Search results for ""Author Stephen Burt""

The British have always been obsessed by the weather. Astronomers at Durham Observatory began weather observations in 1841; weather records continue unbroken to this day, one of the longest continuous series of single-site weather records in Europe. Durham Weather and Climate since 1841 represents the first full publication of this newly digitised record of English weather, which will be of lasting appeal to interested readers and climate researchers alike. The book celebrates 180 years of weather in north-east England by describing how the records were (and are) made and the people who made them, examines monthly and seasonal weather patterns and extremes across two centuries, and considers long-term climate change. Local documentary sources and contemporary photographs bring the statistics to life, from the great flood of 1771 and skating on the frozen River Wear in February 1895 right up to Durham's hottest-ever day in July 2019 and its wettest winter in 2021. Extensive links are provided to full daily weather records back to 1843. This volume is a sister publication to Oxford Weather and Climate since 1767 by the same authors, published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

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Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children's book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for poetry and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Amid the resurgence of interest in Randall Jarrell, Stephen Burt offers this brilliant analysis of the poet and essayist. Burt's book examines all of Jarrell's work, incorporating new research based on previously undiscovered essays and poems. Other books have examined Jarrell's poetry in biographical or formal terms, but none have considered both his aesthetic choices and their social contexts. Beginning with an overview of Jarrell's life and loves, Burt argues that Jarrell's poetry responded to the political questions of the 1930s, the anxieties and social constraints of wartime America, and the apparent prosperity, domestic ideals, and professional ideology that characterized the 1950s. Jarrell's work is peopled by helpless soldiers, anxious suburban children, trapped housewives, and lonely consumers. Randall Jarrell and His Age situates the poet-critic among his peers-including Bishop, Lowell, and Arendt-in literature and cultural criticism. Burt considers the ways in which Jarrell's efforts and achievements encompassed the concerns of his time, from teen culture to World War II to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the book asks, too, how those efforts might speak to us now.

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The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.

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