Search results for ""author words"

If the child is the father of the man, as William Wordsworth so famously declared, then what of the father that child grows to become? How does a daughter born of her mother’s death, as in the case of Mary Shelley, navigate the politics of production and reproduction within a loaded language of mythological allusion between generational authorships? How do the visual arts perpetuate or challenge cultural agendas, such as portraying patriarchal anxieties about the “effeminization” of homeland by the foreign “other”, or attempting, iconically, to “save the soul” of a nation? How do parents both encode and decode our world? With the rise of the cult of the child in the later 18th and 19th centuries, Romantic writers of Britain and Europe, and eventually of North America, were perfectly positioned to explore, by extension, what it meant to “parent,” whether it be in within the domestic or the political sphere.The essays in Romanticism and Parenting: Image, Instruction and Ideology offer a fresh, timely, and cutting edge contribution to the field of Romantic studies. The collection has its roots in conference proceedings from the 2005 Romanticism and Parenting Conference held at Seattle University in Seattle, Washington. Essays acknowledge traditional discussions of such quintessentially “Romantic” themes as the child, education and familial politics while building upon contemporary innovative arguments within the contexts of Romanticism. As a result, chapters in the collection range from examining didactic children’s literature to complicating constructions of the family politic at personal, communal and nationalistic levels. While challenging and deepening an understanding of Romantic studies, the collection also points to current, dynamic issues, such as the burgeoning discussion of the experience that actual parents face in academia. Consequently, the collection reveals how the Romantic period has come to profoundly influence our own current constructions of the politics of parenting.

Read more less

Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Winner of the Poetry Category OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2022. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in a village in central Jamaica. 'Trees were all around,' he writes, 'we often went to the yam ground, my grandmother's cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. [...] The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.' Now he lives in Leeds, near a forest where he goes walking. 'Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture...' And even as they help him recover his connections with nature, these poems are inevitably political. As Malika Booker writes, 'Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils. The collection racializes contemporary ecological poetics and its power lies in Allen-Paisant's subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker's right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body's complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.'

Read more less

From a platypus scarf to a giant crocodile rug, this fabulous activity book features animal-themed knitting patterns and fun puzzles, stories and quizzes to knock your socks off. Louise Walker, also known as Sincerely Louise, presents a selection of her favourite knits for you to try out. Including patterns for both home and to wear, this book includes mini animal trophy heads, triceratops slippers, a lion mug coaster and a giant balloon dog for you to recreate at home. Also, knit along to the ‘Lola the Polar Bear Moves’ comic and create a killer whale, raccoon, corgi, meerkat and a toucan, among many other adorable animals. But this book is not just packed with patterns – have a go at the crafty crossword, the ‘Find the Fibre’ wordsearch, The Knitter’s Arms pub quiz, Louise’s scrap yarn challenge, and many more. Each project is easy to make, only using a basic range of stitches, increases and decreases, so is perfect for beginners wanting to knit something impressive straight away or experienced knitters who are looking for exciting patterns.

Read more less

This anthology fills the need for a comprehensive, up-to-date collection of the most important contemporary writings on the English romantic poets. During the 1980s, many theoretical innovations in literary study swept academic criticism. Many of these approaches--from deconstructive, new historicist, and feminist perspectives--used romantic texts as primary examples and altered radically the ways in which we read. Other major changes have occurred in textual studies, dramatically transforming the works of these poets. The world of English romantic poetry has certainly changed, and Romantic Poetry keeps pace with those changes. Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff have organized the book by poet--Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, and Keats--and have included essays representative of key critical approaches to each poet's work. In addition to their excellent general introduction, the editors have provided brief, helpful forewords to each essay, showing how it reflects current approaches to its subject. The book also has an extensive bibliography sure to serve as an important research aid. Students on all levels will find this book invaluable.

Read more less

Fascinating and richly illustrated stories of flowers for every day of the year. Every day of the year a different species of flower bursts into bloom somewhere in the world. This collection of 366 flowers reveals not only their beauty but the fascinating botanical, literary, folkloric and historical stories behind them. Discover the magnificent magnolia, which evolved more than 95 million years ago at the time of dinosaurs, and the specific perfumed rose that covers the land around Grasse in France. Read about the powerful medicinal elements of the Manuka bush flowers and the inspiration behind William Wordsworth's 'host of golden daffodils'. Here are also the cheerful Mexican marigolds bedecking urban graveyards, delicate cherry or sakura blossoming along Japanese avenues, spectacular tropical vines hanging in the Philippine rainforest and flamboyant wildflowers carpeting meadows across Europe, showcasing the amazing variety of the natural world. Illustrated with stunning photographs and works of art, this collection is a celebration of flowers and their special place in both the natural world and our culture.

Read more less

Many cultures identify mourning as the very source of poetry and music, what Elizabeth Bishop calls the art of losing. That might well be the title of this collection. Not every poem is cornered with death, but all are about loss. The poems chosen traverse a surprisingly wide range of emotions from despair to joy, resignation to anger, all articulated in language of the greatest power and beauty . All the major verse forms of mourning are represented here: epitaph, requiem and lament. Three great elergies by Milton, Whitman and Rilke are surrounded by a wide variety of shorter poems. Naturally, the pathos of death predominates, but its comedy has not been neglected, whether in the savage poems of World War I or the gentle teasing of seventeenth-century satire. Poets include: Akhmatova, Auden, Bishop, Brodsky, Browning, Carew, Cory, Cowley, Dickinson, Donne, Dryden, Dyer, Fletcher, Graves, Gurney, Hardy, Harrison, Herrick, Hopkins, Horace, King, Leopardi, Lowell, MacCaig, Mandelstam, Milosz, Philips, Propertius, Roethke, Smith, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas and Wordsworth.

