Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne and the French politician and journalist Lucien Millevoye, attracted many admirers - among them distinguished authors such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Arthur Symms, Lennox Robinson, Francis Stuart and Liam O'Flaherty. Yeats proposed marriage to her, Ezra Pound had a secret, passionate love affair with her and she married Francis Stuart. This book contains her hitherto unpublished letters to Yeats and Pound, edited and annotated by Anna MacBride White (Maud Gonne's granddaughter), Christina Bridgwater (Iseult's granddaughter) and A. Norman Jeffares, the distinguished Yeats scholar.

The first collection focused on the writing of provocative author and performance artist Sapphire, including her groundbreaking novel PUSH that has since become the Academy-award-winning film Precious.

This book applies linguistic analysis to the poetry of Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo, a Singaporean poet and leading figure in Commonwealth literature. The work explores how the poet combines grammar and metaphor to make meaning, making the reader aware of the linguistic resources developed by Thumboo as the basis for his unique technique. The author approaches the poems from a functional linguistic perspective, investigating the multiple layers of meaning and metaphor which go into producing these highly textured, grammatically intricate works of verbal art. The approach is based on Systematic Functional Theory, which assists with investigating how the poet uses language (grammar) to craft his text, in a playful way that reflects a love of the language. The multilingual and multicultural experiences of the poet are seen to have contributed to his uniquely creative use of language. This work demonstrates how Systematic Functional Theory, with its emphasis on exploring the semogenic (meaning-making) power of language, provides the handle we need to better understand poetic works as intentional acts of meaning. The verbal art of Edwin Thumboo illustrate Barthes' point that "Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc. pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text." With a focus on meaning, this functional analysis of poetry offers an insightful look at the linguistic basis of Edwin Thumboo's poetic technique. The work will appeal to scholars with an interest in linguistic analysis and poetry from the Commonwealth and new literatures, and it is also well suited to support courses on literary stylistics or text linguistics.

Robert Browning both denied and affirmed the value of biography for an understanding of literature. This book narrates the development of his controversial creative life through responses to his work by five key 19th-century figures: John Stuart Mill, William Charles Macready, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold. It also relates Browning's sense of literary vocation to Victorian publishing. Browning emerges as a writer vividly engaged with contemporary assumptions, yet deeply aware of the unaccountability of writing.

This collection of essays addresses poetic and critical responses to the various crises encountered by contemporary writers and our society. The essays included discuss a range of issues from the holocaust, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and their aftermath and the war on terror to the ecological crisis, poetry's relationship to place and questions of cultural and national identity. What are the means available to poetry to address the various crises it faces, and how can both poets and critics meet the challenges posed by society and the literary community? How can poetry justify its own role as a meaningful form of cultural and artistic practice? The volume focuses on poetry from Britain, Ireland and the US, and many of the poets discussed in this volume are among the most acclaimed contemporary writers, including for example Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Louise Gluck and Alice Oswald.

Lewis Carroll's nonsense poems have been astonishingly popular with children and adults alike since the first publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, and have influenced the work of a host of modern writers, including James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borgese and Vladimir Nabokov. This selection of Carroll's verse serves as an introduction to his work. It includes the best-known Alice poems as well as "Sylvie and Bruno", "The Hunting of the Snark" and pieces from Phantasmagoria. The text is illustrated with a number of the evocative original Tenniel drawings.

Carter explores early modern culture's reception of Ovid through the manipulation of Ovidian myth by Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, Marlowe and Marston. With a focus on sexual violence, homosexuality, incest and idolatry, Carter analyses how depictions of mythology represent radical ideas concerning gender and sexuality.

Re-examining English Romanticism through Hegel's philosophy, this book outlines and expands upon Hegel's theory of recognition. Deakin critiques four canonical writers of the English Romantic tradition, Coleridge, Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley and Mary Shelley, arguing that they, as Hegel, are engaged in a struggle towards philosophical recognition.

This set comprises of 42 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.

Contemporary Women's Poetry is a unique resource for students, teachers, and anyone interest in contemporary poetry. It offers the opportunity for readers to engage with the work of important figures and issues in contemporary women's poetry from two perspectives: that of poets themselves, and that of literary criticism. The poets discuss their writing practice and the reasons for their poetic strategies, while the literary critics many of whom are also poets themselves contextualise, analyse and situate the work of a wide range of poetry of the most significant women poets of our time in Britain and North America.

In this book, Tim Fulford examines the male Romantics' versions of poetic authority in the context of their involvement in the political debates of Regency Britain. He argues that their response to Burke's gendered discourse about power effected radical changes in the definitions of masculinity and femininity. Discussing Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Radcliffe, Malthus and Mary Robinson, he offers new perspectives on current critical debates concerning the Gothic, the sublime, and gender.

This study focuses on the character, literary precursors and effects of the language in Virgil's Eclogues. It is divided into four major sections: word formation, linguistic models, style level, personal names. Each section examines the influence of earlier poets (Theocritus, Callimachus, Ennius, Lucretius, Catullus et al.), the reception by later poets of the Augustan Age (Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid) and in particular the relationship of the Eclogues to Vergil's later work (Georgica, Aeneis).

This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyzes the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasized the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly an ethical challenge of responsibility of its discoveries.

This book fills a lacuna in the intellectual history of the seventeenth century by investigating the role that skepticism plays in the declining prestige of memory. It argues that Shakespeare and Donne revolutionize the art of memory, thanks to their skepticism, and thereby transform literary strategies like mimesis, exemplarity, and pastoral.

