman7. Proper Names, the Dictionary, and the Poetry of ExperimentPiers Pennington8. Etymology and Elegy: Paul Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’Mia GaudernPart 3: American Poetry and the Dictionary9. Briefer Mentions and Lyrical Lexicons: Marianne Moore’s Responses to Dictionaries in The Dial and ObservationsTara Stubbs 10. A Collected Unconscious: James Merrill’s DictionariesAndrew Blades11. ‘All Things are Words of Some Strange Tongue’: Dictionary Definition Form in Contemporary American PoetryKate Potts12. Long Poems about Everything: Dictionary as Subject and Model for Poem, 1974–2016Giles Goodland

Read more less

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

Read more less

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'

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

Book SynopsisPacifist Invasions is about what happens to the francophone lyric in the translingual Franco-Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it demonstrates how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in the poetry of Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Pacifist Invasions deploys side-by-side comparisons of classical Arabic literature, Islamic scripture, and the Arabic commentary traditions in the original language against the landscapes of modern and contemporary French and francophone literature, poetry, and poetics. Detailed close readings reveal three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into the French lyric, and the mechanisms by which poets foreignize French, as they engage in a translational and intertextual relationship with the history and world of Arabic literature.Through fine-grained analyses of poetry, translations, commentaries, chapbooks, art books, and essays, Pacifist Invasions proposes a cross-cultural history and rereading of French and francophone literatures in relation to the transversal translations and transmissions of classical Arabic poetics. It offers a translingual, comparative repositioning of the field of francophone postcolonial studies along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis. The vision of the postfrancophone succeeds the point of exhaustion within the French poetic sociolect, with wide-ranging and surprising implications for the study of French and francophone poetry.Trade ReviewReviews 'Pacifist Invasions will be of major importance to scholars of postcolonial francophone literature and intervenes in important ways in ongoing debates on world literature.'Olivia Harrison, University of Southern California'Elegant, textured, and richly insightful, yasser elhariry’s book nimbly explores Franco-Arab writers who infuse French poetry with Arabic cultural traditions. Helpfully delineating major Arabic forms that go back many centuries, Elhariry examines how contemporary poets intertextually and interlingually intertwine them with French. They remake the landscape of French poetry, unleashing new possibilities by their reverse colonization of French with the idioms, forms, and spirituality of Muslim Arab lands. An important study of a fascinatingly translingual and intercultural body of work.'Jahan Ramazani, editor ofThe Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial PoetryTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsNote on TranslationsPreface // Ends of FrenchIntroduction // Word Over WordPart One // Odists 1 Translating Translating Tengour 2 Sky-Birds & Dead Trees: On Two Images in Edmond JabèsPart Two // Sufis 3 Wine Song: Salah Stétié & ʿOmar ibn al-Fārid 4 Sufis in Mecca: Abdelwahab Meddeb, Ibn ʿArabī, & the New LyricPart Three // Andalusians 5 Heliotropic Exit: Ryoko Sekiguchi’s MuwashshahConclusion // PostfrancophoneNotesBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.The Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most sophisticated writers of the twentieth century, suffered from sexual impotence. This emotionally overwhelming condition shaped his literary experience in ways that have not been understood. Until now Borges has largely been considered an asexual author who could not read, think, or write about desire and sex, but in this book historian Ariel de la Fuente shows that sexuality was a major preoccupation for him, both as a reader and as an author. De la Fuente has conducted an extensive literary investigation in Borges’s figurative erotic library and presents for the first time a study of the relationship between Borges’s sexual biography, his erotic readings, and the writing of desire and sex in his work. The author explores relevant literary questions while employing a historical method and the book is truly an interdisciplinary study at the intersection of history with Latin American, European, and Eastern literatures, poetry, philosophy, and sexuality. Argued with clarity, Borges, Desire, and Sex offers an unexpected perspective on the literature and figure of a world-wide influential author.Trade Review'It is remarkable that there remains under-explored an area of Borges scholarship, yet the central questions posed here are important, original, and compelling.'William Rowlandson, University of Kent'This is a work of exceptional originality. The historical rather than literary perspective has brought to the fore entirely new readings, both regarding the interplay between Borges’s life and his work, and between his reading and creative output. At the moment it stands almost alone in its approach and methodology. This work will become a mandatory tool in the development of future research.'Evelyn Fishburn, University College London, author of A Dictionary of Borges'The author offers a detailed argument…assembling strong evidence for his case, while opening new avenues of investigation of Borges’s life and works…For [its] novel investigations of key [Borges’s] works, for highlighting the erotic focus of some of Borges’s readings, for offering a timely reminder of the importance of Stoic philosophy in the Argentine writer’s thinking, as well as for its exposition of the sexual dimensions of Borges’s poetry on the arrabal, among other merits, the book is very valuable. In the end, it serves to bring to light the important role that sex and desire played in [Borges’s] life and work.' Bill Richardson (National University of Ireland), Variaciones Borges'De la Fuente makes a compelling argument not merely for the importance of sexuality in Borges’s work, but for its extent. The author marshals his evidence and presents it clearly… Borges, Desire, and Sex makes a major contribution to our better, more complete understanding of the man and his work. I recommend it highly.' Earl Fitz (Vanderbilt University), Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y El CaribeTable of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1: On Borges’s SexualityChapter 2: Biography in Literature and the Reading of Desire and Sex in BorgesChapter 3: Borges’s Erotic Library: The Poetry ShelfChapter 4: Sir Richard Burton’s Orientalist Erotica: The Thousand Nights and a Night and The Perfumed GardenChapter 5: Schopenhauer and Montaigne, Philosophy and SexChapter 6: Desire and Sex in Buenos Aires: Borges’s Poetry on the ArrabalChapter 7: Stoicism and Borges’s Writing of WomenChapter 8: Emma Zunz: Sex, Virtue, and PunishmentChapter 9: La intrusa: Incest and Gay ReadingsWorks Cited

