Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career, or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that The Earthly Paradise is in fact central to Morris's political vision-indeed, it is the most radical manifestation of that vision. Paradise Dislocated explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations, and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole, as well as a judgement upon the possibilities (and impossibilities) of imaginative and cultural criticism at Morris's moment-and at our own.

The hero's descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets--British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from the margins--stage Underworld descents in their works? Through a series of contextualized close readings, this study traces the cultural work performed by modern deployments of the classical narrative. While some poets engage their literary forebears to exorcise anxiety and others use Hell to sharpen their cultural critique, most recent poets, including James Merrill, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, have found the Underworld descent to be a useful framework for addressing the claims of history and politics.

Essays shedding fresh and significant light on Gower's poetry, major and minor, as it was received, read, and re-produced in England and in Iberia from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. John Gower's great poem, the Confessio Amantis, was the first work of English literature translated into any European language. Occasioned by the existence in Spain of fifteenth-century Portuguese and Spanish manuscripts ofthe Confessio, the nineteen essays brought together here represent new and original approaches to Gower's role in Anglo-Iberian literary relations. They include major studies of the palaeography of the Iberian manuscripts;of the ownership history of the Portuguese Confessio manuscript; of the glosses of Gowerian manuscripts; and of the manuscript of the Yale Confessio Amantis. Other essays situate the translations amidst Anglo-Spanish relations generally in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; examine possible Spanish influences on Gower's writing; and speculate on possible providers of the Confessio to Philippa, daughter of John of Gaunt and queenof Portugal. Further chapters broaden the scope of the volume. Amongst other topics, they look at Gower's use of Virgilian/Dantean models; classical gestures in the Castilian translation; Gower's conscious contrasting of epic ideals and courtly romance; nuances of material goods and the idea of "the good" in the Confessio; Marxian aesthetics, Balzac, and Gowerian narrative in late medieval trading culture between England and Iberia; reading the Confessio through the lens of gift exchange; literary form in Gower's later Latin poems; Gower and Alain Chartier as international initiators of a new "public poetry"; and the modern sales history of manuscript and earlyprinted copies of the Confessio, and what it reveals about literary trends. Ana Saez Hidalgo is Associate Professor at the University of Valladolid, Spain; R.F. Yeager is Professor of English and World Languagesand chair of the department at the University of West Florida. Contributors: Maria Bullon-Fernandez, David R. Carlson, Sian Echard, A.S.G. Edwards, Robert R. Edwards, Tiago Viula de Faria, Andrew Galloway, Fernando Galvan, Marta Maria Gutierrez Rodriguez, Mauricio Herrero Jimenez, Ethan Knapp, Roger A. Ladd, Alberto Lazaro, Maria Luisa Lopez-Vidriero Abello, Matthew McCabe, Alastair J. Minnis, Clara Pascual-Argente, Tamara Para A. Shailor, Winthrop Wetherbee

Ezra Pound belatedly conceded that T.S.Eliot "was the true Dantescan voice" of the modern world. This is the first study to deal with this assertion and the relationship between the two poets. It attempts to show how Dante's total vision impinges on Eliot's craft and thought. Eliot's indebtedness to his Italian master, whose poetry he deemed "as the most persistent and deepest influence" upon his own verse, manifests itself in a variety of literary strategies, including imitation, parody, citation and allusion. At the same time Eliot's debt transcends the literary to embrace Dante's total vision, or his philosophy, theology and politics. Various aspects of Eliot's recourse to Dante's craft and thought may appear in a new light - his recurring fascination with Ulysses in "Inferno XXVI" and especially with Arnaut Daniel in "Purgatorio XXVI"; the exodus motif as it informs "The Waste Land", "The Hollow Men" and "Ash Wednesday"; the metaphor of Dante's book of memory as it applies to Eliot's work; the notion of order in its ethical, aesthetic and political dimensions. Finally, light is shed on some of the reasons why Eliot's Dante ultimately differs radically from that of the other mod

This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.

