Search results for ""author words"

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.

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Ancient clay cooking pots in the southern Levant are unappealing, rough pots that are not easily connected to meals known from ancient writings or iconographic representations. To narrow the gap between excavated sherds and ancient meals, the approach adopted in this study starts by learning how food traditionally was processed, preserved, cooked, stored, and transported in clay containers. This research is based on the cookware and culinary practices in traditional societies in Cyprus and the Levant, where people still make pots by hand.Clay pots were not only to cook or hold foods. Their absorbent and permeable walls stored memories of food residue. Clay jars were automatic yogurt makers and fermentation vats for wine and beer, while jugs were the traditional water coolers and purifiers. Dairy foods, grains, and water lasted longer and/or tasted better when stored or prepared in clay pots. Biblical texts provide numerous terms for cookware without details of how they looked, how they were used, or why there are so many different words.Recent studies of potters for over a century in the southern Levant provide a wealth of names whose diversity helps to delineate the various categories of ancient cookware and names in the text. Ancient Cookware from the Levant begins with a description of five data sources: excavations, ancient and medieval texts, 20th century government reports, early accounts of potters, and ethnoarchaeological studies. The final section focuses on the shape, style, and manufacture of cookware for the past 12,000 years. For archaeologists, changes in cooking pot morphology offer important chronological information for dating entire assemblages, from Neolithic to recent times. The survey of pot shapes in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan presents how different shapes were made and used.

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This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan’s purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, it aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory. By stressing the question of affect, the book shows how Lacan’s position cannot be reduced to the structuralist models he nevertheless draws upon, and thus how the problem of the body may be understood as a formation that marks the limits of language. Exploring the anthropological category of “race” within a broadly evolutionary perspective, it shows how Lacan’s elaboration of the “imaginary” and the “symbolic” might allow us to explain human physiological diversity without reducing it to a cultural or linguistic construction or allowing “race” to remain as a traditional biological category. Here again the questions of history and temporality are paramount, and open the possibility for a genuine dialogue between psychoanalysis and biology. Finally, the book engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself.

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This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan’s purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, it aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory. By stressing the question of affect, the book shows how Lacan’s position cannot be reduced to the structuralist models he nevertheless draws upon, and thus how the problem of the body may be understood as a formation that marks the limits of language. Exploring the anthropological category of “race” within a broadly evolutionary perspective, it shows how Lacan’s elaboration of the “imaginary” and the “symbolic” might allow us to explain human physiological diversity without reducing it to a cultural or linguistic construction or allowing “race” to remain as a traditional biological category. Here again the questions of history and temporality are paramount, and open the possibility for a genuine dialogue between psychoanalysis and biology. Finally, the book engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself.

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The Off-Comers of Windermere, Birth of a Vibrant Victorian Township fills a gap in the literature of the Lake District. It presents a comprehensive social history of the many off-comers who built their villas and mansions in a sylvan landscape, amongst the lakes and fells of Lakeland, creating the vibrant village we know today as Windermere. Who were these folk, wealthy and not, artisan and not, mostly strangers who came from off to shape a Northern Arcadia? All too often the memory of them and their contribution to the architecture, institutions and heritage of the place has faded, and been lost in the mists of time. This book seeks to revive their memory and assemble a definitive record, before the facts are lost forever. It also describes the many working people who provided labour and skill to fashion the fabric, services and infrastructure of a vibrant township for the enjoyment of residents and tourists alike, who increasingly visit today. Windermere was born in 1847, a product of the railway age, when a branch line opened from Kendal to carry tourists into central Lakeland. It was vigorously opposed by Wordsworth, who feared invasion of his homeland by uneducated masses from the industrial hinterland. So what was the plan, if any; who conceived it; and how was it accomplished? What linked a private church, a college for the sons of clergymen, a school for the poorer classes, and the elegant villas of gentlefolk? The narrative is rooted in records, building as far as possible on contemporaneous accounts of events, to weave a broad and colourful tapestry which stretches from a sylvan quietude in 1800, through the thrust of an iron way, to completion of a thriving township in 1900. A fascinating story emerges, supported by many colourful anecdotes, and original photographs taken in Victorian times by one of the founders.

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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.

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Nicholas Hagger's 55 books include innovatory works on literature, history, philosophy and international politics. In his first published literary work he revived the Preface, which had fallen into disuse after Wordsworth and Shelley. He went on to write Prefaces (sometimes called ‘Prologues’, ‘Introductions’ or ‘Introductory Notes’) for all his subsequent books. Collected Prefaces, a collection of 55 Prefaces (excluding the Preface to this book), sets out his thinking and the reader can follow the development of his philosophy of Universalism (of which he is the main exponent), his literary approach (particularly his combination of Romanticism and Classicism which he calls "neo-Baroque") and his metaphysical thinking. His Prefaces can be read as essays, and as in T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays there is an interaction between adjacent Prefaces that brings an entirely new perspective to Hagger's works. These Prefaces cover an enormous range. Nicholas Hagger is a Renaissance man at home in many disciplines. His Universalism focuses on humankind’s relationship to the whole universe as reflected in seven key disciplines seen as wholes: the whole of literature, history, philosophy and the sciences, mysticism, religion, international politics and statecraft and world culture. Behind all the Prefaces is Hagger’s fundamental perception of the unity of the universe as the One and of humankind’s position in it. These Prefaces complement his Selected Letters, a companion volume also published by O-Books, and contain startling insights that illumine and send readers to the works the Prefaces introduce.

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A fresh twist on 24 classic poems, these visual interpretations by comic artist Julian Peters will change the way you see the world.This stunning anthology of favorite poems visually interpreted by comic artist Julian Peters breathes new life into some of the greatest English-language poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.These are poems that can change the way we see the world, and encountering them in graphic form promises to change the way we read the poems. In an age of increasingly visual communication, this format helps unlock the world of poetry and literature for a new generation of reluctant readers and visual learners.Grouping unexpected pairings of poems around themes such as family, identity, creativity, time, mortality, and nature, Poems to See By will also help young readers see themselves differently. A valuable teaching aid appropriate for middle school, high school, and college use, the collection includes favorites from the Western canon already taught in countless English classes.Includes poems by Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, Maya Angelou, Seamus Heaney, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti, William Wordsworth, William Ernest Henley, Robert Hayden, Edgar Allan Poe, W. H. Auden, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Philip Johnson, W. B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Tess Gallagher, Ezra Pound, and Siegfried Sassoon.