"British Victorian Women's Periodicals" explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era to answer questions about taste, style, and the significance of poetry to our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century. Ledbetter shows how the periodical's advice about maintaining or acquiring social respectability through appropriate fashion, good behavior, and regulation of the household is seamlessly integrated with poetry that aimed to inspire, teach, and cultivate feeling. This book questions traditional evaluations of nineteenth-century sentimental poetry, and argues for a consideration of women's poetry within its own cultural milieu.

Incorporating the most recent discoveries concerning Blake's heritage and cultural context, Visionary Materialism in the Early Works of William Blake: The Intersection of Enthusiasm and Empiricism proposes a radical new reading of his early works, that sees them taking enlightenment ideas to heights never dreamed of by Locke and Priestley. Drawing on a careful analysis of key figures from both sides of the enlightenment/counter-enlightenment divide (including Boehme, Swedenborg, the Moravians, Lavater, Brothers, Erasmus Darwin), the discussion traces an alternative tradition that disrupts previous assumptions about important aspects of Blake's thought.

In God and Elizabeth Bishop Cheryl Walker takes the bold step of looking at the work of Elizabeth Bishop as though it might have something fresh to say about religion and poetry. Going wholly against the tide of recent academic practice, especially as applied to Bishop, she delights in presenting herself as an engaged Christian who nevertheless believes that a skeptical modern poet might feed our spiritual hungers. This is a book that reminds us of the rich tradition of religious poetry written in English, at the same time taking delicious detours into realms of humour, social responsibility, and mysticism.

The 14th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. In addition to the well known poets, talented up-and-coming writers are also profiled.
Contents:
* Each entry provides full career history and publication details
* An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers
* A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes
* The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes.

This book is a study of writing processes of six modernist authors: Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf, from the 'golden age of manuscripts'. Finn Fordham examines how these processes relate to selfhood and subjectivity, both of which are generally considered to have come under an intense examination and reformulation during the modernist period. The study addresses several questions: what are the relations between writing and subjectivity? To what extent is a 'self' considered as a completed product like a book? Or how are selves, if considered as things 'in process' or 'constructs', reflections of the processes of writing? How do the experiences of writing inform thematic concerns within texts about identity?
There are three theoretical and methodological chapters (about 'genetic' criticism, about critical studies of selfhood within modernism, and the 'effacement' of manuscripts in philosophies of the subject). There then follow chapters on each of the six authors, with a different topic on each - compression, selection, doubling, hollowing out, multiplying and class. The study comprises much new material from archives, and many fresh ideas stemming from the combination of different critical approaches: genetic, psychological, political criticism and close reading. Readers of its contents described it as 'excellent', 'a very creative study', 'original, timely and extremely suggestive'.

A Spenser Chronology is the first serious attempt to map out in concrete detail all of the known facts concerning the poet Edmund Spenser, a major canonical author whose entire literary career was spent in Ireland. This book charts Spenser's parallel vocations of Elizabethan planter and Renaissance writer, outlining the activities, appointments and whereabouts of a prominent Irish colonist, and shedding new light on the life of one of the most important figures in English literary history.

Frederick Glaysher invokes a global vision beyond the prevailing postmodern conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary world culture. East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankind ranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Ryuichi Tamura, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature. Clearly the work of a poet-critic attempting to embrace a larger portion of human experience than the personal postmodern self, The Grove of the Eumenides reaches toward an epic vision of the twenty-first century. All the muck and glory of American and international experience and history mix in the complex tension of a mind struggling with itself and its Age. Acutely perceptive of the spiritual and moral nuances of literature, criticism, and culture, Glaysher confronts the loss of religious faith in the modern world and breaks through to a vision of the unity of the human longing for transcendence.

The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America culminates in the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-86). For example, just as her poems of science and technology reflect her faith in experience, and just as her lyrics about natural history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural religion, so too do her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of faith. Thus, for an American audience, Dickinson recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception. This double perspective, this counterintuitive combination of natural models with spiritual metaphors, parallels the androgynous ideal of her nineteenth-century feminism and champions her belief in immortality. The experience/faith paradox of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the mind and soul, as well as the heart, of her legacy.

Unruly women constantly speak out in lyric poetry, their voices brought to life in the bodies of female singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Performing Women is the first book-length study of female performers in Galician-Portuguese and Castilian comic-satiric poetry. Filios reconstructs medieval women's oral performances by bringing modern ethnographic work and performance theory to bear on literary and historical evidence. Filios explores how women's performances (and men's impersonations of women) contributed to the construction of the court, the marketplace, and the countryside as cultural spaces defined by certain acts, discourses, and conflicts. She argues that poetic portraits of sexually aggressive courtesans, bread sellers, and mountain women allowed elite men to portray their own sexuality as transgressive and to adopt temporarily a female identity, enabling them to speak and act as a degraded other. While these portraits may be misogynistic, they also demonstrate that poets appreciated marginalized women's characters, placing speeches overtly critical of dominant power structures in their mouths and constructing imaginary communities around them. Men wrote these characters, women appropriated them, ironically performing as themselves. By situating medieval lyric poems in their dialogic performance context, this study demonstrates the centrality female performers in poetic spectacles.

Troubled by his complex sexuality, Monro was a tormented soul whose aim was to serve the cause of poetry. Hibberd's revealing and beautifully-written biography will help rescue Monro from the graveyard of literary history and claim for him the recognition he deserves. Poet and businessman, ascetic and alcoholic, socialist and reluctant soldier, twice-married yet homosexual, Harold Monro probably did more than anyone for poetry and poets in the period before and after the Great War, and yet his reward has been near oblivion. Aiming to encourage the poets of the future, he befriended, among many others, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Imagists; Rupert Brooke and the Georgians; Marinetti the Futurist; Wilfred Owen and other war poets; and the noted women poets, Charlotte Mew and Amma Wickham.