Read more less

Given the increasing number of old people, the proliferation of books about old age is hardly surprising. Most of these come from cultural historians or social scientists and, when those with a literary background have tackled the subject, they have largely done so through what are known as period studies. In Blasted with Antiquity, David Ellis provides an alternative. Skipping nimbly from Cicero to Shakespeare, and from Wordsworth to Dickens and beyond, he discusses various aspects of old age with the help of writers across European history who have usually been regarded as worth listening to. Eschewing extended literary analyses, Ellis addresses retirement, physical decay, sex in old age, the importance of family, legacy, wills and nostalgia, as well of course as dying itself. While remaining alert to current trends, his approach is consciously that of the old way of teaching English rather than the new. Whether 'blasted with antiquity' like Falstaff in Henry IV Part Two, or with the 'shining morning face' of an unwilling student, his accessible and witty style will appeal to young and old alike.

Read more less

Through close engagement with the work of Wordsworth, Austen, and Byron, The History of Missed Opportunities posits that the everyday first emerged as a distinct category of experience, or first became thinkable, in the Romantic period. Conceived here as something overlooked and only noticed in retrospect, the everyday not only becomes subject matter for Romanticism, it also structures Romantic poetry, prose, and writing habits. Because the everyday is not noticed the first time around, it comes to be thought of as a missed opportunity, a possible world that was not experienced or taken advantage of and of whose history—or lack thereof—writers become acutely conscious. Consciousness of the everyday also entails a new relationship to time, as the Romantics turn to the history of what might have been. In recounting Romanticism's interest in making things recurrently present, in recovering a past of what was close at hand yet underappreciated, William H. Galperin positions the Romantics as precursors to twentieth-century thinkers of the everyday, including Heidegger, Benjamin, Lefebvre, and Cavell. He attends to Romantic discourse that works at cross purposes with standard accounts of both Romanticism and Romantic subjectivity. Instead of individualizing or turning inward, the Romantics' own discourse depersonalizes or exhibits a confrontation with thing-ness and the material world.

Read more less

Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex and confusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity to what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important periods in literary history. Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated with Romanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarify several of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of this era Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romantics that have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for example that they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in free love; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with his sister Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideas that have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture – from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of the vampire Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarly introduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applying the most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths that continue to shape our appreciation of their work

Read more less

This book reflects on the figure of veering to form a new theory of literature. Contrary to a widespread sense that literature has become increasingly irrelevant to our culture and everyday life, Royle brilliantly traces a strangely compelling 'literary turn'. Starting with an 'Advertisement' (which literally means a 'turning towards') like an 18th-century novel, he explores images of swerving, loss of control, digressing and deviating to form this new theory of literature. Royle's study ranges from Montaigne to Stephen King, from the 'dance of atoms' in Lucretius to the 'human veer' in Don DeLillo. With wit and irony he investigates 'veering' in the writings of Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Melville, Hardy, Proust, Lawrence, Bowen, J.H. Prynne and many others. Veering provides new critical perspectives on all major literary genres: the novel, poetry, drama, the short story and the essay, as well as 'creative writing'. It proposes a new term for understanding post-1960s cultural and intellectual history: 'the literary turn'. It transverses different disciplines and discourses including verse, vertigo, the dinameu, detournement, transversality, environmentalism, the linguistic, the ethical and the political turn.

Read more less

Make the Berenstain Bears come to life by coloring many of your favorite characters with stickers! Featuring Papa, Mama, Brother, Sister, Honey Bear, and the Bear Country gang, children will love using the stickers in this book to create their masterpieces.The Berenstain Bears Color by Sticker also includes fun and engaging activities, such as mazes, crosswords, wordsearches, and more! This interactive addition to the Living Lights™ series of The Berenstain Bears books will provide young readers with hours of fun.The Berenstain Bears Color by Sticker is perfect for: Readers ages 4-8 Holiday gift exchanges, boredom busters, stocking stuffers, or road trips Kids who love stickers, puzzles, and other paper-and-pencil activities The Berenstain Bears Color by Sticker is an addition to the Living Lights™ series, with over 13 million copies sold, that: Features the hand-drawn artwork of the Berenstain family Continues in the much-loved footsteps of Stan and Jan Berenstain’s The Berenstain Bears series of books Is part of one of the bestselling children’s book series ever created, with more than 250 books published and impacting nearly 300 million readers

Read more less

‘I can't think of a single person who wouldn't enjoy having this beautiful collection of poetry to dip into when they need a boost' – Good Housekeeping ‘This is supreme bedtime reading.’ – The Lady ‘Go to sleep with the lightest of hearts, with verses from Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope and more’ – Townswoman These days we're all in need of a little nugget of happiness to help soothe our weary souls at the end of the day. A Happy Poem to End Every Day provides just that: one sublimely happy poem for every day of the year, from cosy fireside idylls in winter to outdoor adventures in summer, encounters with the beauty of nature in spring and moments of quiet reflection in autumn. It features some of the greatest poets ever to put pen to paper, from William Wordsworth on the joy of skating and Emily Brontë enjoying life on the moors to Simon Armitage catching a cricket ball and Wendy Cope sharing an orange, with a good smattering of classic jolly verse such as Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat. Beautifully illustrated with contemplative scenes of pure happiness, this wonderful book is the perfect way to give yourself a little lift every evening. Keep it by your bedside and it's sure to bring restful sleep and sweet dreams.