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AS FEATURED ON THE ZOE BALL RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB SUNDAY TIMES CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH 'Wonderful' Lee Child 'Outstanding' Nadine Matheson 'Riveting' Harriet Tyce 'Brilliant' Janice Hallett 'We know you know. Talk and you’re next.' Bishop Jeremiah Dawodu, pastor of a Nigerian megachurch, has been arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Folasade, the 'First Lady' of the church. The arrest was public, humiliating and sensational - sending shockwaves through Lagos - but throughout it all, Bishop Dawodu maintains his innocence. Philip Taiwo, an acclaimed investigative psychologist, is asked by his sister, a member of the church's congregation, to clear the pastor’s name. With no actual body, it looks to be a simple case and despite Philip’s dislike of organised religion, he agrees to take it on as a favour to his sister. Then the First Lady's body is found in a nearby lake just as Philip’s beloved family come under attack from someone warning him off the case, and he realises that nothing to do with this investigation will be straightforward. Was it murder or suicide? Is someone framing the Bishop or the First Lady? Gaslight is the sensational follow up to Femi Kayode's acclaimed debut, Lightseekers, picked as a Book of the Month by the Times, Sunday Times, Independent, Guardian, Observer, Financial Times and Irish Times 'Femi Kayode is an unparalleled wordsmith' S. A. Cosby 'Deftly plotted, with strong characterisation and a great sense of place' Guardian

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Winner of the Stanford Dolman Lifetime Contribution to Travel Writing Award 2020The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux. Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.'Stunning. . . exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful' Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times'An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a black mudbank of horror' Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian'Magnificently stimulating and exciting' Anthony BurgessAmerican travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels and collected short stories, My Other Life, The Collected Stories, My Secret History, The Lower River, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, A Dead Hand, Millroy the Magician, The Elephanta Suite, Saint Jack, The Consul's File, The Family Arsenal, and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin.

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Winner of the Stanford Dolman Lifetime Contribution to Travel Writing Award 2020The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux. Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.'Stunning. . . exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful' Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times'An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a black mudbank of horror' Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian'Magnificently stimulating and exciting' Anthony BurgessAmerican travel writer Paul Theroux is known for the rich descriptions of people and places that is often streaked with his distinctive sense of irony; his novels and collected short stories, My Other Life, The Collected Stories, My Secret History, The Lower River, The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, A Dead Hand, Millroy the Magician, The Elephanta Suite, Saint Jack, The Consul's File, The Family Arsenal, and his works of non-fiction, including the iconic The Great Railway Bazaar are available from Penguin.

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*Shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Thriller of the Year Award* If you liked Blood Orange, The Perfect Couple and The House Guest you will love this! Susan and Sarah. Sisters. Best friends.Together…forever? Nothing could break them apart. Until they meet him. And he can only choose one… Now Susan is back. Determined to reclaim everything Sarah has taken from her. Her home, her husband…her life? *Shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Thriller of the Year Award* Readers can’t get enough of The Twins: ‘Wow. Mind Blown. J.S. Lark is a wily wordsmith and not to be trusted’ DJ ‘My goodness, I don’t even know where to start with this one!… At times shocking, this book is an absolute must-read for anyone who likes a psychological thriller’ Emma ‘An original, gripping page turner and it had me guessing and shocked throughout’ Ceri ‘Started reading this Wednesday night and finished it by Friday morning…If you like physiological thrillers then you will love this’ Leanne ‘So many twists and turns that literally left me with my mouth hanging open’ Randi ‘A fast paced twisty psychological thriller’ Jayne ‘Lots of twists and turns and I just had to read ‘one more chapter’ Abbi ‘Wonderful well written plot that had me engaged from the start…Great suspense and found myself second guessing every thought I had’ Billie

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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?

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In Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Uhlig turns to the decades around 1800 in Europe to reveal that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study—rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history—emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding. Uhlig details how Scottish writers like Adam Smith and Hugh Blair taught rhetoric as a form self-expression, while Anglophone and German theorists of poetry like William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schlegel, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both engaged with and resented critics. At the same time, varying opinions on the practice of literary history emerged, with Immanuel Kant and Thomas De Quincey arguing for the independence of literature from historical forces while writers like Matthew Arnold approached literature as a means of narrating cultural archives instead of drawing on close reading and analysis. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies in the field.

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What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, War at a Distance considers how those left on the home front register wars and wartime in their everyday lives, particularly when military conflict remains removed from immediate perception, available only through media forms. Looking back over two centuries, Mary Favret locates the origins of modern wartime in the Napoleonic era and describes how global military operations affected the British populace, as the nation's army and navy waged battles far from home for decades. She reveals that the literature and art produced in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries obsessively cultivated means for feeling as much as understanding such wars, and established forms still relevant today. Favret examines wartime literature and art as varied as meditations on the Iliad, the history of meteorology, landscape painting in India, and popular poetry in newspapers and periodicals; she locates the embedded sense of war and dislocation in works ranging from Austen, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to Woolf, Stevens, and Sebald; and she contemplates how literature provides the public with methods for responding to violent calamities happening elsewhere. Bringing to light Romanticism's legacy in reflections on modern warfare, this book shows that war's absent presence affects home in deep and irrevocable ways.

