Against the backdrop of Britain’s underground 18th and early-19th century homosexual culture, mob persecutions, and executions of homosexuals, Hobson shows how Blake's hatred of sexual and religious hypocrisy and state repression, and his revolutionary social vision, led him gradually to accept homosexuality as an integral part of human sexuality. In the process, Blake rejected the antihomosexual bias of British radical tradition, revised his idealization of aggressive male heterosexuality and his male-centered view of gender, and refined his conception of the cooperative commonwealth.

Against a historical backdrop that includes eighteenth-century language theory, children's literature and education, debates on the French Revolution, Biblical interpretation, and print culture, "Blake on Language, Power, and Self-Annihilation" breaks new ground in the study of William Blake. This book analyzes the concept of self-annihilation in Blake’s work, using the language theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to elucidate the ways in which his discourse was open to the viewpoints of others, undermines institutional authority, and restores dialogue. This book not only uncovers the importance of self-annihilation to Blake's thinking about language and communication, but it also develops its centrality to Blake's poetic practice.

William Blake and the Body re-evaluates Blake's central image: the human form. In Blake's designs, transparent-skinned bodies passionately contort; in his verse, metamorphic bodies burst from each other in gory, gender-bending births. The culmination is an ideal body uniting form and freedom. Connolly explores romantic-era contexts like anatomical art, embryology, miscarriage, and 20th century theorists like those of Kristeva, Douglas, and Girard to provide an innovative new analysis of Blake's transformations of body and identity.

New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy is a lively and varied collection of new essays on Thomas Hardy, contributed by some of the world's leading Hardy scholars. The essays range widely over Hardy's work, thought, creative methods and life, and show a variety of critical approaches. The essays collected here will appeal equally to scholars, students and non-academic Hardy enthusiasts.

For centuries, spoken Arabic was kept separate from the language of literary expression, with poetry exclusively the domain of the latter. Today, modern Egyptian colloquial poetry is a robust, sophisticated, and versatile genre, enjoyed by millions. After the eruption of the revolutionary youth movement in Egypt on January 25th, 2011, this genre became one of the vehicles for revolutionary communications. However, it has long been neglected in the critical space. Here, Noha Radwan offers the first book-length study of the emergence, context, and development of modern Egyptian colloquial poetry and situates in among modernist Arab poetry.

Herman Sinaiko is renowned for his gifts as a guide to exploring and appreciating the humanities. This book brings to general readers Sinaiko's thoughts on, and invitations to read or reread, a wide selection of major literary and philosophical works -- from ancient Greek to Chinese to modern. Taking a conversational approach, he deals with the perennial questions that thinking people have always raised and investigates how works of great art may provide answers to these questions.

Sinaiko reestablishes the notion that there is a canon of great works from the great traditions of the world and argues for the existence of permanent standards of excellence. He rejects most contemporary critical views of classical literature and philosophy, including those of "experts" who seek to monopolize access to great works, academics whose extreme emphasis on historical context disallows any current relevance, and theorists whose lenses distort with personal bias rather than sharpen focus on the works they discuss. Sinaiko reclaims the canon for all of us, opening up discussion on texts ranging from Plato to Tolstoy, Confucius to Mary Shelley, and encouraging each reader to listen and respond to the rich diversity of powerful views on the human condition that such great works offer.

"Sinaiko's essays are interesting, provocative, thick like a good pudding, and contain much original thought. Plato, Confucius, Yeats, Nietzsche, and others -- a gala and stimulating Humanities course." -- Bennett Simon, M.D., Harvard Medical School

"The more one knows and has studied a work that Sinaiko addresses, the more one appreciates the depth and significance of what he has to say." -- Bruce A. Kimball, University of Rochester

At his death in 2000, R. S. Thomas was widely considered to be one of the major poets of the English-speaking world, having been nominated for the Nobel prize for Literature. With Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas is probably Wales's best-known poet internationally. Tony Brown provides an introduction to R. S. Thomas's life and work, as well as new perspectives and insights for those already familiar with the poetry. His approach is broadly chronological, interweaving life and work in order to evaluate Thomas's poetic achievement. In addition to presenting a full discussion of Thomas's poetry, and its movements over time between personal, spiritual and political concerns, Tony Brown also examines Thomas's contribution to the culture of Wales, not just in his writing but also his political interventions and activism on behalf of Welsh language and culture.

The first modern study of Hartley Coleridge, showing that he deserves our attention not as the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but as a literary presence in his own right.

Focusing on Shelley's 'Italian experience', the present study both addresses itself to the living context which nurtured Shelley's creativity, and explores a neglected but essential component of his work. The poet's four years of self-exile in Italy (1818-1822) were, in fact, the most decisive of his career. As he responded to Italy, his poetry acquired a new subtlety and complexity of vision. Endowed with remarkably keen powers of absorption, the poet imaginatively reshaped the rich cultural heritage of Italy and the vital qualities of its landscape and climate.

This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words giving direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson. A coda looks at the work of the Language writers, who carry forward this tradition in surprising ways. Based on close readings of theoretical and poetic texts, and drawing on archival research, this book makes two basic claims: that belief in an intrinsic relationship between words and things is linked in American poetry to utopian social projects; and that poets with a deep understanding of how language operates are nonetheless attracted to this belief--despite recognizing its fantastic elements--because it allows them to articulate a social mandate for poetry.