Read more less

Poems to celebrate spring. A sublime bedside companion to enjoy as the frost melts and days grow longer, with poems to immerse yourself in the season. From William Blake and Emily Dickinson to Robert Browning and Eleanor Farjeon, some of the finest poets that ever put pen to paper describe this wondrous season of new beginnings. With one entry for every day through spring, from 1st March until 31st May, this collection of 91 poems will invigorate you in the warmer and wetter months of Spring, from Robert Herrick’s first drops of March dew and the breaking blossoms of Laurence Binyon’s April day to William Blake’s meadow-sweet May and Emily Dickinson’s promise of light to come. This beautiful and collectable anthology of poems derives from the popular A Poem for Every Night of the Year and features poems inspired by springtime by Laurence Binyon, Margaret Cavendish, Amy Lowell, William Wordsworth and many more.

Read more less

In September 2015 the world lost Phil Patton – prolific design writer, teacher and tantalizing wordsmith. Patton’s insatiable curiosity, sense of humour and keen eye made for the most compelling reads. Whether he was chronicling design minutiae, quirky anecdotes or bizarre tales, Phil’s hundreds of books, columns, articles and posts always delivered a new account. As his editor at i-D magazine, Chee Pearlman, said, ‘His insight takes the reader beyond the object to an understanding of its broadest sociological context’. No topic eluded him, and for a large part of his 40-year career he championed automobiles, technology and product design. Roger Black, designer, writer and long-time colleague and friend of Patton’s wrote, ‘He taught the New York Times – by example – to cover design. The domino effect, the rest of the media followed.’ With an introduction by Edward Tufte and foreword by Caroline Baumann, this volume compiles 40 selections representing the wide range of interests and fascinations that occupied his thoughts. Punctuated by images of ideas and lists from notebooks he carried everywhere, Top This and Other Parables of Design is an intimate and portable companion for those who choose to always have a witty, informed friend around.

Read more less

Who were Shakespeare's 'Friend' and the 'Dark Lady'? Why did Donne risk his life and ruin his career for a seventeen-year-old girl? Why did Wordsworth's sister retire to her bed on his wedding day? Writing never takes place in a vacuum and much of the finest poetry in the English language has been inspired by particular people - patrons, spouses, lovers, friends, or just casual acquaintances. Whether relegated to an obscurity they do not deserve or thrust into prominence they did not seek, their importance to the creative process is inescapable. In Where All the Ladders Start, Julian Lovelock discusses with characteristic incisiveness and enthusiasm nine major British poets and the real lives behind their most significant works. Along the way he shows how poetry has developed over the past four hundred years and provides suggestions for further reading, while for convenience all of the relevant poems and extracts are reproduced in full. Written for both the seasoned reader and the student encountering these poems for the first time, Lovelock's analysis will inspire and entertain in equal measure.

Read more less

George Berkeley's mainstream legacy amongst critics and philosophers, from Samuel Johnson to Bertrand Russell, has tended to concern his claim that the objects of perception are in fact nothing more than our ideas. Yet there's more to Berkeley than idealism alone, and the poets now grouped under the label 'Romanticism' took up Berkeley's ideas in especially strange and surprising ways. As this book shows, the poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley focused less on Berkeley's arguments for idealism than they did on his larger, empirically-derived claim that nature constitutes a kind of linguistic system. It is through that 'ghostly language' that we might come to know ourselves, each other, and even God. This book is a reappraisal of the role that Berkeley's ideas played in Romanticism, and it pursues his spiritualized philosophy across a range of key Romantic-period poems. But it is also a re-reading of Berkeley himself, as a thinker who was deeply concerned with language and with written--even literary--style. In that sense, it offers an incisive case study into the reception of philosophical ideas into the workings of poetry, and of the role of poetics within the history of ideas more broadly.

Read more less

One is a science, the other an art; one useful, the other seemingly decorative, but mathematics and music share common origins in cult and mystery and have been linked throughout history. "Emblems of Mind" is Edward Rothstein's classic exploration of their profound similarities, a journey into their "inner life." Along the way, Rothstein explains how mathematics makes sense of space, how music tells a story, how theories are constructed, how melody is shaped. He invokes the poetry of Wordsworth, the anthropology of Levi-Strauss, the imagery of Plato, and the philosophy of Kant. Math and music, Rothstein shows, apply comparable methods as they create their abstractions, display similar concerns with ratio and proportion, and depend on metaphors and analogies to create their meanings. Ultimately, Rothstein argues, they reveal the ways in which we come to understand the world. They are images of the mind at work and play; indeed, they are emblems of Mind itself. Jacques Barzun called this book "splendid." Martin Gardner said it was "beautifully written, marvelous and entertaining." It will provoke all serious readers to think in new ways about the grand patterns in art and life.

Read more less

The Shadow of Death is a timely and ambitious reassessment of English Romantic literature and the unique role it played in one of the great liberal political causes of the modern age. Mark Canuel argues that Romantic writers in Great Britain led one of the earliest assaults on the death penalty and were instrumental in bringing about penal-law reforms. He demonstrates how writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen defined the fundamental contradictions that continue to inform today's debates about capital punishment. Celebrated reformers like Sir Samuel Romilly and William Ewart campaigned against the widespread use of death to punish crimes ranging from murder to petty theft, but they were most influential for initiating a system of penalties built upon conflicting motivations and justifications. Canuel examines the ways Romantic poets and novelists magnified these tensions while treating them as uniquely aesthetic opportunities, seized upon contending rationales of punishment to express imaginative power, and revealed how the imagination fueled the new penal code's disturbing vitality. Death-penalty reform, Canuel argues, in fact emerged from a new way of thinking about punishment as a negotiation among rationales rather than a seamless whole, with leniency and severity constantly at odds. He concludes by exploring how Romantic penal reform continues to influence contemporary views about the justice--and injustice--of legal sanctions.