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhat do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation – the elegy, the ode, the hymn – have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question – Jorie Graham, Frank O’Hara, Michael Haslam, J. H. Prynne, Claudia Rankine, and others – have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial phase in the evolving history of lyric.CONTRIBUTORS: Ruth Abbott, Edward Allen, Gareth Farmer, Fiona Green, Drew Milne, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sophie Read, Matthew Sperling, Esther Osorio Whewell, John WilkinsonTable of ContentsIntroductionEdward Allen1. Aubade: Jorie Graham and “the pitch of the dawn”Fiona Green2. Hymnody: From Lowell to Riley in Common MeasureMatthew Sperling3. Pastoral: “Language-Landscape Linkage” in Michael Haslam’s VerseSophie Read4. Elegy: Surreptitious and Prospective, from W. S. Graham to Margaret RossJohn Wilkinson5. Interpellation: Addressing Ideology in Claudia Rankine’s American LyricDrew Milne6. Ode: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and the Artifice of ResuscitationGareth Farmer7. Souvenir: Lucie Brock-Broido’s True KitschEsther Osorio Whewell8. Song: Denise Riley in PartsRuth Abbott9. Dramatic Monologue: R. F. Langley and the Poem of “Anyone in Particular”Jeremy Noel-Tod10. Nocturne: J. H. Prynne Among the StarsEdward Allen

Read more less

Book SynopsisPoetry & Money: A Speculation is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It begins by showing how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable such trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the South Sea Bubble and the economic revolution, debates over metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value. With its practitioner’s attention to the minutiae of poetic technique, it considers analogies between words and coins, and between poetic rhythm and the circulation of currencies in an economy. Through its close readings of poems over many centuries directly or indirectly engaged with money, it proposes ways in which, while we cannot escape monetary economies, we can resist, to some extent, being ensnared and diminished by them – through a fresh understanding of values money may serve to enable, but ones which are nevertheless beyond price.Trade Review'To call this original book "rich" and "rewarding" (and I do) is only to demonstrate the extent to which money and its metaphors permeate areas of cultural value and valuation. Examining those metaphors is essentially the method of this study, though Robinson never forgets that artworks assert their value in unique, if compromised, ways. Robinson transacts an enviable sweep across the poetries of several centuries and cultures, using his deep and wide knowledge of poetry. Expect some fine archival research, as well as novel and exciting close readings of some canonical and less canonical figures.' Robert Sheppard, Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Edge Hill UniversityTable of Contents1. Introductory issues2. Money is a kind of poetry3. Straitened circumstances4. Indebtedness and redemption5. Poetic forms containing rampant money6. For a vast speculation had failed7. Going off the gold standard8. Contracts and prophets9. Circulatory checks and balances10. Getting value out of money