A new examination of the little-studied phenomena of Direct Speech in Old English poetry. Some of the most celebrated passages of Old English poetry are speeches: Beowulf and Unferth's verbal contest, Hrothgar's words of advice, Satan's laments, Juliana's words of defiance, etc. Yet Direct Speech, as a stylistic device, has remained largely under-examined and under-theorized in studies of the corpus. As a consequence, many analyses are unduly influenced by anachronistic conceptions of Direct Speech, leading to problematic interpretations, not least concerning irony and implicit characterisation. This book uses linguistic theories to reassess the role of Direct Speech in Old English narrative poetry. Beowulf is given a great deal of attention, because it is amajor poem and because it is the focus of much of the existing scholarship on this subject, but it is examined in a broader poetic context: the poem belongs to a wider tradition and thus needs to be understood in that context. The texts examined include several major Old English narrative poems, in particular the two Genesis, Christ and Satan, Andreas, Elene, Juliana and Guthlac A. Elise Louviot is a Lecturer at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France) and a specialist of Old English poetry. Her research interests include orality, tradition, formulas and the linguistic expression of subjectivity.

Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Hermes shows that there was no shortage of medieval Muslims who cast curious eyes towards the European Other and that more than a handful of them were interested in Europe.

This is a comprehensive study of Shakespeare's forgotten masterpiece 'The Phoenix and Turtle'. Bednarz confronts the question of why one of the greatest poems in the English language is customarily ignored or misconstrued by Shakespeare biographers, literary historians, and critics.

New essays on Thomas Traherne challenge traditional critical readings of the poet. Thomas Traherne has all too often been defined and studied as a solitary thinker, "out of his time", and not as a participant in the complex intellectual currents of the period. The essays collected here take issue with this reading, placing Traherne firmly in his historical context and situating his work within broader issues in seventeenth-century studies and the history of ideas. They draw on recently published textual discoveries alongside manuscripts which will soon be published for the first time. They address major themes in Traherne studies, including Traherne's understanding of matter and spirit, his attitude towards happiness and holiness, his response to solitude and society, and his Anglican identity. As a whole, the volume aims to re-ignite discussion on settled readings of Traherne's work, to reconsider issues in Traherne scholarship which have long lain dormant, and to supplement our picture of the man and his writings through new discoveries and insights. Elizabeth S. Dodd is programme leader for the MA in theology, ministry and mission and lecturer in theology, imagination and culture at Sarum College, Salisbury; Cassandra Gorman is lecturer in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. Contributors: Jacob Blevins, Warren Chernaik, Phoebe Dickerson, Elizabeth S. Dodd, Ana Elena Gonzalez-Trevino, Cassandra Gorman, Carol Ann Johnston, Alison Kershaw, Kathryn Murphy

Drawing on a series of new sources, this biography of Ezra Pound - the first to appear in more than a decade - outlines his contribution to modernism through a detailed account of his development, influence and continued significance. It pays special attention to his role in creating Imagism, Vorticism and the modern long poem, as well as his importance for Yeats, Joyce and Eliot. His roles as editor, translator and critic, plus his attempt to complete "The Cantos," are also studied.

Dominic Rainsford examines ways in which literary texts may seem to comment on their authors' ethical status. Its argument develops through readings of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, three authors who find especially vivid ways of casting doubt on their own moral authority, at the same time as they expose wider social ills. The book combines its interest in ethics with post-structuralist scepticism, and thus develops a type of radical humanism with applications far beyond the three authors immediately discussed.

Bringing a fresh approach to the field, this study shows that poems by women do not always subvert the mainstream, the media, and the marketplace. With explorations of both Hollywood films, household advertising, children's books, mass magazines, and tabloid journalism as well as the poetry of H.D., Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Ai, and Carol Ann Duffy, Marsha Bryant assesses the counterintuitive innovations that these poets fashion through popular culture. Bridging feminist and cultural studies, this book analyzes the ways in which British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders, consuming music, movies, and magazines through poems that do not always conform to appropriation or critique.

The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Groeber in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) has often been considered a particularly British writer in part as his official post as Poet Laureate inevitably committed him to a certain amount of patriotic writing. This volume focuses on his impact on the continent, presenting a major scholarly analysis of Tennyson's wider reception in different areas of Europe. It considers reader and critical responses and explores the effect of his poetry upon his contemporaries and later writers, as well as his influence upon illustrators, painters and musicians. The leading international contributors raise questions of translation and publication and of the choices made for this purpose along with the way in which his ideas and style influenced European writing and culture. Tennyson's reputation in Anglophone countries is now assured, following a decline in the years after his death. This volume enables us to chart the changes in Tennyson's European reputation during the later 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, the first book-length treatment of the character, examines the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the perspective of both medieval and twentieth-century theories of sex, gender, and erotic practice. Sturges argues for a discontinuous, fragmentary reading of this character and his tale that is genuinely both premodern and postmodern. Drawing on theorists ranging from St. Augustine and Alain de Lille to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sturges approaches the Pardoner as a representative of the construction of historical--and sexual--identities in a variety of historically specific discourses, and argues that medieval understandings of gender remain sedimented in postmodern discourse.