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Place of refuge, place where we can be ourselves; place we long to escape from, place where we are confronted by absence and loneliness; shabby downtown apartment or idyllic country cottage. Like it or loathe it, home is where we do most of our living. Home is, of course, many things to many poets. It is Billy Collins's favourite armchair and Imtiaz Dharker's 'Living Space' in the slums of Mumbai. It is Wordsworth's 'dear Valley' of Grasmere, and Philip Larkin's Coventry, that place where nothing so famously happens. It may be somewhere we long for, perhaps unattainably: Ovid and Mahmoud Darwish lament their home countries, Kapka Kassabova seeks 'a house we can never find', while Jules Supervielle is 'Homesick for the Earth'.There is an abundance of domestic life. Attend a miserable breakfast chez Jacques Prévert; observe Wendy Cope and partner happily 'Being Boring'. Cut to Anna Barbauld's washing-day, Marilyn Nelson dusting, Buson mending his clothes and Fiona Wright contending with a Tupperware party. Peep in on Amy Lowell in the bath and John Donne in bed, Auden in the privy and Joy Harjo at the kitchen table. Here are removals and homecomings, neighbours good and bad. Inevitably, after a year of enforced domesticity, some lockdown thoughts (Anna McDonald, Pauline Prior-Pitt); Mary Oliver's dream house, Naomi Shihab Nye's homes where children live, the far-from-safe houses of U. A. Fanthorpe, and some final reflections on the idea of a dwelling place from Rumi, Emily Dickinson, John Burnside, Vinita Agrawal, Derek Walcott, Les Murray and Iman Mersal. It may not always be sweet, but there is certainly No Place Like Home.

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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?

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Poems in the Manner Of is an illuminating journey through centuries of writers who continue to influence new work today, including that of respected poet and series editor of The Best American Poetry David Lehman.“Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer,” says Robert Olen Butler. Now the Best American Poetry series editor and New School writing professor channels, translates, and imagines a collection of “poems in the manner of” Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Rilke, William Carlos Williams, and more. Lehman has been writing “poems in the manner of” for years, in homage to the poems and people that have left an impression, experimenting with styles and voices that have lingered in his mind. Finally, he has gathered these pieces, creating a striking book of poems that channels poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath and also calls upon jazz standards, Freudian questionnaires, and astrological profiles for inspiration. Intelligent and sparkling, this is a great gift for poetry fans and a useful resource for creative writers. These are poems of wit and humor but also deep emotion and clear intelligence, informed by Lehman’s genuine and knowledgeable love of poetry and literature. From Catullus and Lady Murasaki to Wordsworth, Neruda, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, and Charles Bukowski, Poems in the Manner Of shows how much life there is in poets of the past. And like Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Robert Pinsky’s Singing School, this book gives you more than poetry. Whether you’re reading for pure enjoyment or examining how a poet can use references and influences in their own work, Poems in the Manner Of is a treasure trove of literary pleasures and food for thought.

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This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory. Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj i ek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Bronte, and Keats. Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications for literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.

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Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems.In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.”In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

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A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artistsBetween the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination—poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious—displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens. Celestial Aspirations explores how British literature and art during that period exploited classical representations of these soaring themes—through philosophical, scientific and poetic flights of the mind; the ascension of the disembodied soul; and the celestial glorification of the ruler.From textual reachings for the heavens in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne and Cowley, to the ceiling paintings of Rubens, Verrio and Thornhill, Philip Hardie focuses on the ways that the history, ideologies and aesthetics of the postclassical world received and transformed the ideas of antiquity. In England, narratives of ascent appear on the grandest scale in Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic built around a Christian plot of falling and rising, and one of the most intensely classicizing works of English poetry. Examining the reception of flight up to the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Hardie considers the Whig sublime, as well as the works of Alexander Pope and Edward Young. Throughout, he looks at motivations both public and private for aspiring to the heavens—as a reward for political and military achievement on the one hand, and as a goal of individual intellectual and spiritual exertion on the other.Celestial Aspirations offers an intriguing look at how creative minds reworked ancient visions of time and space in the early modern era.

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Just who did the British think they were? For much of the last 1,500 years, when the British looked back to their origins they saw the looming mythological figure of Brutus of Troy. A great-great-grandson of the love goddess Aphrodite through her Trojan son Aeneas (the hero of Virgil's Aeneid), Brutus accidentally killed his father and was exiled to Greece. He liberated the descendants of the Trojans who lived there in slavery and led them on an epic voyage to Britain. Landing at Totnes in Devon, Brutus overthrew the giants who lived in Britain, laid the foundations of Oxford University and London and sired a long line of kings, including King Arthur and the ancestors of the present Royal Family.Invented to give Britain a place in the overarching mythologies of the Classical world and the Bible, Brutus's story long underpinned the British identity and played a crucial role in royal propaganda and foreign policy. His story inspired generations of poets and playwrights, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickens and Blake, whose hymn 'Jerusalem' was a direct response to the story of Brutus founding London as the New Troy in the west.Leading genealogist Anthony Adolph traces Brutus's story from Roman times onwards, charting his immense popularity and subsequent fall from grace, along with his lasting legacy in fiction, pseudo-history and the arcane mythology surrounding some of London's best-known landmarks, in this groundbreaking biography of the mythological founder of Britain.

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There's no doubt that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past few decades, the world has embraced "progress" and we're living with the resultant clicking, beeping, anxiety-inducing frenzy. But a creative backlash is gathering steam, helping us cope with the avalanche of data that threatens to overwhelm us daily through our computers, tablets, and smartphones. The Joy of Missing Out considers the technologically focused life, with its impacts on our children, relationships, communities, health, work, and more, and suggests opportunities for those of us longing to cultivate a richer on- and off-line existence. By examining the connected world through the lens of her own internet fast, Christina Crook creates a convincing case for increasing intentionality in our day-to-day lives. Using historical data, typewritten letters, chapter challenges, and personal accounts, she invites us to explore a new way of living, beyond our steady state of distracted connectedness. Most of us can't throw away our smartphone or cut ourselves off from the internet. But we can all rethink our relationship with the digital world, discovering new ways of introducing balance and discipline to the role of technology in our lives. This book is a must-read for anyone wishing to rediscover quietness of mind and seeking a sense of peace amidst the cacophony of the modern world. Christina Crook is a wordsmith and communications professional and instigator of the project Letters from a Luddite, which chronicled her thirty-one day internet fast and fueled her passion for exploring the intersection of technology, relationships, and joy.