Of interest to interdisciplinary historians as well as those in various other fields, this book presents the first publication of 14 poems ranging from 12 to 3,000 lines. The poems are printed in the chronological order of their composition, from Elizabethan to Augustan times, but nine of them are verse translations of works from earlier periods in the development of alchemy. Each has a textual and historical introduction and explanatory note by the Editor. Renaissance alchemy is acknowledged as an important element in the histories of early modern science and medicine. This book emphasises these poems' expression of and shaping influence on religious, social and political values and institutions of their time too and is a useful reference work with much to offer for cultural studies and literary studies as well as science and history.

William Blake has maintained an enduring popularity amongst a large and diverse audience as a poet, artist and engraver. There are probably more artists, writers, filmmakers and composers working under the influence of Blake than any other figure from the Romantic era.Radical Blake traces his influence and afterlife across a range of major themes such as Metropolitan Blake, Blake and Nationalism, and Blake and Women.

This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval narratives and lyrics - not how they express the subjectivity of individuals, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes analyses of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law's Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok the Dane, the lyric sequence attributed to Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and many anonymous poems. It also devotes sections to Ovid's Heroides and to poems by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn. For the first time, it brings to bear on medieval narratives and lyrics a body of theory which denies the supposed necessity for literary texts to have narrators or 'speakers', and in doing so reveals the implausibilities into which a dogmatic assumption of this necessity has led much of the last century's criticism.

The poet Mak Dizdar has become a cultural icon in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. Inspired by the lapidary imagery and epitaphs of medieval Bosnian tombstones, his best-acclaimed collection of poetry, Stone Sleeper, reawakens the medieval voices in the historical imagination of contemporary Bosnians. Amila Buturovic looks at Stone Sleeper 's recovery of the ancestral world as an effort to refashion the sentiments of collective belonging. In treating the medieval tombstones as sites of collective memory, Dizdar’s poetry evokes new possibilities for Bosnians to cast aside national differences based on religion and embrace a pluralistic identity rooted in the sacred landscape of medieval Bosnia. The book includes a bilingual appendix of Dizdar's poetry with an introduction by the translator, Francis Jones.

"Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in "New American" Poetry" examines the crucial, yet sometimes fraught connections between poets associated with Donald Allen's groundbreaking 1960 anthology, "The New American Poetry." Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, including Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Nathaniel Mackey, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to the writing, especially at early stages in these poets' careers. Mossin then goes on to examine the role that male friendship, rivalry, and camaraderie play in the production of poetic texts. "No one listens to poetry," Jack Spicer famously wrote. This book shows how a particular group of poets did listen to each other and what they made of what they heard.

In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another. One group, as yet the most numerous, insists that to study a poem is to investigate the historical circumstances out of which it was produced; the other retorts that poetry offers pleasures fully available only to readers whose attention is focused on their language. This book attempts to reconcile the two groups by arguing that a poet's most effective political action is the forging of a new language and that the political import of a poem is a function of its style.

Anna Wickham's life is characterized by the turbulent, burgeoning feminism of the early 20th century. A woman whose incisive mind and inquisitive nature sent her husband into jealous rages, she was forcibly committed to a mental hospital at the age of 30. Upon her release, she began a life-long quest for happiness, exhibited first and foremost through her poetry. Anna Wickham became a widely acclaimed writer whose life, at times immersed in scandal, is a story of success and sadness. Eventually leaving her husband and four sons to live in Paris's left bank, she became a confidante of D.H. Lawrence, the long-time lover of millionairess Natalie Clifford Barney, and a strong-willed literary icon, rumored to have once thrown Dylan Thomas into a snowstorm. Despite her fame and achievement, Wickham's struggles with depression and anxiety would eventually lead to her untimely death.

WINNER OF THE PROSE AWARD FOR LITERATURE, LANGUAGE, AND LINGUISTICS

The two principal questions that "The City of Translation" sets out to answer are: how did poetry, philology, catechesis, and literary translation legitimate a coterie of right-wing literati's rise to power in Colombia? And how did these men proceed to dismantle a long-standing liberal-democratic state without derogating basic constitutional freedoms? To answer those questions, Jose Maria Rodriguez Garcia investigates the emergence, development, and decline of what he calls "the reactionary city of translation"--a variation on, and a correction to, Angel Rama's understanding of the nineteenth-century "lettered city" as a primarily liberal and modernizing project. "The City of Translation" makes the tropes of ""translatio"" the conceptual nucleus of a comprehensive analysis that cuts across academic disciplines, ranging from political philosophy and the history of concepts to the relationship of literature to religious doctrine and the law.

Did 1st century Mediterranean readers of the fourth Gospel have comparable literary examples to inform their comprehension of Moses as a character? In addressing this question, Harstine's study falls into two parts: the first is an analysis of the character Moses as utilized in the text of the fourth Gospel, and the second is an examination of other Hellenistic narrative texts, in which the character of Homer is also considered, as another important legendary figure with whom the readers of the fourth Gospel would have been familiar.