The Greek View of Poetry details critical theories and the appreciation of poetry by the ancient Greeks. Originally published in 1931, this text deals with a whole range of Greek critics from very early criticism to Longinus and his views on Homer in an attempt to provide a historical view of the importance of poetry to Greek society. This title will be of interest to students of Classics.

This volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Opus Maximum, written in the early 1820s and first published in 2002, is a challenge to every scholar who has encountered it. Sublime Coleridge offers an entry point to this important text of British Romanticism, with a reader's guide and background information. Murray J. Evans introduces each major theme of the Opus Maximum--the Will, divine ideas, human subjectivity, and the Trinity--and shows their importance in explaining Coleridge's ideas about religion, psychology, and the sublime.

"Shelley's German Afterlives "traces the German reception of P.B. Shelley over a time-span of nearly 200 years, considering material as diverse as anthologies, journals, biographies, poetic imitations, translations. If German readers of the 1830s and 1840s were initially fascinated by Shelley's life and death, interest in the lyrical and the political Shelley set in soon, too. "Men of England" became the model for one of the most popular German working class poems by Herwegh. In the context of the "fin de siecle" and of expressionism, Shelley's Faustian characters--Cenci and Prometheus--received acclaim.

Conceptualizes the genre of American assassination fiction as a dramatization of the tension between individualism and mass society in US culture. Vote with a Bullet is the first systematic study of assassination in American fiction. It proffers not only a fundamental overview of the genre but also an argument about its larger cultural, aesthetic, and political significance in the present moment as well as in the respective historical contexts of the works themselves. The study argues that American assassination fiction is a symbolic condensation of the larger conflict between individual and society that is at the heart of modern democracy, and that has been especially contested in the democratic culture of the US. Starting with Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) and ending with Noah Hawley's The Good Father (2012), the chapters analyze twelve works ranging from canonical classics to popular genre fiction. A conclusion considers Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (2006). The book describes the loose continuum of assassination fiction as an imaginary laboratory in which fantasies of individual empowerment and social unity play out in different ways, negotiating the tension between individualism and mass society in a democracy that is based on the former but must restrict it to preserve the latter. Furthermore, the study connects the imaginary of assassination with a variety of related themes such as hegemonic masculinity and whiteness, electoral and non-electoral political choice, agency panic, subjectivity, as well as conspiracies and conspiracy theory.

This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world. Based on extensive research and oral testimony, this biography embraces postcolonial realities and promise, and is a major contribution to British cultural history. -- .

After a sleepless night spent longing for his absent wife Sita, Rama, god-prince and future king, surveyed his army camps on a clear autumn morning and spied a white goose playing in a pond of lotus flowers. Seeing this radiant creature who so resembled his lost beloved, he began to plead with the bird to send her a message of love and fierce revenge. This is the setting of the Hamsasandesa ("A Message for the Goose"), a sandesa or "messenger poem" by the medieval saint-poet and philosopher Vedantedesika, a seminal figure for the Srivaisnava religious community of Tamil Nadu, South India, and a master poet in Sanskrit and Tamil. In The Flight of Love, Steven P. Hopkins situates Vedantedesika's Sanskrit sandesa within the wider comparative context of South Indian and Sri Lankan literatures. He traces the significance of messenger poetry in the construction of sacred landscapes in pre-modern South Asia and explores the ways the piece re-envisions the pan-Indian story of Rama and Sita, rooting his protagonists in a turbulent emotional world where separation, overwhelming desire, and anticipated bliss, are written into the living particularized bodies of lover and beloved, in the "messenger" goose and in the landscapes surrounding them. Hopkins's translation of the Hamsasandesa into fluid American English verse is framed by a comparative introduction, including an extended essay on translation, detailed linguistic notes, and an expanded thematic commentary that weaves together traditional religious interpretations of the poem with themes of contemporary literary relevance. Equally the work of a scholar and a poet, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian studies, comparative religion, and Indian literatures.

The most influential East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchange that has taken place in modern and postmodern times was the reading and writing of haiku. Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku, Alice Walker's work reflects her affinity for Zen philosophy, and Ishmael Reed's work includes a discussion of Eastern thought. Here, esteemed contributors investigate the impact of Eastern philosophy and religion on African American writers from Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison to Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson, offering a fresh field of literary inquiry.