Read more less

In Christopher Reid's marvellous new collection, a schoolboy furtively and thrillingly drops a marble through the top of his desk so that it makes its way in darkness along a complicated chute of books, rulers and rubbish, only to emerge from a hole in the base and be caught deftly in his other hand. The poem is titled 'Homeric' and might serve as a clue to the mood and construction of the collection in general, where the poet, now in his seventies, seeks to track down and commune with his much younger self. It is an investigation that tests Wordsworth's 'the Child is father of the Man' by contriving a series of transtemporal encounters between two selves who may now, conceivably, begin to understand each other.Reid was born in Hong Kong and, thanks to the roving nature of his father's employment, spent some of his childhood in foreign places. Most of the locations in this book, however, are the Britain of the 1950s and '60s - perhaps, at this distance in time, no less exotic. As the poems move from pre-verbal experience to adolescence, the younger self is captured in scenes that illuminate the steps by which a man - a poet - has been raised. Another poem conjures up the childhood of Henry James in order to reflect on 'the large part / mystery plays in both childhood and art', a proposition that the book as a whole may be said to endorse through both its wondering gaze and its ingenuity.

Read more less

The Scottish Highlands form the highest mountains in the British Isles, a broad arc of rocky peaks and deep glens stretching from the outskirts of Glasgow, Perth and Aberdeen to the remote and storm-lashed Cape Wrath in Scotland's far northwest. The Romans never conquered the region - according to the historian Tacitus, the Highland warrior chieftain Calgacus dubbed his people 'the last of the free' - and in the Dark Ages the island of Iona became home to a Celtic Church that was able to pose a serious challenge to the Church of Rome. Few travellers ever ventured there, however, disturbed by the tales of wild beasts, harsh geography and the bloody conflicts of warring families known as the clans. But after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden the influence of the clans was curbed and the Scottish Highlands became celebrated by poets, writers and artists for their beauty rather than their savagery. In the nineteenth century, inspired by the travel reportage of Samuel Johnson, the novels of Walter Scott, the poems of William Wordsworth and the very public love of the Highlands espoused by Queen Victoria, tourists began flocking to the mountains - even as Highlanders were being removed from their land by the brutal agricultural reforms known as the Clearances. With the popularity of hiking and the construction of railways, including the famed West Highland line across Rannoch Moor, the fate of the Highlands as one of the great tourist playgrounds of the world was sealed. Andrew Beattie explores the turbulent past and vibrant present of this landscape, where the legacy of events from the first Celtic settlements to the Second World War and from the construction of military roads to mining for lead, slate and gold have all left their mark.

Read more less

New Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.

Read more less

An affectionate but meticulously researched history of one of the most beautiful and best-loved corners of England – Crosthwaite Parish, nestling deep within the mountains and valleys of the Lake District. 'A unique contribution to English history' Hunter Davies 'A delightful, refreshingly written book, attentive to social detail and telling the only story that matters – history' Simon Jenkins 'A wonderful book' Margaret Drabble 'A completely fresh perspective on the Lakes and Lake Poets... I hugely enjoyed it' Andrew Marr Bounded by the peaks of Scafell, Skiddaw and Helvellyn, and embracing such well-known landmarks as Borrowdale, Derwentwater and Keswick, it lies within the heart of the Lake Poets' landscape and its rugged terrain excites passion in all those who know it. The Parish also boasts a remarkable history. Its 90 square miles were governed, from medieval times, by eighteen annually chosen 'customary tenants'; ancestors of the people who later prompted Wordsworth's portrayal of the area as 'a perfect Republic of Shepherds and agriculturalists'. His fellow poet Robert Southey lived within the Parish for forty years, was an active parishioner and rests in St Kentigern's churchyard. Here he is given his rightful position as a Lake Poet. In the nineteenth century, the Victorian state killed off the old parish system, sweeping away the egalitarian rule of the Eighteen Men. But a degree of redemption was at hand. Canon Rawnsley, vicar of Crosthwaite from 1883, pledged to defend the Lake District for future generations. So the Parish was at the heart of the creation of the National Trust and blazed a trail for a wider movement to preserve the English landscape. Writing with a historian's rigour and bearing aloft the banner of the Lake District statesmen, Philippa Harrison has produced a magisterial and fascinating record of a parish with a unique social, cultural and aesthetic resonance in English history.

Read more less

Prince Dmitry Rostov, Anglophile lover of English poetry, especially Shakespeare, has a bicycling accident. It occurs beside Wordsworth's "sylvan Wye". More sinister and worrying are a ghostly white figure, a strange black boat, a blood-red rose cast on the water, a train whistle and a gunshot, all of which make him witness to a "gap in nature" that will ultimately involve him in a unique quest for the truth. Finding himself less seriously injured than he thought, he receives medical care and a night's rest at the home of the beautiful daughter of Lord Irmingham, a devotee of the late-Victorian cult of Tolstoyanism. Discovering that the prince had once met Anna Karenina, Lord Irmingham insists on having him as an honoured guest at his large country house, Stadleigh Court, among other guests assembled for a soiree devoted to celebrating Tolstoy's ideas. But there is an important sub-text to the occasion, as the prince soon discovers. He is invited to confront the veiled, reclusive lady in the tower. Is she Anna Karenina? Is she now apparently alive and well and living at Stadleigh Court on the banks of the river Wye? Entrusted with the task of identifying her, the prince finds himself drawn ever more deeply into a sympathetic understanding of her situation, her concern for her son, newly arrived from Russia but suddenly struck down, her joys and fears, above all her talk of threats and, finally, her claim to have "enemies". The soiree when it occurs proves to be fatally tragic. Her death overnight forces the prince to investigate. By dint of clever detective work and a certain amount of good luck he gradually uncovers the specifically Russian reasons for her killing. An Epilogue to what is an ingenious and entertaining crime novel reveals how much more the prince has to tell his wife when she returns from visiting her mother in Russia.