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Today, we do not expect a symptomatic reading to refer to bodily symptoms, or a literary dissection to be more than metaphorical. But this was not always true. In Romantic Autopsy, Arden Hegele considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find that the two fields collaborated to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts. Together, Romantic readers and doctors elaborated protocols of diagnosis-practices for interpretation that could be used to diagnose disease, and to understand fiction and poetry. This volume puts essential works of British Romantic literature that seem at first to have little to do with medicine, such as the lyrics of William Wordsworth, the elegies of Percy Shelley and Alfred Tennyson, and the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, back into conversation with emergent medical disciplines of the period -- anatomy, pathology, psychiatry, and semiology. Poems and novels, Hegele argues, were historically understood through techniques designed for the analysis of disease; meanwhile, autopsy reports and case histories adopted stylistic features associated with literature. Countering the assumption of a growing specialization in Romanticism, these practices suggest that symptomatic reading (treating a text's superficial signs as evidence of deeper meaning), a practice still used and debated today, might have originated from Romantic diagnostics. The first study of the interconnected literary and medical analytics of British Romanticism, Romantic Autopsy charts an important history underlying our own approaches to literary analysis.

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With stories of 50 incredible hiking routes in 30 countries, from New Zealand to Peru, plus a further 150 suggestions, Lonely Planet’s Epic Hikes of the World will inspire a lifetime of adventure on foot. From one-day jaunts and urban trails to month-long thru-hikes, cultural rambles and mountain expeditions, each journey shares one defining feature: being truly epic.In this follow-up to Epic Bike Rides and Epic Drives, we share our adventures on the world’s best treks and trails. Epic Hikes is organised by continent, with each route brought to life by a first-person account, beautiful photographs and charming illustrated maps. Additionally, each hike includes trip planning advice on how to get there, where to stay, what to pack and where to eat, as well as recommendations for three similar hikes in other regions of the world.Hikes featured include:Africa & the Middle East: Cape Town’s Three Peaks (South Africa) Kilimanjaro (Tanzania) Camp to Camp in South Luangwa National Park (Zambia) Americas: Angel’s Landing, Zion National Park (USA) Skyline Trail, Jasper National Park (Canada) Concepción volcano hike (Nicaragua) Asia: 88 Sacred Temples of Shikoku Pilgrimage (Japan) Markha Valley (India) Gubeikou to Jinshanling on the Great Wall (China) Europe: Wordsworth’s Backyard: Dove Cottage and around Rydal and Grasmere (UK) Alpine Pass Route (Switzerland) Camino de Santiago (Spain) Oceania: Sydney’s Seven Bridges Walk (Australia) The Routeburn Track (New Zealand) Kokoda Track (Papua New Guinea) About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we’ve printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You’ll also find our content online, on mobile, videos and in 14 languages, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more.

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Notable writers—including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow—celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the pastWhat can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead? In Lives of Houses, notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.Editors Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee are joined by wide-ranging contributors, including Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, David Cannadine, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, Daisy Hay, Margaret MacMillan, Alexander Masters, and Jenny Uglow. We encounter W. H. Auden, living in joyful squalor in New York's St. Mark's Place, and W. B. Yeats in his flood-prone tower in the windswept West of Ireland. We meet Benjamin Disraeli, struggling to keep up appearances, and track the lost houses of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. We visit Benjamin Britten in Aldeburgh, England, and Jean Sibelius at Ainola, Finland. But Lives of Houses also considers those who are unhoused, unwilling or unable to establish a home—from the bewildered poet John Clare wandering the byways of England to the exiled Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera living on the streets of London.With more than forty illustrations, Lives of Houses illuminates what houses mean to us and how we use them to connect to and think about the past. The result is a fresh and engaging look at house and home.Featuring Alexandra Harris on moving house ● Susan Walker on Morocco's ancient Roman House of Venus ● Hermione Lee on biographical quests for writers’ houses ● Margaret MacMillan on her mother's Toronto house ● a poem by Maura Dooley, "Visiting Orchard House, Concord, Massachusetts"—the house in which Louisa May Alcott wrote and set her novel Little Women ● Felicity James on William and Dorothy Wordsworth's Dove Cottage ● Robert Douglas-Fairhurst at home with Tennyson ● David Cannadine on Winston Churchill's dream house, Chartwell ● Jenny Uglow on Edward Lear at San Remo's Villa Emily ● Lucy Walker on Benjamin Britten at Aldeburgh, England ● Seamus Perry on W. H. Auden at 77 St. Mark's Place, New York City ● Rebecca Bullard on Samuel Johnson's houses ● a poem by Simon Armitage, "The Manor" ● Daisy Hay at home with the Disraelis ● Laura Marcus on H. G. Wells at Uppark ● Alexander Masters on the fear of houses ● Elleke Boehmer on sites associated with Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera ● Kate Kennedy on the mental asylums where World War I poet Ivor Gurney spent the last years of his life ● a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue, "Safe Houses" ● Roy Foster on W. B. Yeats and Thoor Ballylee ● Sandra Mayer on W. H. Auden's Austrian home ● Gillian Darley on John Soane and the autobiography of houses ● Julian Barnes on Jean Sibelius and Ainola

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Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are literary superstars, known around the world as the creators of Middle-earth and Narnia. But few of their readers and fans know about the important and complex friendship between Tolkien and his fellow Oxford academic C.S. Lewis. Without the persistent encouragement of his friend, Tolkien would never have completed The Lord of the Rings. This great tale, along with the connected matter of The Silmarillion, would have remained merely a private hobby. Likewise, all of Lewis' fiction, after the two met at Oxford University in 1926, bears the mark of Tolkien's influence, whether in names he used or in the creation of convincing fantasy worlds. They quickly discovered their affinity—a love of language and the imagination, a wide reading in northern myth and fairy tale, a desire to write stories themselves in both poetry and prose. The quality of their literary friendship invites comparisons with those of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper and John Newton, and G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc. Both Tolkien and Lewis were central figures in the informal Oxford literary circle, the Inklings. This book explores their lives, unfolding the extraordinary story of their complex friendship that lasted, with its ups and downs, until Lewis's death in 1963. Despite their differences—differences of temperament, spiritual emphasis, and view of their storytelling art—what united them was much stronger, a shared vision that continues to inspire their millions of readers throughout the world. †

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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.

