This is an investigation of Yeats's experiments with the media of language and dance in his plays. He was allied to other artists of the 1890s in his fascination with the biblical dancer Salome and in his preoccupation with things Japanese, particularly "Noh" theatre with its central dance. The impact of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes also played its part in influencing Yeats's drama and he took interest in the "dance-as-meaning" debate. The book contains new data on Yeats's "At the Hawk's Well" dancer, Ito and new information on his personal acquaintance with music-hall and Ballets Russes from yet unpublished letters.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014 In Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that Edgar Allan Poe is best understood, not merely as a talented artist or canny magazinist, but primarily as a practical joker who employs satire and fantasy to poke fun at an emergent nationalist discourse circulating in the United States. Poe's satirical and fantastic mode, on display even in his apparently serious short stories and literary criticism, undermines the earnest attempts to establish a distinctively national literature in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, Poe's work also subtly subverts the tenets of an institutionalized American Studies in the twentieth century. Tally interprets Poe's life and works in light of his own social milieu and in relation to the disciplinary field of American literary studies, finding Poe to be neither the poete maudit of popular mythology nor the representative American writer revealed by recent scholarship. Rather, Poe is an untimely figure whose work ultimately makes a mockery of those who would seek to contain it. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze's distinction between nomad thought and state philosophy, Tally argues that Poe's varied literary and critical writings represent an alternative to American literature. Through his satirical critique of U.S. national culture and his otherworldly projection of a postnational space of the imagination, Poe establishes a subterranean, nomadic, and altogether worldly literary practice.

In the winter of 1798-99, shut up in the freezing German town of Goslar, William Wordsworth began producing a series of lyrical fragments that appeared first in letters written to Coleridge and emerged eventually as source texts for "The Prelude". These lyrics are revolutionary because they reconstruct a new version of the autobiographical "I". This work explores the many voices of the poetic speaker "Wordsworth" and their relationship to the historical figure who shared the same name.

Bringing poststructuralist theories of discourse into dialogue with biologically and culturally informed models of pain and affect, this book explores the representation of traumatic historical events such as war and revolution in literary texts by Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Zola. Focusing on the rising industrial capitalism of early modern France, Vaheed Ramanzani considers how the patterns of thought and practice developed during that period inflect a contemporary "culture of denial" and critiques the symbiosis between everyday forms of language and mass irruptions of violence.

Bonner . . . provides a compendium of information, helpful to the undergraduate as well as to the scholar; a chronology of Chopin's life; nine translations by Chopin herself of French short stories, eight of which are by Guy de Maupassant, a major literary influence (five of these published here for the first time); period maps of Missouri, Louisiana, and New Orleans, and a 13-page bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources, which is thorough and organized for easy reference. The bulk of the book is devoted to a Dictionary of Characters, Places, Titles, Terms, and People from the Life and Works of Kate Chopin.' The Dictionary' will be especially helpful to those readers . . . who are unfamiliar with the Cajun and Creole terms--e.g., lagniappe, jambalaya--appearing in Chopin's fiction, or with the many references to French Catholicism made by her characters. . . . Overall, this volume is a valuable tool for both the novice and experienced Chopin reader, and is highly recommended. "Choice"

Recent years have witnessed a major rebirth of interest in the works of Kate Chopin, author of two novels and nearly 100 short stories. The current volume makes an important contribution to the study of Chopin's work by providing a dictionary of characters, places, plot briefs, poem briefs, biographical items, and selected terms; period maps of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Missouri; and a bibliographic essay on primary and secondary sources. Also featured are Chopin's translations of eight Guy de Maupassant stories, five of which appear here in print for the first time, and one story by Adrien Vely.

The dictionary delineates the characters and places in Chopin's fiction, many of which reappear as major and minor elements throughout her work. Of particular significance are the many unnamed characters who contribute to the development of recurring social themes. The maps of relevant areas in Louisiana and Missouri will help make the connections between character and place, story, and setting more concrete. The bibliographic essay covers editions, manuscripts, and letters in the primary sources section. Biography and criticism, including general appraisals and those addressed to special topics or particular works, are included in the secondary sources section. The aim throughout is to resolve basic questions and confusions that persist regarding Chopin's work so that the reader can concentrate more productively--and more enjoyably--on the issues of form, theme, and influence that dominate her fiction.

Since the 1874 publication in Belgium of the first posthumous edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, the enigmatic work has served as an inspiration for the poetic and creative liberation of countless twentieth-century writers and artists. Little is known, however, about the book's elusive French author Isidore Ducasse, known as le comte de Lautreamont, and his abbreviated life (1846-1870). In the absence of an original manuscript, Lautreamont's readers have over time altered his poetry for personal, political, and aesthetic reasons. Symbolist literary journals, first editions of his work, surrealist illustrated editions, and the prestigious Pleiade edition (1970 and 2009), reveal how varying editions of Lautreamont's work have in turn contributed to his legend. In Lautreamont, Subject to Interpretation, Andrea S. Thomas carefully explores these editions of this so-called poete maudit to show how impassioned readers can shape not only the reception of works, but the works themselves.

Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity. Following organicism from its crucial radicalization in German Idealism, it shows how both Coleridge and Wordsworth developed some of their most profound ideas and poetry on its basis. Armstrong shows how the tenets and ideals of organicism--despite much criticism--remain an insistent, if ambivalent, backdrop for much of our current thought, including the work of Derrida amongst others.

This new study explores the poetic tradition of the love sonnet sequence in English as written by women from 1621-1931. It connects this tradition to ways of speaking desire in public in operation today, and to the development of theories of subjectivity in Western culture.

This broad and original study of the full range of John Clare's work is the first to take seriously his repeated appeals to the judgement of future readers. Restoring the suppressed history of Clare's deep cultural engagement, it teases out, in clear terms, the often unexpected complexities of his varied writings. A series of close readings reveals Clare's sophisticated poetics: his covert quotations, his careful analysis of the history and culture of his own place, and his fascination with literary success and posthumous fame.

This critical anthology examines the place of the sublime in the cultural history of the late eighteenth century and Romantic period. Traditionally, the sublime has been associated with impressive natural phenomena and has been identified as a narrow aesthetic or philosophical category. Cultures of the Sublime: Selected Readings, 1750-1830: - Recovers a broader context for engagements with, and writing about, the sublime - Offers a selection of texts from a wide range of ostensibly unrelated areas of knowledge which both generate and investigate sublime effects - Considers writings about mountains, money, crowds, the Gothic, the exotic and the human mind - Contextualises and supports the extracts with detailed editorial commentary Also featuring helpful suggestions for further reading, this is an ideal resource for anyone seeking a fresh, up-to-date assessment of the sublime.

Ambivalence in Hardy challenges the Hardy canon through the analysis of two "minor" novels: The Hand of Ethelberta and Two on a Tower, and with the help of manuscript evidence a revolutionary re-reading of The Woodlanders is offered. Generous references to Hardy's letters, autobiography, literary notebooks, marginalia, and the letters of his two wives, seek to blend a biographical approach with a feminist reading. Parallelisms between Hardy's fiction and that of contemporary women writers, especially his protégés and his "scribbling" wives, are discussed in unprecedented detail. An analysis of the short stories makes a case for Hardy as the champion of "Woman as Victim," while his changing responses to the Suffrage movement suggest a deep-rooted ambivalence that makes any glib appropriation of Hardy under the feminist banner too simplistic. This book thus highlights the tensions and contradictions between Hardy and the apologist for women and Hardy the alleged misogynist.

This cultural study reveals the interdependence between British Aestheticism and late-Victorian social-reform movements. Following their mentor John Ruskin who believed in art's power to civilize the poor, cultural philanthropists promulgated a Religion of Beauty as they advocated practical schemes for tenement reform, university-settlement education, Sunday museum opening, and High Anglican revival. Although subject to novelist's ambivalent, even satirical, representations, missionary aesthetes nevertheless constituted an influential social network, imbuing fin-de-siecle artistic communities with political purpose and political lobbies with aesthetic sensibility.

From this renowned research-level series, Poems and Contexts: Yeats Annual 16 thrusts Yeats's poems back into the circumstances of their creation and revision, thereby addressing what is very much the coming subject in studies of the Irish Literary Revival and the Modernist Movement: the historicity of Yeats's texts. Essayists and their themes include Wayne Chapman on Yeats's Rebellion Poems, while Joseph M. Hassett and P. S. Sri address Yeats's poetic sequences from fresh viewpoints. Deirdre Toomey illuminates the turning point of 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', A. Norman Jeffares contributes a major biographical study of Iseult Gonne, and Neil Mann a study of George Yeats and Athanasius Kircher. The volume also features research materials, including a full printing of Richard Ellmann's Notebooks on Yeats.

Despite contemporary historical study of her contexts, Christina Rossetti continues to haunt the reader as a displaced subjectivity emptied of history. Through an analysis of the posthumous in her work, the construction of Christina Rossetti by her brothers, and the history of reception, this study asks how speaking with the dead can avoid critical ventriloquy. The figure of the mother is offered as a paradigm for theorizing a new reading that refuses to exorcise the ghost of Christina Rossetti.

This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own "Biographia Literaria" as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the "Biographia" was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge.