Read more less

In his introduction to Prayin’ to Be Set Free, Andrew Waters likens the personal accounts of former Mississippi slaves to the music of that state’s legendary blues artists. The pain, the modest eloquence, and even the underlying vitality are much the same. What is now Mississippi wasn’t acquired by the United States until 1798, at which time it had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, excluding Native Americans. By the Civil War, it had over 430,000 slaves and 350,000 whites. More than half the whites were members of slave-owning families. The majority of slaves worked in the cotton fields. Mississippi was known as a slave-buying frontier state, in contrast to the eastern states, which sold slaves westward. Indeed, many of the former slaves in this book speak of coming to Mississippi as children. At the height of the Depression, the out-of-work wordsmiths who comprised the Federal Writers’ Project began interviewing elderly African-Americans about their experiences under slavery. The former slaves were more than 70 years removed from bondage, but the memories of many of them were strikingly clear. The accounts from former Mississippi slaves are considered among the strongest in the entire collection. The 28 narratives presented here are the best of those. Andrew Waters is a writer and former editor. A native North Carolinian, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Honors in Creative Writing and received a graduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the executive director of the Spartanburg Area Conservancy in Spartanburg, SC.

Read more less

Enlightenment critics from Dryden through Johnson and Wordsworth conceived the modern view that art and especially literature entails a double reflection: a reflection of the world, and a reflection on the process by which that reflection is accomplished. Instead “neoclassicism” and “Augustanism” have been falsely construed as involving a one-dimensional imitation of classical texts and an unselfconscious representation of the world. In fact these Enlightenment movements adopted an oblique perspective that registers the distance between past tradition and its present reenactment, between representation and presence. Two modern movements, Romanticism and modernism, have appropriated as their own these innovations, which derive from Enlightenment thought. Both of these movements ground their error in a misreading of “imitation” as understood by Aristotle and his Enlightenment proponents. Rightly understood, neoclassical imitation, constitutively aware of the difference between what it knows and how it knows it, is an experimental inquiry that generates a range of prefixes—“counter-,” “mock-,” “anti-,” “neo-”—that mark formal degrees of its epistemological detachment. Romantic ideology has denied the role of the imagination in Enlightenment imitation, imposing on the eighteenth century a dichotomous periodization: duplication versus imagination, the mirror versus the lamp. Structuralist ideology has dichotomized narration and description, form and content, structure and history. Poststructuralist ideology has propounded for the novel a contradictory “novel tradition”—realism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—whose stages both constitute a sequence and collapse it, each stage claiming the innovation of the stage that precedes it. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Read more less

'Literary, erudite, poignant and touching' Mail on Sunday'Stafford has a historical X-ray vision which allows her to look through the surface of a given landscape and describe what lies beneath . . . Miraculous' ScotsmanA village waits at the bottom of a reservoir. A monkey puzzle tree bristles in a suburban garden. A skein of wild geese fly over a rusty rail viaduct. The vast inland sea that awed John Clare has become fields.Chapter by fascinating chapter, alive with literary, local, and her own family history, Fiona Stafford reveals the forces, both natural and human, which transform places. Swooping along coastlines, through forests and across fens, following in the footsteps of Burns and Keats, Celia Fiennes and Charles Dickens, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Noel Coward and Compton Mackenzie, join her, time-travelling deep into the stories of our Isles.From red squirrels to brick vistas, from botanical gardens to hot springs, the landscapes of Britain are full of delights and surprises. Chance discoveries of rare species, shipwrecks and unlikely ruins, curious trees and startling towers, weird caves and disused airfields, or even just baffling placenames offer ways into unexpected histories and hidden lives. The clues to the past are all round us - Time and Tide will help you find them.'Shot through with tender delights and unexpected revelations' RICHARD HOLMES'Wonderful . . . A fascinating compendium of people and places and how they endlessly interact to change each other' PHILIP MARSDEN

Read more less

"Bartels proves herself a master wordsmith and storyteller."--Library Journal, starred review "This subdued tale of learning to forgive is Bartels's best yet."--Publishers Weekly "A deeply personal, thoughtful exploration of dealing with pain and grief."--Life Is Story "Taut and engaging."--Foreword "A deftly crafted, entertaining, thought-provoking novel."--Midwest Book Reviews *** Ten years ago, sisters Olivia and Melanie Greene were on a backcountry hiking trip when their parents were in a fatal car accident. Over the years, they grew apart, each coping with the loss in her own way. Olivia plunged herself into law school, work, and a materialist view of the world--what you see is what you get, and that's all you get. Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life-coaching business around her cafeteria-style spirituality--a little of this, a little of that, whatever makes you happy. Now, at Melanie's insistence (and against Olivia's better judgment), they are embarking on a hike in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In this remote wilderness they'll face their deepest fears, question their most dearly held beliefs, and begin to see that perhaps the best way to move forward is the one way they had never considered. Michigan Notable Book Award winner Erin Bartels draws from personal experience hiking backcountry trails with her sister to bring you a story about the complexities of grief, faith, and sisterhood.