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Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being.Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.

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Critics have long understood the development of Romantic aesthetics as a turning point in the history of literary theory, a turn that is responsible for theories of mind and body that continue to inform our understandings of subjectivity and embodiment today. Yet the question of what aesthetic experience can "do" grates against the fact that much Romantic writing represents subjects as not actually in charge of the feelings they feel, the dreams they dream, or the actions they take. In response to this dilemma, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation argues that being moved contrary to one's will is itself an aesthetic phenomenon explored by Romantic poets whose experiments with poetic form and genre provoke unanticipated feelings through verse. By analyzing how Romantic poets intervene, affectively and aesthetically, in readerly expectations of form and genre, Mathes shows how provocations disrupt and invite, disturb and compel—interrupting or suspending or retreating in ways that ask readers to orient themselves, materially and socially, in relation to literary experiences that are at once virtual and embodied. Examining the formal tactics of Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, alongside their reactions to historical events such as Toussaint Louverture's revolt and the Peterloo Massacre, Mathes reveals that an aesthetics of radical openness is central to the development of literary theory and criticism in Romantic Britain.

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Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being.Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.

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From the private papers of Jane Austen and Mozart to those of Anne Boleyn and Nelson, Love Letters of Great Men and Women collects together some of the most romantic letters in history. For some of these great men, love is a ‘delicious poison’ (William Congreve); for others, ‘a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music’ (Charles Darwin). Love can scorch like the heat of the sun (Henry VIII), or penetrate the depths of one’s heart like a cooling rain (Flaubert). But what about the other side of the story? What of the secret hopes and lives of some of the greatest women in history? Taken together, these love letters show that perhaps little has changed over the last 2,000 years. Passion, jealousy, hope and longing are all represented here – as is the simple pleasure of sending a letter to, and receiving one from, the person you love most. Includes letters by: Anne Boleyn * Beethoven * Edith Wharton * Mark Twain * Mary Wordsworth * Nell Gwyn (mistress of Charles II) * Elizabeth Barrett Browning * GK Chesterton * Queen Victoria * Napoleon Bonaparte * The Empress Josephine * Mary Wollstonecraft * Amadeus Mozart * Katherine Mansfield Praise for Love Letters of Great Men: 'The most romantic book ever' Daily Mail 'Inspired by the Sex and the City movie... Famous men caught with pen in hand and heart in mouth' The Times

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Through attuned close readings, this volume brings out the imaginative and formal brilliance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writing as it explores his involvement in processes of dialogue and influence. Shelley recognizes that poetic individuality is the reward of connectedness with other writers and cultural influences. 'A great Poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight', he writes, 'and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight' (A Defence of Poetry). He is among the major Romantic poetic exponents and theorists of influence, because of his passionately intelligent commitment to the onward dissemination of ideas and feelings, and to the unpredictable ways in which poets position themselves and are culturally positioned between past and future. The book has a tripartite structure. The first three chapters seek to illuminate his response to representative texts, figures, and themes that constitute the triple pillars of his cultural inheritance: the classical world (Plato); Renaissance poetry (Spenser and Milton); Christianity and, in particular, the concept of deity and the Bible. The second and major section of the book explores Shelley's relations and affinities with, as well as differences from, his immediate predecessors and contemporaries: Hazlitt and Lamb; Wordsworth; Coleridge; Southey; Byron; Keats (including the influence of Dante on Shelley's elegy for his fellow Romantic) and the great painter J. M. W. Turner, with whom he is often linked. The third section considers Shelley's reception by later nineteenth-century writers, figures influenced by and responding to Shelley including Beddoes, Hemans, Landon, Tennyson, and Swinburne. A coda discusses the body of critical work on Shelley produced by A. C. Bradley, a figure who stands at the threshold of twentieth-century thinking about Shelley.

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Geoff Inverarity writes poems for people who don't like poetry (and those who do). In this debut collection Inverarity writes of broken things, things that have come apart at the seams, things that ought not to but sometimes do dissolve with time: friendships, relationships, promises, aging parents, hearts, bodies, love, and even time itself. But it's not all shattered dreams and sad-luck stories here, there is hope and optimism too - in the future, in the Now, and in the heat and power of the coming generations. And there are poems of memory, poems for grandfathers and aging aunts, children and lost loves. Inverarity also probes the the multitude of possibilities "in this fallen world of compromises," gently reminding us that "we're stockpiling for the short term / the long term we don't know. / No matter how much you prepare / there's always something new looming / like the Unexploded Grief Bomb." It is a world where we struggle to give back the past, to finally get to the point "where the past does not exist" and "where all history is now." The penultimate entry is "Mars Variations," a wonderfully extended suite of complementary poems, a time-traveling fractal narrative: a sci-fi horror movie for the ears, referencing works as disparate as Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Wordsworth's "Prelude," and horror films like Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man along with nods towards the various iterations of Godzilla; and of course the classic 1962 "Mars Attacks" Topp's Bubble Gum cards - which form a framing device. The sequence explores the relationship between time, fiction, and facts; between public history and private experience. The book concludes with a short Epilogue, assuring us that "one day, all the broken things will be mended."