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez’s classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter. William Wootten explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The Alvarez Generation is an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide. A new Afterword contains important biographical information on Sylvia Plath and reflects on its implications both for the discussions contained in the book and for the study of Plath’s work more generally.Trade Review'A well-researched, gracefully-written and important book about a formative period in British and Irish poetry. Wootten has established himself as a fine critic.' Patrick McGuinness'The Alvarez Generation is an illuminating, provocative and important book... Though briefer, it is as significant as Blake Morrison’s The Movement.' Sean O'Brien'Wootten's account of the emergence and persistence of these tastes allows us to understand much of what happened in British poetry in the post-war era.'Justin Quinn, Times Literary Supplement'[As] "the serious gives way to ludic scepticism" in more and more contemporary poetry, it is good to be reminded of a time when much more seemed at stake.'Michael Daniels, PN ReviewTable of Contents Preface Part I 1. Beginnings: Oxford and Cambridge Poetry in the early 1950s 2. ‘A Violent Time’: Anti-Movement Poetry in the mid to late 1950s 3. In Opposite Directions: A. Alvarez and Thom Gunn 4. Against Gentility 5. On Being Serious 6. Anthology Making 7. First Reactions: 'The Review' Debate and the Initial Response to 'The New Poetry' Part II 8. Sylvia Plath Part III 9. Going to Extremes 10. ‘A Study of Suicide’ Part IV 11. ‘Against Extremism’ 12. Costing Seriousness 13. ‘I Don’t Like Dramatising Myself’: anti-confessionalism in the later poetry of Thom Gunn 14. 'Birthday Letters' 15. Geoffrey Hill’s New Poetry 16. Children of 'The New Poetry' Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisA Critical Introduction proposes a new didactic and dynamic way of reading the great twentieth-century poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). The aim is to present a holistic vision of this complex poet, promoting his literary geniality in order to better understand his orthonymic-heteronymic poetry. A guiding motif is Pessoa's own Be as plural as the universe. In leading the reader through the poet's published literary work, Jerónimo Pizarro allows an intimate perspective, alongside an academic one, to better understand the workings of Pessoa's mind and life. Discussion centres on the dilemmas an editor faces when editing posthumously. A prime question revolves around the genesis of Pessoa's heteronyms and orthonyms. Understanding is revealed by a critical perspective on the unity that exists in all of Pessoa's literary work. Interpretations of the poems; explanation of the profundity of The Book of Disquiet; and his isms of Paulism, Caeirism, Intersectionism and Cessationism, are discussed and analysed. The issue of Pessoa's astrological predictions his birth year and the effects of this event on Portuguese national history is debated. A chapter is devoted to the effect that translating Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát had on the poet. The work contains eleven texts written by Pessoa in English (including an autobiographical note from 1935), a substantive dual language bibliography, and is highly illustrated with facsimiles of the poet's own written material. A Critical Introduction is essential reading for all scholars and students of Pessoa's literary output and life circumstances. The work has been written to appeal to cultural studies (arts and aesthetics) enthusiasts in general at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, but given the engagement of new critical material it also provides a structured resource for future research.Trade Review‘Pizarro’s book… can be considered as a true mini-course on Fernando Pessoa. It not only guides its readers with a sure hand through the complexities of Pessoa’s own work but also prepares them to navigate the by now labyrinthine field of Pessoa studies.’ Paulo de Medeiros, Portuguese Studies