Read more less

This selection brings together the best prose writings of the great early nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb, whose shrewd wit and convivial style have endeared him to generations of readers. These pieces include early discussions of Hogarth and Shakespeare; masterly essays written under the pen-name 'Elia' that range over such subjects as drunkenness, witches, dreams, marriage and the joy of roast pig; and letters to Lamb's circle of contemporaries, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Wryly amused by the world, allusive, searching and endlessly inventive, these are the essential works of a master of English prose.In his introduction Adam Phillips discusses how Charles Lamb's tragic life and sainted reputation, caring for his mentally ill sister Mary, belied the quality of his work. This edition also includes a biographical index of Lamb's correspondents.Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was an English essayist best known for his humorous Essays of Elia from which the essay 'A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig' is taken. Lamb enjoyed a rich social life and became part of a group of young writers that included William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge with whom he shared a lifelong friendship. Lamb never achieved the same literary success as his friends but his influence on the English essay form cannot be underestimated and his book, Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets is remembered for popularising the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Read more less

Poems to celebrate the winter season.A wonderful bedside companion for a frosty winter’s evening, with poems to immerse yourself in the season. From William Shakespeare to John Keats to Katherine Mansfield, the finest poets that ever put pen to paper describe this beautiful and sometimes terrible season.With one entry for every day through winter, from 1st December until 28th or 29th February, this is the ideal book to take you through the darker months and find joy and comfort in nature.In December ‘Gaunt in gloom’ begins James Joyce’s ‘Nightpiece’. In January, there’s a ‘certain slant of light for Emily Dickinson, while ‘the dull dead wind is out of tune’ for Oscar Wilde. And in February, the last month of meteorological winter, William Morris muses ‘From this chill thaw to dream of blossomed May’.This beautiful and collectable anthology of poems derives from the popular A Poem for Every Night of the Year and also features wintry poems by Alice Oswald, Edward Lear, Emily Brontë, William Wordsworth, Ted Hughes and many more.

Read more less

Thomas De Quincey's multivalent engagement with Romantic translation Offers new perspectives on De Quincey's most celebrated essays, his style and politics, and his famously fraught interactions with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Kant, and others Traces how De Quincey harnessed translation to reconfigure British Romanticism and open it towards European Romanticisms Combines insights from translation studies, critical theory, and Romantic studies in order to establish a novel method for reading Romantic writing This book investigates how De Quincey's writing was shaped by his work as a translator. Drawing on a wide range of materials and readings, it traces how De Quincey employed structures of interlinguistic and interdiscursive exchange to reimagine Romanticism. The book examines how his theories and practices of translation served to position his oeuvre, define his style, frame his philosophy and reinvent the meaning of literary creativity. Brecht de Groote traces in particular the ways in which De Quincey used translation to locate British Romanticism in its European context. In shedding new light on De Quincey, de Groote models a new translation-centric approach to the study of Romanticism.

Read more less

Classic essays on English literature, written in the late Professor Derek Brewer's characteristically lively and accessible manner. Derek Brewer, here on the brink of his long and successful career, takes a look at issues in English literature which were to remain of enduring interest to him. Lecturing in Japan at the time, a country where English culture wasnot at the time well known and understood, he stepped back to get matters in focus. These pages provide a brilliant synthesis of the attitudes and understanding that informed English literature from the early middle ages to the twentieth century. His special subjects are already to the fore: the medieval 'mindset', Chaucer, Malory, and the art of story above all. But his wide view also homes in on Shakespeare; on Wordsworth and the Romantics; and on E. M. Forster and modern novelists. Each of these topics Derek Brewer subtly contextualises with observations that are at once illuminating and informed by common sense. The whole is prefaced by a consideration of the important issues and preoccupations that underpin English literature, and how attitudes towards them evolved: morality, a sense of time, love, class and religion. Professor Derek Brewer [1923-2008], medievalist and scholar, was Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from 1977-90.

Read more less

The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is necessary for capitalism. Hanson treats rhetorical language as an archive of capital's accumulation through dispossession, in works by S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Moseley, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as in contemporary film and critical theory. Reading riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and the paradoxical coincidence of subsistence living with industrialization, Hanson shows the figural to be a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. But this survival is not always-already resistant to capitalism, nor are the origins of capital accumulation confined to the Romantic past. Hanson reveals rhetorical figure as entwined in deeply ambivalent ways with the circuitous, ongoing process of dispossession. Reading both historically and rhetorically, Hanson argues that rhetorical language records histories of dispossession and the racialized, gendered distribution of the labor of subsistence. Romanticism, they show, is more contemporary than ever.

Read more less

This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history.

Read more less

This book explores previously unexamined links between the arbitrary as articulated in linguistic theories on the one hand, and in political discourse about power on the other. In particular, Willam Keach shows how Enlightenment conceptions of the arbitrary were contested and extended in British Romantic writing. In doing so, he offers a new paradigm for understanding the recurrent problem of verbal representation in Romantic writing and the disputes over stylistic performance during this period. With clarity and force, Keach reads these phenomena in relation to a rapidly shifting literary marketplace and to the social pressures in Britain generated by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the class antagonisms that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. The question of what it means to think of language or politics as arbitrary persists through postmodern thinking, and this book advances an unfinished dialogue between Romantic culture and the critical techniques we currently use to analyze it. Keach's intertwined linguistic and political account of arbitrary power culminates in a detailed textual analysis of the language of revolutionary violence. Including substantial sections on Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Anna Jameson, Arbitrary Power will engage not only students and scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature but also those interested in critical and linguistic theory and in social and political history.