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Emerson's journals of 1847-1848 deal primarily with his second visit to Europe, occasioned by a British lecture tour that began at Manchester and Liverpool in November of 1847, took him to Scotland in the following February, and concluded in London during June after he had spent a month as a sightseer in Paris. The journals of these years, along with associated notebooks and letters, recorded the materials for lectures that Emerson composed while abroad, for additional lectures on England and the English that he wrote shortly after his return to Concord, and ultimately, for English Traits, the book growing out of his travels that he was to publish in 1856.Travel abroad provided a needed change for Emerson in 1847 as it had done on previous occasions, though with his usual discounting of the values of mere change of place he was slow in deciding to make the trip. Discouragement with the prevailing political climate at the time of the Mexican War and the old uncertainty about his own proper role in the "Lilliput" of American society were much on his mind as the year began. In March he thought of withdrawing temporarily "from all domestic & accustomed relations"--preferably to enjoy "an absolute leisure with books," though he also recognized the want of some "stated task" to stimulate his flagging vitality; in July he finally agreed to accept a long-standing invitation to visit England as a lecturer. As matters turned out, a full schedule of lectures and travel, unexpectedly heavy social engagements along the way, and proliferating correspondence left Emerson little time for reading but did not prevent him from filling his journals with sharp observations on the passing scene.As Emerson moved about England his acknowledged admiration for the English rose every day, though he was careful to distinguish their less admirable qualities.The Englishman's "stuff or substance seems to be the best of the world," he told Margaret Fuller. "I forgive him all his pride. My respect is the more generous that I have no sympathy with him, only an admiration." He took a wry amusement from the new experience of being lionized by his hosts. In his journals are lively portraits of those who entertained him, such as Richard Monckton Milnes, his particular sponsor in the society of London and Paris, and sketches of literary notables including Rogers, Dc Quincey, Wilson, Tennyson, and Dickens. He renewed acquaintance with Wordsworth and recorded in detail the pronouncements of his old friend Carlyle. Settling in London in March and April of 1848, he divided his time between work at his desk, visits to nearby points of interest, and the mixed pleasures of a busy social life. In May he went to France just as an abortive uprising against the new provisional government was brewing. Four weeks in Paris served to correct his old "prejudice" against the French, who on closer acquaintance rose in his estimation just as the English had done. In June he returned to London to lecture, and in July, after visiting Stonehenge with Carlyle, he sailed home. As the journals reveal, he reached Concord refreshed and renewed by the change of scene, the new acquaintance, and the generous reception that the trip had brought him, and with an enlarged perspective that revealed to him once again the "proper glory" of his own country.

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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.

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The stunningly written, evocative new debut crime thriller you won’t want to miss! A detective ready for a new lifeFor years, Jake Jackson has been a high-flying detective in the city. One day he receives a letter from his reclusive uncle – he has left Jake his property in the middle of the countryside. It is the perfect opportunity for a fresh start. A rural idyll the stuff of dreamsLife in the middle of nowhere is everything Jake could wish for. His home is beautiful and his surroundings are stunning. While the locals are eccentric, they are also friendly, and invite him to join their annual treasure hunt. A death that disrupts everythingWhat starts as an innocent game turns sinister, when a young woman’s bones are discovered. And Jake is thrust once again into the role of detective, as he tries to unearth a dangerous killer in this most unlikely of settings. Praise for Death Under a Little Sky ‘Tense but patient, fast but thoughtful, and twisty but substantial – this is a truly excellent debut, and I want the next installment now’ Lee Child ‘I LOVED this. I found it totally immersive, and couldn’t wait to squeeze some time from my day to return to it. The writing is very classy and the conclusion came as a surprise, which is always a treat’ Ann Cleeves ‘Gloriously atmospheric and masterfully plotted with such a strong sense of place, this is a huge treat for crime fiction lovers. I can’t wait for the next instalment!’ Lucy Foley ‘Stylish…a more than promising debut’ The Times ‘Stylishly written by a skilled wordsmith, and an absorbing tale’ Sun ‘A vivid, atmospheric debut’ Daily Mail ‘A cosy crime read with an appealing protagonist’ Guardian

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Since 1961 James Reeve has been exhibiting and selling his paintings, first in Florence, then in Madrid. From 1974 onwards he has travelled widely, often with subsequent London gallery exhibitions. Here he vividly describes and illustrates the characters he meets and the adventures which unfold in Haiti, Madagascar, India, Australia, Jordan, the Yemen and Mexico. As his cousin, the historian, Antonia Fraser remarks in a letter to him: ‘Dearest James, When God gave you your great artistic talent She [sic] made a big mistake, contrary to what is generally thought.’ ‘This is because you are really meant to be a brilliant writer.’ And so now, badgered by Antonia Fraser and other writer friends, James Reeve has at last put his talents together in a series of self-contained short stories recalling travels, anecdotes and encounters which he has illustrated with his vividly colourful vignettes. Always travelling with the purpose of work, in Italy James meets Harold Acton. In the Australian Outback he draws among other things dumps and decrepit dwellings, and there too is Madam Tongere catching a Wichetty grub. He meets Princess Elizabeth of Toro in Uganda and is captured by pygmies in the Congo forest. He paints the fearsome Mrs Gilbert Miller’s portrait in Palm Beach and travels in Rajasthan with Diana Wordsworth, a last relic of the Raj. At last, weary of wandering, he discovers a distant cloud-forest village in Mexico, where Edward James, as the only other Englishman, had preceded him. There he built a house. Living in Mexico for 35 years, among his friends are Doña Olive, the retired prostitute, and the Dominican nuns of an enclosed order who let him in to teach them how to make marmalade.

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First Comprehension provides an early introduction to written comprehension, developing children's enthusiasm for reading and their ability to interpret texts. When working through the series, support from an adult will boost children's confidence and help them to understand and evaluate each text. The books are easy to mark and provide a permanent record of each child's work, helping you to monitor progress. Designed to support the National Curriculum for Years 2 and 3, the content of this series has wide appeal and may also be used by older children. First Comprehension Book 1 is aimed at children in Year 2 (ages 6 - 7) who are attempting written comprehension for the first time. 18 carefully selected texts reflect the range of genres recommended by the National Curriculum, and accompanying questions are presented in two parts, to suit the concentration level of most children in this age group. The first of two First Comprehension activity books, this book features work by writers such as Roald Dahl and A. A. Milne, as well as an excerpt from a children's dictionary and a number of accessible non-fiction texts. The series provides: a brief introduction, enabling teachers, parents and adult helpers to use the books effectively; passages from classic and contemporary fiction to broaden children's reading experience; a wide selection of poetry, from William Wordsworth to Tony Mitton; stimulating non-fiction extracts, with different subjects and structures; a range of question types, including direct, inferential and evaluative questions. The separate Teacher's Guide contains teaching notes, sample answers and further activities for each text, allowing you to use First Comprehension to its full potential.