In a work that will be of interest to students and scholars of American Literature, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, the History of Ideas,and Religious Studies, Brad Bannon examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's engagement with the philosophical theology of Jonathan Edwards. A closer look at Coleridge's response to Edwards clarifies the important influence that both thinkers had on seminal works of the nineteenth century, ranging from the antebellum period to the aftermath of the American Civil War-from Poe's fiction and Emerson's essays to Melville's Billy Budd and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Similarly, Coleridge's early espousal of an abolitionist theology that had evolved from Edwards and been shaped by John Woolman and Olaudah Equiano sheds light on the way that American Romantics later worked to affirm a philosophy of supernatural self-determination. Ultimately, what Coleridge offered the American Romantics was a supernatural modification of Edwards' theological determinism, a compromise that provided Emerson and other nineteenth-century thinkers with an acceptable extension of an essentially Calvinist theology. Indeed, a thoroughgoing skepticism with respect to salvation, as well as a faith in the absolute inscrutability of Providence, led both the Transcendentalists and the Dark Romantics to speculate freely on the possibility of supernatural self-determination while doubting that anything other than God, or nature, could harness the power of causation.

Today Blake scholarship is experiencing a period of unprecedented variety and mutuality. These essays reflect the methodological cross-fertilisations now taking place in Blake scholarship and explore the range of debates and contentions generated by these encounters, embracing figurative, structural, and material readings of Blake's life and works.

This collection reveals the variety of literary forms and visual media through which travel records were conveyed in the long nineteenth century, bringing together a group of leading researchers from a range of disciplines to explore the relationship between travel writing, visual representation and formal innovation.

In his quest for a truly native idiom, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) incarnated the American geography and its people in a new and transcendent poetic form. His monumental work, Leaves of Grass, celebrates sexuality, gender equality, and the astonishing beauty of the everyday. For Whitman, "The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science and to common lives, endowing them with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to real things, and to real things only."
This complete edition of Leaves of Grass, which includes "Sands at Seventy" (from November Boughs) and "Good-bye My Fancy," contains those poems that have become part of the great American literature, including "Song of Myself," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "O Captain, My Captain."

Walter Benjamin holds a unique fascination for students and scholars interested in the question of modernity. The most original thinker of Weimar Germany, Benjamin has become something of a cultural icon and his works are often regarded with awe rather than critical scrutiny. This book offers surprising new insights from a number of perspectives -- sociology, history, women's studies, literary and cultural studies -- and investigates unexplored areas of Benjamin scholarship to arrive at a critically balanced perception of his work.
There are four main sections:
- a critical re-evaluation of Benjamin's concepts of history and modernity in light of postmodernist discourses;
- a discussion of aspects of Benjamin's literary scholarship;
- a re-evaluation of Benjamin's writings on media and performance theories; and
- an investigation of Benjamin's peculiar 'utopianism' which includes a critical consideration of sexual/gender politics.

In Writing in Between, Beth Sharon Ash develops an important theoretical framework for interpreting Conrad's signal texts and his situation as an author. Using relational psychoanalysis, Ash reinserts into the literary conversation the idea of the psychologically inflected subject. She integrates authorial and fictional subjectivity within specific historical contexts, thus lending agency and density to the "relational subject" without neglecting the social forces which shape it. Organized around the thematics of unfinished mourning, this book carefully positions Conrad as a writer caught 'in between,' as both a figure of alienation critically disenchanted with British imperialism, and an orphan of genius desperately desiring a fit with his adopted culture. Through fine-grained, often surprising readings of Conrad's novels and broad analyses of psychoanalytic and modernist criticism, Ash persuasively refocuses how one reads Conrad and, in doing this, retheorizes the subject and its literary relations.

"Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason" examines Coleridge's understanding of the Pantheism Controversy - the crisis of reason in German philosophy - and reveals the context informing Coleridge's understanding of German thinkers. It challenges previous accounts of Coleridge's philosophical engagements, forcing a reconsideration of his reading of figures such as Schelling, Jacobi and Spinoza. This exciting new study establishes the central importance of the contested status of reason for Coleridge's poetry, accounts of the imagination and later religious thought.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siecle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable "stuff," has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity. Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of "character" in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

Written in an age of revolutions, Lyrical Ballads represents a radical new way of thinking - not only about literature but also about our fundamental perceptions of the world. The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge continues to be among the most appealing and challenging in the rich tradition of English Literature; and Lyrical Ballads, composed at the height of the young authors' creative powers, is now widely acclaimed as a landmark in literary history. In this lively study, detailed analysis of individual poems is closely grounded in the literary, political and historical contexts in which Lyrical Ballads was first conceived, realised and subsequently expanded into two volumes. John Blades examines poetry from both volumes and carefully reassesses the poems in the light of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's revolutionary theories, while Part II of the study broadens the discussion by tracing the critical history of Lyrical Ballads over the two centuries since its first publication. Providing students with the critical and analytical skills with which to approach the poems, and offering guidance on further study, this stimulating book is essential reading.

This book examines Austen's novels in relation to her philosophical and religious context, demonstrating that the combination of the classical and theological traditions of the virtues is central to her work. Austen's heroines learn to confront the fundamental ethical question of how to live their lives. Instead of defining virtue only in the narrow sense of female sexual virtue, Austen opens up questions about a plurality of virtues. In fresh readings of the six completed novels, plus Lady Susan, Emsley shows how Austen's complex imaginative representations of the tensions among the virtues engage with and expand on classical and Christian ethical thought.