Read more less

Recorded in 2009, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney reads his first eleven collections of poems in their entirety. In this new edition Faber has added live readings by the poet of eleven poems from his final collection, Human Chain (2010), to complete the collection. 'His is "close-up" poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does.' John Banville'More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of.' John Carey'Heaney's voice, by turns mythological and journalistic, rural and sophisticated, reminiscent and impatient, stern and yielding, curt and expansive, is one of a suppleness almost equal to consciousness itself.' Helen Vendler 'There are few poets whose reading voice is so crucial to the poems' effect' - Bernard O'Donoghue, The Irish Times.Death of a NaturalistDoor into the DarkWintering OutNorthField WorkStation Island (part one)Station island (part two & three)The Haw LanternSeeing Things (part one)Seeing Things (part two)The Spirit Level (part one)The Spirit Level (part two)Electric Light (part one)Electric Light (part two)District and CircleHuman Chain

Read more less

An entertaining and provocative investigation of friendship in all its variety, from ancient times to the present day A central bond, a cherished value, a unique relationship, a profound human need, a type of love. What is the nature of friendship, and what is its significance in our lives? How has friendship changed since the ancient Greeks began to analyze it, and how has modern technology altered its very definition? In this fascinating exploration of friendship through the ages, one of the most thought-provoking philosophers of our time tracks historical ideas of friendship, gathers a diversity of friendship stories from the annals of myth and literature, and provides unexpected insights into our friends, ourselves, and the role of friendships in an ethical life. A. C. Grayling roves the rich traditions of friendship in literature, culture, art, and philosophy, bringing into his discussion familiar pairs as well as unfamiliar—Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Huck Finn and Jim. Grayling lays out major philosophical interpretations of friendship, then offers his own take, drawing on personal experiences and an acute awareness of vast cultural shifts that have occurred. With penetrating insight he addresses internet-based friendship, contemporary mixed gender friendships, how friendships may supersede family relationships, one’s duty within friendship, the idea of friendship to humanity, and many other topics of universal interest.

Read more less

In this ambitious study of the intense and often adversarial relationship between English and American literature in the nineteenth century, Robert Weisbuch portrays the rise of American literary nationalism as a self-conscious effort to resist and, finally, to transcend the contemporary British influence. Describing the transatlantic "double-cross" of literary influence, Weisbuch documents both the American desire to create a literature distinctly different from English models and the English insistence that any such attempt could only fail. The American response, as he demonstrates, was to make strengths out of national disadvantages by rethinking history, time, and traditional concepts of the self, and by reinterpreting and ridiculing major British texts in mocking allusions and scornful parodies. Weisbuch approaches a precise characterization of this "double-cross" by focusing on paired sets of English and American texts. Investigations of the causes, motives, and literary results of the struggle alternate with detailed analyses of several test cases. Weisbuch considers Melville's challenge to Dickens, Thoreau's response to Coleridge and Wordsworth, Hawthorne's adaptation of Keats and influence on Eliot, Whitman's competition with Arnold, and Poe's reshaping of Shelley. Adding a new dimension to the exploration of an emerging aesthetic consciousness, Atlantic Double-Cross provides important insights into the creation of the American literary canon.

Read more less

The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the renowned naturalist Richard Mabey. A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death. Writing in a celebrated style that the Economist calls “delightful and casually learned,” Mabey takes readers from the Himalayas to Madagascar to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of writers, artists, and scientists such as da Vinci, Keats, Darwin, and van Gogh and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images of plant life in ancient cave art and the earliest representations of the Garden of Eden; Newton’s apple and gravity, Priestley’s sprig of mint and photosynthesis, and Wordsworth’s daffodils; the history of cultivated plants such as maize, ginseng, and cotton; and the ways the sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia came to epitomize the spirit of America. Complemented by dozens of full-color illustrations, The Cabaret of Plants is the magnum opus of a great naturalist and an extraordinary exploration of the deeply interwined history of humans and the natural world.

Read more less

What did British people in the late eighteenth century think and feel about their relationship to nonhuman animals? This book shows how an appreciation of human-animal similarity and a literature of compassion for animals developed in the same years during which radical thinkers were first basing political demands on the concept of natural and universal human rights. Some people began to conceptualise animal rights as an extension of the rights of man and woman. But because oppressed people had to insist on their own separation from animals in order to claim the right to a full share in human privileges, the relationship between human and animal rights was fraught and complex. This book examines that relationship in chapters covering the abolition movement, early feminism, and the political reform movement. Donkeys, pigs, apes and many other literary animals became central metaphors within political discourse, fought over in the struggle for rights and freedoms; while at the same time more and more writers became interested in exploring the experiences of animals themselves. We learn how children's writers pioneered narrative techniques for representing animal subjectivity, and how the anti-cruelty campaign of the early 1800s drew on the legacy of 1790s radicalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Clare, Southey, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Equiano, Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Spence, Mary Hays, Ignatius Sancho, Anna Letitia Barbauld, John Oswald, John Lawrence, and Thomas Erskine are just a few of the writers considered. Along with other canonical and non-canonical writers of many disciplines, they placed nonhuman animals at the heart of British literature in the age of the French Revolution.

Read more less

The very best of British and Irish nature writing selected by the natural history writer Patrick Barkham. The landscapes of Britain and Ireland, together with the creatures and plants that inhabit them, have penetrated deep in our collective imagination. From Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth to Laurie Lee and Nan Shepherd, literature inspired by the natural world has become an integral part of our shared identity, and shaped our relationship with the islands we call home. In The Wild Isles, Patrick Barkham has gathered together a wide array of the very best of British and Irish nature writing, characterized by an arresting diversity of moods and voices. His choices are arranged under themes that range from birds, woods and coastlines to childhood, the seasons and urban nature, and juxtapose extracts from much-loved classics with passages by contemporary writers such as Robert Macfarlane, James Rebanks and Helen Macdonald. Here the reader will find joyful celebrations of landscape and the wildlife it nurtures, probing explorations of the environmental problems facing us today, as well as the fresh and vital perspectives of writers from underrepresented backgrounds. 'If British and Irish nature writing is to grow and endure,' writes Barkham in his introduction, 'it must be diverse, complex, multi-faceted and dynamic, and relevant to everyone who lives on this land.' Encompassing the bleak heights of the Cairngorms, the ancient woodlands of Essex, the storm-lashed islands of Ireland's west coast and the lush fields of Devon, The Wild Isles highlights nature's capacity to terrify and to delight, to soothe and to heal, to surprise, inspire and bring wonder.