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Here is a treasure-house of over seven centuries of English poetry, chosen and introduced by Christopher Ricks, whom Auden described as 'exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding'. The Oxford Book of English Verse, created in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch and selected anew in 1972 by Helen Gardner, has established itself as the foremost anthology of English poetry: ample in span, liberal in the kinds of poetry presented. This completely fresh selection brings in new poems and poets from all ages, and extends the range by another half-century, to include many twentieth-century figures not featured before -- among them Philip Larkin and Samuel Beckett, Thom Gunn and Elaine Feinstein -- right up to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Here, as before, are lyric (beginning with medieval song), satire, hymn, ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad . . . but also kinds of poetry not previously admitted: the riches of dramatic verse by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster; great works of translation that are themselves true English poetry, such as Chapman's Homer (bringing in its happy wake Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'), Dryden's Juvenal, and many others; well-loved nursery rhymes, limericks, even clerihews. English poetry from all parts of the British Isles is firmly represented -- Henryson and MacDiarmid, for example, now join Dunbar and Burns from Scotland; James Henry, Austin Clarke, and J. M. Synge now join Allingham and Yeats from Ireland; R. S. Thomas joins Dylan Thomas from Wales -- and Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, writing in America before its independence in the 1770s, are given a rightful and rewarding place. Some of the greatest long poems are here in their entirety -- Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey', Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner', and Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' -- alongside some of the shortest, haikus, squibs, and epigrams. Generous and wide-ranging, mixing familiar with fresh delights, this is an anthology to move and delight all who find themselves loving English verse.

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With stories of 50 incredible hiking routes in 30 countries, from New Zealand to Peru, plus a further 150 suggestions, Lonely Planet’s Epic Hikes of the World will inspire a lifetime of adventure on foot. From one-day jaunts and urban trails to month-long thru-hikes, cultural rambles and mountain expeditions, each journey shares one defining feature: being truly epic. In this follow-up to Epic Bike Rides and Epic Drives, we share our adventures on the world’s best treks and trails. Epic Hikes is organised by continent, with each route brought to life by a first-person account, beautiful photographs and charming illustrated maps. Additionally, each hike includes trip planning advice on how to get there, where to stay, what to pack and where to eat, as well as recommendations for three similar hikes in other regions of the world. Hikes featured include: Africa & the Middle East: Cape Town’s Three Peaks (South Africa) Kilimanjaro (Tanzania) Camp to Camp in South Luangwa National Park (Zambia) Americas: Angel’s Landing, Zion National Park (USA) Skyline Trail, Jasper National Park (Canada) Concepción volcano hike (Nicaragua) Asia: 88 Sacred Temples of Shikoku Pilgrimage (Japan) Markha Valley (India) Gubeikou to Jinshanling on the Great Wall (China) Europe: Wordsworth’s Backyard: Dove Cottage and around Rydal and Grasmere (UK) Alpine Pass Route (Switzerland) Camino de Santiago (Spain) Oceania: Sydney’s Seven Bridges Walk (Australia) The Routeburn Track (New Zealand) Kokoda Track (Papua New Guinea) About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world’s number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we’ve printed over 145 million guidebooks and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You’ll also find our content online, on mobile, video and in 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more.

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The first detailed introduction to the entirety of Seamus Heaney’s work This study will enable readers to gain clearer understanding of the life and major works of Seamus Heaney. It considers literary influences on Heaney, ranging from English poets such as Wordsworth, Hughes, and Auden to Irish poets such as Kavanagh and Yeats to world poets such as Virgil and Dante. It shows how Heaney was closely attuned to poetry's impact on daily life and current events even as he articulated a convincing apologia for poetry's own life and integrity. Discussing Heaney's deep immersion in Irish Catholicism, this book demonstrates how faith influenced his belief system, poetry and politics. Finally, it also considers how deeply Heaney's artistic endeavours were intertwined with politics in Northern Ireland, especially through his embrace of constitutional nationalism but rejection of physical force republicanism. Key Features Includes sections on biography, historical, cultural and political contexts, poetry and other genres, as well as a concluding section on primary works and secondary criticism Pays special attention to the marriage of form and content in the poetry and how they work together to express subtle shades of meaning Offers close readings of Heaney's canonical poems throughout his career, including the early seminal poems such as Digging, the `bog poems’, and his many elegies, such as Casualty, Station Island, and Clearances Draws on drafts of the poems and prose at the Heaney archives at Emory University and the National Library of Ireland

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This is a 7 volume facsimile reprint collection of three important but ‘difficult to find’ editions of The Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory, two published in 1816, one in 1817. The three editions marked the revival of Medievalism in the Romantic era, and played an important role for the Romantic poets to ‘discover’ the richness of the medieval literature which was followed by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the middle of the century.The edition in volumes 1-2 was the landmark of this literary movement. The Morte Darthur was published for the first time in nearly two centuries since William Stansby’s 1634 edition. They were small pocket size books (enlarged by 140% in this facsimile) and very popular among literary figures as such John Keats, William Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt.Volumes 3-5 include another pocket book edition (also enlarged by 140% in this collection) originally published in the same year, 1634, and particularly valuable as an example of a ‘bowdlerized’ edition of Thomas Malory’s text. It is known that Alfred Tennyson learned of The Morte Darthur from this book.The edition in volumes 6-7 (reprinted in the original quarto size) is the first Malory text scholarly edited, and is considered to be the most important contribution to the academic publishing history of The Morte Darthur. Based on William Caxton’s edition of 1485, the editor Robert Southey added a long introduction and detailed annotations which provided the medievalist with a valuable source for research. It also influenced such Pre-Raphaelists as William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.Accompanied with a new bibliographic study in English by Yuri Fuwa, this facsimile collection of the three different editions of The Morte Darthur which are all rare in the antiquarian book market, should be in any academic libraries with courses of English literature.

