Tennyson is not known for his scepticism. This book argues that he should be. It proposes a revaluation of the way in which his work is read. Tennyson has always been understood as a poet who is committed primarily to endorsing spiritual values. But this study argues that much of his poetry is driven by a metaphysical scepticism that is associated, in part, with rational perspectives deriving from Enlightenment thought. The scepticism in Tennyson's poetry partakes in the complex generation of the modern that was taking place in his era. One of the purposes of the study is to demonstrate that a cultural studies approach to Tennyson trivialises his intellectual subtlety and complexity. Making extensive critical use of Tennyson's manuscript drafts, this study provides close readings of Tennyson's earlier, shorter poems, together with the principal works of his maturity including In Memoriam , Maud and The Lover's Tale , and will be a valuable resource for Tennyson students and scholars worldwide.

This study contributes to ongoing discussions on the connections between the environmental imaginary and issues of identity, place and nation. Utilizing a delimited ecocritical approach, McNee puts Brazilian culture, through the work of contemporary poets and visual artists, into a broader, transnational dialogue.

This wide-ranging "Companion" reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism.

The "Companion" opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry's relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" to slightly less well-known works such as Swift's "Stella" poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's "Town Eclogues," Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume.

The" Companion" gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard's "Eighteenth-century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology" (Blackwell, second edition, 2004).

This text examines both "English" poetry through the events of the 20th century and British history through its representations in recent poetry. It builds a narrative not of poetry in the 20th century but of the 20th century in poetry. A high proportion of literature courses include an exploration of the issues of gender, ethnicity, theory, nationality, politics and social class. But until now most teaching has focused on the novel as the most useful way of raising these issues. Peter Childs demonstrates that all poetry is historically produced and consumed and is part of our understanding of society and identity. This student-friendly critical survey includes chapters on: the Georgians; First World War poetry; Eliot; Yeats; the thirties; post-war poetry; contemporary anthologies; women's poetry; and Northern Irish and black British poets. Placing literature in a wider social context, this book examines the way in which recent theory has questioned divisions between "history" and literature, between "text" and "event", between society and the individual.

The heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of medievalist Arthur G. Brodeur. By considering Blaser's and Spicer's poetics as they were shaped by their encounter with Beowulf, the book is able to open up questions about the non-representational poetics of the poem, rebooting a mid-century approach to aesthetics on a new critical trajectory. The book considers the poem's aesthetics through relationship translation theory, as well as early medieval discourses of sensory-affective experience and twentieth-century phenomenology. The heat of Beowulf reexamines the scholarship on Old English poetics from the mid-twentieth century as it intersected with post-war avant-garde poetics, and how understanding these critical histories can reshape how we read Beowulf now. -- .

Makes available research from international experts
This "Encyclopedia" gathers, for the first time, information not easily found elsewhere without extensive research. The material has been distilled from a variety of sources by over 200-internationally recognized contributors-including such leading Whitman scholars as James E. Miller, Jr., Roger Asselineau, Betsy Erkkila, and Joel Myerson. Writing under the guidance of a distinguished 11-member advisory board, they provide unprecedented access to important information about Whitman.
Comprehensive A-to-Z coverage of more than 750 topics
In all, the volume comprises more than 750 signed entries arranged in convenient alphabetical format. Coverage includes:
*Biographical Information-all names, dates, places, and events important to understanding Whitman's life and career.
*Whitman's Works-essays on all eight editions of "Leaves of Grass," major poems and poem clusters, principal essays and prose works, as well as his more than two dozen short stories and the novel, "Franklin Evans."
*Prominent Themes and Concepts-essays on such major topics as democracy, slavery, the Civil War, immortality, sexuality, and the women's rights movement.
*Significant Forms and Techniques-such as prosody, symbolism, free verse, and humor.
*Important Trends and Critical Approaches in Whitman Studies-including New Historicist and cultural criticism, psychological explorations, and controversial issues of sexual identity.
*Surveys of Whitman's International Impact-as well as an assessment of his literary legacy.
A user-friendly guide
Useful for students, researchers, librarians, teachers, and Whitmandevotees, this volume features extensive cross-references, numerous photographs of the poet, a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry includes a bibliography for further study.

Among Ruins is the final volume of Homestead Works, a collection of four books of poetry that explore the industrial past and legacy of the old steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, and, by extension, Pittsburgh.

John Thelwall and the Materialist Imagination reassesses Thelwall's eclectic body of work from the perspective of his heterodox materialist arguments about the imagination, political reform, and the principle of life itself, and his contributions to Romantic-era science.

Provides essays on the careers, works and backgrounds of the 150 poets and over 1000 poems that are included in the Library of America anthology (1-57958-034-3). It also provides entries on specialized categories of 19th-century verse, such as hymns, folk ballads, spirituals, Civil War songs and Native American poetry. The entries, besides presenting essential factual information, amount to in-depth critical essays. A bibliography at the end of each entry directs readers to other key works by and about the poet. The encyclopaedia is keyed to the contents of the Library of America anthology.

No other ancient poet has had such a hold on the imagination of readers as Ovid. Through the centuries, artists, writers, and poets have found in his work inspiration for new creative endeavors. This anthology of twenty of the most influential papers published in the last thirty years represents the broad range of critical and scholarly approaches to Ovid's work. The entire range of his poetry, from the Amores to the Epistles from the Black Sea, is discussed by some of the leading scholars of Latin poetry, employing, critical methods ranging from philology to contemporary literary theory. In an introductory essay, Peter Knox surveys Ovidian scholarship over this period and locates the assembled papers within recent critical trends. Taken together, the articles in this collection offer the interested reader, whether experienced scholar or novice, an entree into the current critical discourse on Ovid, who is at once one of the most accessible authors of classical antiquity and one of the least understood.