Read more less

Book SynopsisOverturning many of the established perspectives on Larkin's poetry and prose, Cooper's book presents new evidence from a range of previously unpublished sources, and is the first full-length critical work to analyse Larkin's early fiction, as well as advancing new readings of The Less Deceived', The Whitsun Weddings' and High Windows'. Critics have tended to label Larkin's poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkin's artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems' commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. This study makes available to scholars paintings by Larkin's friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writer's concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s. This is a fresh and revealing study on Larkin's artistic subversion; stylistic and thematic, it reveals the underlying themes of Larkin's entire oeuvre.Trade Review"Stephen Cooper's book sets a new standard in Larkin criticism. A comprehensive study of all of Larkin's writings, including juvenilia, fiction, poetry, drama and letters, it is also the most challenging and provocative account of his fiction to date. With impressive subtlety and skill, Cooper overturns the commonly held view of Larkin as a jaundiced conservative and reveals how his writing often emerges from surprisingly progressive and unorthodox views on gender, nation and social class. The book is full of unusual insights and thoughtful reflections on post-war British culture. Larkin's poetry and fiction are given a new and lasting significance in the light of this radical reappraisal." -- Stephen Regan, Professor of English, University of Durham."Larkin's worldview, as revealed in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985, ed. by Anthony Thwaite (1992), became increasingly sexist, racist, and socially conservative over time. This contrasts sharply with the wry, sometimes jaundiced, usually humane persona revealed in Larkin's poems. Presently, much Larkin criticism focuses on the darker aspects of his thought as revealed in the letters, consequently neglecting the excellences of his work. Cooper redresses this trend by considering the poet's neglected juvenilia and early fiction alongside the widely appreciated later poetry and nonfiction. In the early works, Cooper locates the germs of dominant themes in Larkin's canon - - for example, gender, class, and identity - - and he provides excellent close, parallel readings of these texts and later poems to show how these themes changed and grew over time. Cooper cites unpublished correspondence (letters to and reminiscences from friends and colleagues) that underscores the idea that Larkin was more artistically experimental and subversive than the current critical portrait of him suggests, especially regarding the social reinforcement of gender roles. Summing Up: Highly recommended." -- Choice.Larkins poetry and fiction are given a new and lasting significance in the light of this radical reappraisal. -- Stephen Regan, Professor of English, University of DurhamCooper cites unpublished correspondence that under-scores the idea that Larkin was more artistically experimental and subversive than the current critical portrait of him suggests, especially regarding the social reinforcement of gender roles. Highly recommended. -- ChoiceThe way [Cooper] points out the coexistence of a realist and a modernist paradigm in A Girl in Winter is a contribution not only to Larkin studies, but also to the literary history of the 20th century. -- Professor Istvan Racz, Hungarian Journal of English and American StudiesTable of ContentsPastoralism & the Changing Climate in the Arid Northern Kenya; New Generation of Dietary Supplements with Microelements for Livestock -- Possibilities & Prospects; Soy Protein Products: Anti-Nutritional Factors, Classification, Processing, Quality Assessment, Nutritional value & Application in Animal Feed; Bangladesh Poultry Sector: Growth, Competitiveness & Future Potential; Parasitic Diseases in Livestock under Different Farming Practices: Possibilities for their Control; Animal Trypanosomosis: An Important Constraint for Livestock in Tropical & Sub-Tropical Regions; Surveillance & Management of Trypanosomiasis in Cattle Herds in Kauru Area, Kaduna State, Nigeria; Anthelmintic Resistance: A Giant Obstacle for Livestock Worm Control in Current Era -- A Challenge; Salmonella & Salmonellosis in Animals & Humans: Epidemiology, Pathogenicity, Clinical Presentation & Treatment; Bovine Tuberculosis at the Human-Animal Interface, Situation & Possible Risk Factors of Disease in Animals in Pakistan, Future of Disease & Action Plan; Paratuberculosis (Johne's Disease): Clinical Signs, Diagnosis, Lesions, Prophylaxis/Treatment/Control & Zoonotic Potential; Changes in Consumers' Food Purchases Due to New Legislation on Food Labeling May Affect Livestock Production Practices in the United States; Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisJohn Hughes explores Hardy's claim that his art sought to intensify the expression of things through three main sections on music, the body, and voice. These offer intersecting and mutually informing discussions of the central drama of inexpression and expressivity in Hardys work, as it affects the various personae of the text, including the reader. Throughout, the book draws on themes in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell to reveal how Hardys fiction and poetry express and represent the affective and physical conditions of mind, and their conflicts with social fictions of identity. The first main section on music incorporates three chapters that examine how Hardys writing stages musical experience as an expression of human desire and individuality at odds with the constraints of rationality, Victorian fiction form, and social convention. Intricate and extensive readings are linked also to larger contextual and theoretical issues in order to show how music as a theme and motif highlights the kinds of creativity and ethical cruxes that characterise Hardys work throughout his career. The second section on embodiment and sensation shows how close attention to Hardys writing on the topics of facial and bodily expression (and affectivity) reveal much about the sources of his inspiration, and its philosophical conditions and implications. The third section on voice offers three chapters, each of which centrally employs a close metrical reading of an important Hardy poem within its larger biographical and inter-textual contexts. These readings demonstrate how fundamental were Hardys innovations in meter to the power and originality of his work, and to its expressive treatment of his abiding preoccupations with love, grief, childhood, and the loss of faith.