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The pivotal figure in John Elder's latest book - itself a combination of environmental history, travel writing, literary criticism, and memoir - is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, generally regarded now as Americais first environmentalist. Like Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous manifesto, Man and Nature. Marsh drew parallels between the despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont, warning that it was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was a prescient voice for stewardship. On a Fulbright year, Elder chooses to follow in Marsh's footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa - which, as it happens, boasts a stand of sugar maples planted by Marsh. Punctuated throughout with learned and genial considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost, Elderis narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced locally, reports on family doings (including his wife's reconnecting with Italian relatives), and returns finally - as did Marsh's - to Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of wilderness areas. Elder also extends the idea of sustainability from maintaining a healthy human-environmental balance to maintaining a strong web of social relationships within both the family and the larger community. Here is an exceptional reading experience, the chance to follow two of the finest chroniclers of our place in nature - separated by years, but by surprisingly little else.

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The Lake District National Park is England's most popular mountain region and is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Suitable for most reasonably fit hillwalkers, the 145km (90 mile) Tour of the Lake District takes in the best of this beautiful region in a circular tour. The route is presented in nine stages, plus an optional 'prologue' stage from Windermere station to the start-point in Ambleside, and can be compressed into one week or extended over two weeks, giving time to visit many attractions on the way. In addition to the main (non-waymarked) route, which links the main towns and valleys of the national park, five interchangeable high-level stages are also offered, enabling you to visit some of the region's most celebrated high peaks - including Coniston Old Man, Scafell Pike, Great Gable and Helvellyn - should you so wish. Each stage includes summary statistics and clear route description illustrated with OS mapping and an elevation profile. There are notes on local points of interest and a wealth of information to help you plan your tour, covering public transport, accommodation and kit, plus accommodation listings and a facilities table. The Tour showcases the magnificent landscapes of the region, from mountain vistas to idyllic lakeshore scenery. There are lakes, rivers and waterfalls, characterful towns and villages, remote valleys, high fells and fascinating historical features including a Neolithic stone circle, packhorse bridges and properties that once belonged to Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth. There are a wide range of accommodation options to suit all budgets and opportunities to sample delicious local produce. The Tour of the Lake District is an ideal way to discover all the region has to offer and is sure to generate lots of memorable experiences.

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Basil Bunting was one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain – in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called ‘the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’. Bunting called Briggflatts his ‘autobiography’. It is a complex work, drawing on many elements of his life, experience and knowledge, and features the saint Cuthbert and the warrior king Eric Bloodaxe as two opposing aspects of the Northumbrian – and his – character. Its structural models include the sonata form (and Scarlatti’s music in particular) and the latticework of the Lindisfarne Gospels, while thematically it recalls Wordsworth’s Prelude. Bunting wrote that ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard.’ His own readings of his own work are essential listening for a full appreciation of his highly musical poetry. This new edition includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting. As well as his own notes to the poem (and a posthumously published additional Note), the new edition includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966), and other background material. All his poetry is available in Complete Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2000). ‘Briggflatts is one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it’ – Thom Gunn. ‘His poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’ – Hugh MacDiarmid.

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The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap. Stratford continues to lure tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age could have no better guide to such places than Simon Goldhill. In "Freud's Couch, Scott's Buttocks, Bronte's Grave", Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott's baronial mansion, Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District, the Bronte parsonage, Shakespeare's birthplace, and Freud's office in Hampstead. Traveling, as much as possible, by methods available to Victorians - and gamely negotiating distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls - he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern mind. What does it matter that Emily Bronte's hidden passions burned in this specific room? What does it mean that Scott self-consciously built an extravagant castle suitable for Ivanhoe - and star-struck tourists visited it while he was still living there? Or that Freud's meticulous recreation of his Vienna office is now a meticulously preserved museum of itself? Or that Shakespeare's birthplace features student actors declaiming snippets of his plays...in the garden of a house where he almost certainly never wrote a single line? Goldhill brings to these inquiries his trademark wry humor and a lifetime's engagement with literature. The result is a travel book like no other, a reminder that even today, the writing life still has the power to inspire.

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A Waterstones Best History Book of 2022 The bestselling history of the North of England as told through the lives of its inhabitants. ‘Entertaining’ The Times ‘Definitive’ The Mirror ‘Highly readable’ Financial Times A work of unrivalled scale and ambition, Northerners is the defining biography of northern England. This authoritative new history of place and people lays out the dramatic events that created the north – waves of migration, invasions and battles, and transformative changes wrought on European culture and the global economy. In a sweeping narrative that takes us from the earliest times to the present day, the book shows that the people of the north have shaped Britain and the world in unexpected ways. At least six Roman emperors ruled from York. The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria was Europe’s leading cultural and intellectual centre. Cartimandua, Queen of the Brigantes, deserves to be as famous as Boudica. Neanderthals and Vikings, Central European Jews, African-Caribbeans and South Asians, have all played their part in the making and remaking of the north. Northern writers, activists, artists and comedians are celebrated the world over, from Wordsworth, the Brontes and Gaskell to LS Lowry, Emmeline Pankhurst and Peter Kay. St Oswald and Bede shaped the spiritual and cultural landscapes of Britain and Europe, and the world was revolutionised by the inventions of Richard Arkwright and the Stephensons. The north has exported some of sport’s biggest names and defined the sound of generations, from the Beatles to Britpop. Northerners also shows convincingly how the past echoes down the centuries. The devastation of factory and pit closures in the 1980s, for example, recalled the trauma of William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North. The book charts how the north-south divide has ebbed and flowed and explores the very real divisions between northerners, such as the rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire. Finally, Brian Groom explores what northernness means today and the crucial role the north can play in Britain’s future. As new forces threaten the fabric of the UK again, this landmark book could scarcely be more timely.

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