The volume explores Elizabeth I's impact on English and European culture during her life and after her death, through her own writing as well as through contemporary and later writers. The contributors are codicologists, historians and literary critics, offering a varied reading of the Queen and of her cultural inheritance.

Shakespeare and Lost Plays returns Shakespeare's dramatic work to its most immediate and (arguably) pivotal context; by situating it alongside the hundreds of plays known to Shakespeare's original audiences, but lost to us. David McInnis reassesses the value of lost plays in relation to both the companies that originally performed them, and to contemporary scholars of early modern drama. This innovative study revisits key moments in Shakespeare's career and the development of his company and, by prioritising the immense volume of information we now possess about lost plays, provides a richer, more accurate picture of dramatic activity than has hitherto been possible. By considering a variety of ways to grapple with the problem of lost, imperceptible, or ignored texts, this volume presents a methodology for working with lacunae in archival evidence and the distorting effect of Shakespeare-centric narratives, thus reinterpreting our perception of the field of early modern drama.

The elegiac aspect of Ted Hughes' poetry has been frequently overlooked, an oversight which this book sets out to rectify. Encompassing a broad range of themes, from the decline of nature and local industry to the national grief caused by the First World War, this book is a comprehensive addition to the study of Hughes' poetry.

This study explores why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences, in comparison with the traditions of Continental women writers and of English male authors. In this focus on a single genre, Rosalind Smith examines the relationship between gender and genre in the early modern period, and the critical assumptions currently underpinning questions of feminine agency within genre.

Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky is one of the most celebrated poets of our time, preoccupied with the the nature and destiny of poetry in our era. This volume analyzes Brodsky's career in terms of key elegies and investigates the critical role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics. In his elegies for poetic ancestors, family, friends, and the self, Brodsky demonstrates a concern for a paradox that is at the heart of modern elegiac poetry: attempting to find a basis for consolation in the face of death, but at length being compelled to discard traditional consolations, such as religion or art. The only source of relief is language itself, which Brodsky saw as both the origin and the final repository of values and truths.

This scholarly study presents a new political Wordsworth: an artist interested in "autonomous" poetry's redistribution of affect. No slave of Whig ideology, Wordsworth explores emotion for its generation of human experience and meaning. He renders poetry a critical instrument that, through acute feeling, can evaluate public and private life.

York Notes offer an exciting and fresh approach to the study of literature. The easy-to-use guides aim to provide a better understanding and appreciation of each text, encouraging students to form their own ideas and opinions. This makes study more enjoyable and leads to exam success. York Notes will also be of interest to the general reader, as they cover the widest range of popular literature titles. Key Features: How to study the text - Author and historical background - General and detailed summaries - Commentary on themes, structure, characters, language and style - Glossaries - Test questions and issues to consider - Essay-writing advice - Cultural connections - Literary terms - Illustrations - Colour design. General Editors: John Polley - Senior GCSE Examiner Head of English, Harrow Way Community School, Andover; Martin Gray - Head of Literary Studies, University of Luton.

A seminal text in English literature, the "Reliques" is a collection of ballads, songs, romances and historical poetry, annotated with Percy's literary-antiquarian observations. The Reliques profoundly influenced writers from Thomas Chatterton to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, and the Pre-Raphaelites. The publication of the "Reliques" marked the precise point at which early 18th-century neo-classicism became late- 18th-century Gothic Romanticism, and it encouraged the revival of interest in national folklore across Europe. Until now the first edition has not been available to scholars of the 18th century and British and European Romanticism. It contains additional scarce proofsheets, excluded from the original edition, and a new critical and bibliographical introduction.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"This is the first comprehensive guide to Tennyson, containing concise, informative entries on his poetry, his life and the cultural context of his work. Tennyson, the major poet of the Victorian age, lived through most of the nineteenth century, addressed key issues in science, religion, philosophy, politics and aesthetics and knew most of the great Victorians. This user-friendly reference work, designed both for academics and for the general reader, addresses all aspects of his life and times"--Provided by publisher.

A biobibliography of some 4000 entries listing the published works of mid-Victorian poets (1860-1879). Arranged alphabetically by author, each entry consists of brief biographical information, with bibliographical details of published works. Cross references are given from pseudonyms and other forms of names. The major interest of this biobibliography should be the "discovery" and listing of the very many minor poets unrecorded elsewhere.

Climate change is the greatest issue of our time - and yet too often literature on the subject is considered only in the bracket of 'environmental' writing, divorced from culture, society and politics. The New Poetics of Climate Change argues instead that the emergence of global warming presents a fundamental challenge to the way we read and write poetry - the way we think - in the modern age. In this important new book, Matthew Griffiths demonstrates that Modernism's radical reinvigorations of literary form over the last century represent an engagement with key intellectual questions that we still need to address if we are to comprehend the scale and complexity of climate change. Through an extended examination of Modernist poetry, including the work of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Basil Bunting and David Jones, and their influence on present-day poets including Jorie Graham, Griffiths explores how Modernist modes can help us describe and engage with the terrifying dynamics of a warming world and offer a poetics of our climate.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.