Read more less

Book SynopsisDown to the Sunless Sea explores the time Coleridge spent in Gibraltar, Malta, Sicily and mainland Italy, where he had planned to recover his health, escape the clutches of opium and gain inspiration from the landscape; however, the reality would prove very different. After his short sojourn in Gibraltar, Coleridge arrived in Malta, where he became acquainted with the British Governor, Alexander Ball. He settled into Maltese life, initially taking on the role of acting Under-Secretary. Travelling to Sicily, Coleridge embraced the island's landscapes but was shaken to find the opium poppy was an important local crop. The Mediterranean would not prove the solution to his addiction. He visited the Consul, G. F. Leckie, and was invited to stay with him at a house on the site of Timoleon's Greek villa. The poet visited the antiquities of Syracuse and at the opera house encountered the soprano, Anna-Cecilia Bertozzi, nearly succumbing to her charms. Back in Malta, he was offered rooms in the Treasury building (now the Casino Maltese) and took up the post of Public Secretary. Legal pronouncements in Italian bear Coleridge's signature. Leaving behind these matters of state, he drifted through the Italian peninsula, engaging with a coterie of artistic ex-pats when in Rome. His listless, half-hearted, and financially embarrassed attempts at the Grand Tour included a narrow escape from French troops. Coleridge's Mediterranean sojourn impacted on his life and writing, not to mention his health, which saw a marked decline, leading to his final years in Highgate under the roof of a friendly doctor. Down to the Sunless Sea is a literary reflection on the fact that the sun-filled Mediterranean was not the tonic he had first imagined.Table of ContentsThe Illustrations. ONE: Departure on the Speedwell. TWO: Strategising for Nelson in Malta. THREE: Sicily and the Prima Donna. FOUR: A Hand in Maltese Affairs. FIVE: The Grand Tourist Returns Home. SIX: Lectures and Legacy. Notes. Bibliography. Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisA Critical Introduction proposes a new didactic and dynamic way of reading the great twentieth-century poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). The aim is to present a holistic vision of this complex poet, promoting his literary geniality in order to better understand his orthonymic-heteronymic poetry. A guiding motif is Pessoa's own Be as plural as the universe. In leading the reader through the poet's published literary work, Jerónimo Pizarro allows an intimate perspective, alongside an academic one, to better understand the workings of Pessoa's mind and life. Discussion centres on the dilemmas an editor faces when editing posthumously. A prime question revolves around the genesis of Pessoa's heteronyms and orthonyms. Understanding is revealed by a critical perspective on the unity that exists in all of Pessoa's literary work. Interpretations of the poems; explanation of the profundity of The Book of Disquiet; and his isms of Paulism, Caeirism, Intersectionism and Cessationism, are discussed and analysed. The issue of Pessoa's astrological predictions his birth year and the effects of this event on Portuguese national history is debated. A chapter is devoted to the effect that translating Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát had on the poet. The work contains eleven texts written by Pessoa in English (including an autobiographical note from 1935), a substantive dual language bibliography, and is highly illustrated with facsimiles of the poet's own written material. A Critical Introduction is essential reading for all scholars and students of Pessoa's literary output and life circumstances. The work has been written to appeal to cultural studies (arts and aesthetics) enthusiasts in general at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, but given the engagement of new critical material it also provides a structured resource for future research.Trade Review‘Pizarro’s book… can be considered as a true mini-course on Fernando Pessoa. It not only guides its readers with a sure hand through the complexities of Pessoa’s own work but also prepares them to navigate the by now labyrinthine field of Pessoa studies.’ Paulo de Medeiros, Portuguese Studies