Read more less

A compelling and persuasive account of how the Romantic Movement permanently changed the way we see things and express ourselves.Three great revolutions rocked the world around 1800. The first two - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - have inspired the greatest volume of literature. But the third - the romantic revolution - was perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching. From Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burns, to Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini and Liszt, to Goya, Turner, Delacroix and Blake, the romantics brought about nothing less than a revolution when they tore up the artistic rule book of the old regime. This was the period in which art acquired its modern meaning; for the first time the creator, rather than the created, took centre-stage. Artists became the high priests of a new religion, and as the concert hall and gallery came to take the place of the church, the public found a new subject worthy of veneration in paintings, poetry and music. Tim Blanning's sparkling, wide-ranging survey traces the roots and evolution of a cultural revolution whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

Read more less

Winner 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.

Read more less

While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world. Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.

Read more less

The arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the “end of things,” one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.

Read more less

The Shadow of Death is a timely and ambitious reassessment of English Romantic literature and the unique role it played in one of the great liberal political causes of the modern age. Mark Canuel argues that Romantic writers in Great Britain led one of the earliest assaults on the death penalty and were instrumental in bringing about penal-law reforms. He demonstrates how writers like Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen defined the fundamental contradictions that continue to inform today's debates about capital punishment. Celebrated reformers like Sir Samuel Romilly and William Ewart campaigned against the widespread use of death to punish crimes ranging from murder to petty theft, but they were most influential for initiating a system of penalties built upon conflicting motivations and justifications. Canuel examines the ways Romantic poets and novelists magnified these tensions while treating them as uniquely aesthetic opportunities, seized upon contending rationales of punishment to express imaginative power, and revealed how the imagination fueled the new penal code's disturbing vitality. Death-penalty reform, Canuel argues, in fact emerged from a new way of thinking about punishment as a negotiation among rationales rather than a seamless whole, with leniency and severity constantly at odds. He concludes by exploring how Romantic penal reform continues to influence contemporary views about the justice--and injustice--of legal sanctions.

Read more less

Few can match Charles Rosen's cultivation and discernment, whether as pianist, music historian, or critic. Here he gives us a performance of literary criticism as high art, a critical conjuring of the Romantic period by way of some of its central texts."What is the real business of the critic?" Rosen asks of George Bernard Shaw in one of his essays. It is a question he answers throughout this collection as he demonstrates and analyzes various critical approaches. In writing about the Romantic poets Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Cowper, and Friedrich Hölderlin, he examines the kind of criticism which attempts to uncover concealed code. He investigates the relationship between Romantic aesthetic theory and artworks, and explores the way Romantic art criticism has been practiced by critics from Friedrich Schlegel to Walter Benjamin. In essays on Honoré de Balzac, Robert Schumann, Gustave Flaubert, and others, he highlights the intersections between Romantic art and music; the artist's separation of life and artistic representations of it; and the significance of the established text.With an apt comparison or a startling juxtaposition, Rosen opens whole worlds of insight, as in his linking of Caspar David Friedrich's landscape painting and Schumann's music, or in his review of the theory and musicology of Heinrich Schenker alongside the work of Roman Jakobson.Throughout this volume we hear the voice of a shrewd aesthetic interpreter, performing the critic's task even as he redefines it in his sparkling fashion.

Read more less

In The Extravagant Robert Baker explores the interplay between poetry and philosophy in the modern period, engaging a broad range of writers: Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard in a chapter on the sublime; Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille in a chapter on visionary quest; and Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida in a chapter on apocalyptic negativity. His guiding concern is to illuminate adventures of “extravagant” or “wandering” language that, from the romantic period on, both poets and philosophers have undertaken in opposition to the dominant social and discursive frames of a pervasively instrumentalized world. The larger interpretative narrative shaping the book is that a dialectic of instrumental reason and creative negativity has been at work throughout modern culture. Baker argues that adventures of exploratory wandering emerge in the romantic period as displaced articulations of older religious discourses. Given the dominant trends of the modern world, however, these adventures repeatedly lead to severe collisions and crises, in response to which they are later revised or further displaced. Over time, as instrumental structures come to disfigure every realm of modern life, poetries and philosophies at odds with these structures are forced to criticize and surpass earlier voices in their traditions that seem to have lost a transformative power. Thus, Baker argues, these adventures gradually unfold into various discourses of the negative prominent in contemporary culture: discourses of decentering, dispersing, undoing, and erring. It is this dialectic that Baker traces and interprets in this ambitious study.

Read more less

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking--as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being--and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience. Wisse broadly traces modern Jewish humor around the world, teasing out its implications as she explores memorable and telling examples from German, Yiddish, English, Russian, and Hebrew. Among other topics, the book looks at how Jewish humor channeled Jewish learning and wordsmanship into new avenues of creativity, brought relief to liberal non-Jews in repressive societies, and enriched popular culture in the United States. Even as it invites readers to consider the pleasures and profits of Jewish humor, the book asks difficult but fascinating questions: Can the excess and extreme self-ridicule of Jewish humor go too far and backfire in the process? And is "leave 'em laughing" the wisest motto for a people that others have intended to sweep off the stage of history?

Read more less