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe characteristic alliterative poem of the 14th and 15th centuries tells a story of incident and adventure: it is pre-eminently the poetry of narrative. Yet it is also, more than any other kind of medieval verse, remarkable for passages of vivid description, taking advantage of the extraordinary rich verbal resources of the alliterative poets and the characteristic strengths of the alliterative line. Memorable examples are the green chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the storm at sea in Patience, the dream-landscape in Pearl, and the mysterious tomb in St Erkenwald; there are violent battle-scenes, descriptions of hunting and hawking, beautiful meadows and terrifying mountains, purling streams and wild rivers. Here is a seeming contradiction, or at least a tension that needs to be explored. The descriptive passages are digressions that interrupt the narrative; the story must pause to take in a visual effect. In Description and Narrative in Middle English Alliterative Poetry, Thorlac Turville-Petre explores this relationship between description and narrative, and the contribution of description to the narrative. Passages from all the major alliterative poems are analysed, and translated as necessary, so that the book may meet the needs of students as well as scholars familiar with the language and the topics discussed.Trade ReviewReviews 'These essays cap Thorlac Turville-Petre's nearly half-century career devoted to the alliterative poetic tradition. They ably explore a variety of paradoxes, most notably the tensions between narrative progress and descriptive stasis, and between the perceived 'otherness' of alliterative language and style and various forms of familiarisation (appeals to lived experience, manifold connections with other Middle English writing, as well as with previously unnoted inspirations outwith English). Above all, the essays testify to the power of skills almost forgotten in today's academy, for Turville-Petre's careful unpacking of the poets' capacity to visualise rests always upon an impressive readerly attentiveness.'Ralph Hanna, Professor of Palaeography (Emeritus) and Emeritus Fellow at Keble College, Oxford.‘This book can be approached as a treasury of close readings of the Gawain group and related Middle English alliterative romances, with attention to sources, representation, and locality. On that basis, the book deserves praise, indeed gratitude, for its interpretive precision.’Eric Weiskott, Modern Philology‘[Offers] an informative summary of Turville-Petre’s body of work and provides a critical anthology of vivid passages of alliterative description […] Elegantly written and intellectually engaging.’Alex Mueller, The Review of English Studies'Thorlac Turville-Petre has produced a vade mecum for readers of Middle English alliterative poetry. The most important poems all receive attention. Two preliminary chapters define the corpus and introduce readers to its language and form. The bibliography lists preferred editions. Yet this is not a companion in the sense popularized by Cambridge University Press and Boydell & Brewer. A new “companion to Middle English alliterative poetry” would be welcome, but Turville-Petre offers something more interesting: he reads the poems. His subject is poetic technique, especially descriptive technique and the way that descriptions sit within the flow of narrative.' Ian Cornelius, Anglia'The book as a whole is the work of a scholar immersed in the corpus of late-medieval alliterative verse. Turville-Petre's command of the material is impressive and the texts are lovingly described in clear and crisp prose. That alliterative poets excel at descriptio is a commonplace of criticism, and this study will provoke further analysis of their context and rhetoric.' Richard J. Moll, The Medieval ReviewTable of ContentsAbbreviations1. Introduction2. The Vocabulary of Description3. Narrative and Description in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight4. Morte Arthure: A Hero for our Time5. Alexander’s Entry into Jerusalem in the Wars of Alexander6. Authenticity and Interpretation in St Erkenwald7. Landscapes and Gardens8. Siege Warfare9. Storms10. ConclusionBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisByron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher is the first comprehensive account of the relationship between Byron and the man who published his poetry for over ten years. It is commonly seen as a paradox of Byron’s literary career that the liberal poet was published by a conservative publishing house. It is less of a paradox when, as this book illustrates, we see John Murray as a competitive, innovative publisher who understood how to deal with his most famous author. The book begins by charting the early years of Murray’s success prior to the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and describes Byron’s early engagement with the literary marketplace. The book describes in detail how Byron became one of Murray’s authors, before documenting the success of their commercial association and the eventual and protracted disintegration of their relationship. Byron wrote more letters to John Murray than anyone else and their correspondence represents a fascinating dialogue on the nature of Byron’s poetry, and particularly the nature of his fame. It is the central argument of this book that Byron’s ambivalent attitude towards professional writing and popular literature can be illuminated through an understanding of his relationship with John Murray.Trade ReviewReviews 'Interesting, original, well-researched, and important ... a natural companion to The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron.' Bernard Beatty, University of Liverpool'A substantial and enduring contribution to Byron studies and, more broadly, to literary history and publishing history.' Peter Graham, Virginia Tech'O’Connell neatly explores the demands that the publishing market placed on both Murray and Byron....Byron and John Murray is as much a contribution to studies of sociability, the nineteenth-century publishing world, and the bookselling market place, as it is to accounts of Byron and Byronism. By bringing together reception history, private letters that were exposed to a public world, and Byron’s literary works themselves, this book enhances our understanding of the changing literary landscapes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.'Charlotte May, The BARS Review, No. 48Table of Contents Introduction 1. John Murray I and II 2. ‘Lord Byron turns pro’ 3. Janus-Faced: James Cawthorn and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, John Murray and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 4. ‘…and found myself famous’ 5. ‘I have written too much’ 6. John Murray and ‘the Demon of Silence’: Byron in Exile 7. ‘A book without a bookseller’ Conclusion

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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'

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less

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

Read more less