In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts distinguished critics from Canada, Japan, the US, and the UK, offer fresh and challenging readings of Hardy's works. They also raise far wider and far-reaching questions about Hardy's attitude to his art, his relation to such contemporary forms as melodrama, and his response to the ongoing scientific debates, from Darwin to Einstein, about sexuality; personal identity; the meaning of suicide; and the nature of time.

Edward Thomas 1878-1917, published author, critic, and essayist, died at 39, a casualty of World War I. At the suggestion of his friend Robert Frost, Thomas began to write poetry and six months after his death his first book of poems was published. As the prose writer died, the poet was born, and it is on the poems that his reputation still rests. This new biography--based on some 1,800 of Thomas's letters--tells the story of his courtship, his restless marriage, and his tormented need to choose between happiness with his wife and children and the need to find his way as a writer alone. With delicacy and understanding the book describes Thomas's complex character and his pilgrimage on the road to self-discovery, and reveals how the emergence of Thomas the poet became inevitable.

Stanley Lombardo's deft abridgment of his 2005 translation of the Aeneid preserves the arc and weight of Virgil's epic by presenting major books in their entirety and abridged books in extended passages seamlessly fitted together with narrative bridges. W. R. Johnson's Introduction, a shortened version of his masterly Introduction to that translation, will be welcomed by both beginning and seasoned students of the Aeneid , and by students of Roman history, classical mythology, and Western civilization.

Drawing on contemporary material, including Auden's unpublished diary, this book places personal experience in the context of the life of Berlin - not only its political, artistic and cultural life, but the life of the streets, bars and cafes. The biography brings together a major phase in the life of Auden, Isherwood, and the city. It presents portraits of figures with whom Auden and Isherwood came into contact, and it demonstrates how, especially in Isherwood's fiction, the material of daily existence was transformed into literature. The wide scope of this study, which ranges from poetry and cinema to street violence and prostitution, provides a detailed context for its account of two writers engaged in the process of self-definition.

First published in 1956. Arthur Waley here presents an engrossing account of the works and life of Yuan Mei (1716-1797), the best-known poet of his time. Gaiety is the keynote of his works and the poet was a friend of the Manchu official with whom Commodore Anson had dramatic dealings at Canton in 1743. Yuan Mei gives an account (not previously translated) of Anson's interview with the Manchu authorities. The book contains many translations of Yuan Mei's verse and prose.

This book reads the work of contemporary women poets against recent debates in "third wave" feminism and democratic theory in exploring the range of ways in which women poets have interrogated the complexities of being "public" in contemporary U.S culture.

What is the relation between the language being heard and the picture being simultaneously exhibited on the stage? Typically there is an identity between sound and sight, but often there is a divergence between what the audience hears and what is sees. These divergences are 'insets' and examines the motives, mechanics and poetic qualities of these narrative poems embedded in the plays.

Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Starting with an overview of eighteenth-century developments and their impact of authorship, this book explores the construction of personal and poetic identity in the writing of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, James Beattie, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.

First published in 1957. This edition re-issues the second edition of 1965. Recognized as one of the leading books in its field, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare presents the most comprehensive account available of the English historical drama from its beginning to the closing of the theatres in 1642 and relates this development to Renaissance historiography and Elizabethan political theory.

First published in 1971. This volume explains and analyses the last plays of Shakespeare as dramatic structures. Beginning from the dark comedies, the author describes the ways in which Shakespeare was affected by the new techniques and possibilities for drama opened up by the innovations of the years after 1600, notably by the rise in children's companies. The main line of development of Shakespeare's dramatic skills is shown as leading from the dark comedies, through the late tragedies, to the last plays. A major part of the book is devoted to analyses of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and King Henry VIII.

First published in 1952. An invaluable introduction to Shakespeare, this book places Shakespeare's work and criticism against the background of Elizabethan life in its historical, social, political, religious, linguistic and literary aspects. Contents include: The Problem of Interpretation; Shakespeare at Work; Man and Society; Man and the Universe; The Inner Life.

A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. Its twelve chapters cover key topics (such as politics and gender) and provide reception histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer lively accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser, the Companion also provides an ideal introduction to the non-specialist.

At present, Emily Bronte's poetry is more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, the very uniqueness of her poems has made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poems written by Victorian women. Last Things seeks to reinstate Emily Bronte's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. It presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience of the world and seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. It develops Georges Bataille's insight that it doesn't matter whether Bronte had a mystical experience because she 'reached the very essence of such an experience'. Although the book does not discuss all of Bronte's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. For admirers of Wuthering Heights, Last Things will bring the concerns and methods of the novel into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

This book re-places Lamb - as reader, writer and friend - in the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s.It taps into current interest in 'romantic sociability', a close study of the affiliations of writers who used to be grouped as 'the Wordsworth circle' and 'the Keats circle'. This book makes valuable contribution to emerging critical studies of Lamb and his writings. It offers the first book-length study of Lamb's early works and their relationship to other Romantic writers. It discusses Lamb's friendship with key Romantic writers, including Coleridge and Wordsworth and how their relationships informed their works. It gives attention to allusive practices of the time and the development of the essay as a genre.This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.

This volume contains word-for-word commentaries on Pindar's Olympian Odes 3, 7, 12, 14. Emphasis is placed on the explanations of peculiarities of grammar and idiom, but due attention is paid to figures of style and problems of poetic structure. The interpretations proposed by the author - many of them which are new - are documented as fully, but at the same time as concisely, as possible. This documentation, which includes a critical examination of other views, has been made more easily accessible by detailed indexes. The poems discussed do not have special similarities or interrelationships. On the other hand, they may be considered representative of the poet's art. From this point of view, the present selection may serve as an introduction to the study of Pindar's work. Vol. II will contain commentaries on Olympians 1, 10, 11, Nemean 11, and Isthmian 2. A third volume on Pythians 1, 8, 10 is inteded to conclude the series.

A fresh examination of the four poems of the Cotton manuscript, arguing that they share a profound theological vision. Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are accomplished examples of four different literary genres and represent some of the finest poetry in Middle English. They are, by turns, fast and funny, powerfully dramatic, gentle and ironic, telling of painful bereavement and the terror of victims of disaster and violence, as well as the comic bewilderment of people entangled in alarmingly mysterious situations. The anonymous poet's evident delight in the pleasures and artistry of courtly life has led some readers to suggest that he was a gifted but complacent frequenter of courts, his attention dedicated to the wealthy and his sympathies to thepowerful, and moreover, that his poems pay the merest lipservice to religious observance. God and the Gawain-poet argues that, on the contrary, the poet's wide-ranging engagement with all human life explicitly acknowledgesall material creation as God's gift, revelling in its physicality, in bodily senses and movement and the ways a community celebrates itself. Dr Hatt shows how, in exhorting readers to recognize and respond to the narrative of divine gift, he appears as an energetic Christian poet and a humane and compassionate observer. Cecilia A. Hatt gained her D.Phil from Oxford University.

***Winner of the CCUE Book Prize 2012 ***
Fascinated by his own imagination, Coleridge secretly wrote that its characteristic blend of power and desire made him a "Daemon": a being superstitiously feared as "a something transnatural." "Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination" examines this simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge's poetry and the fabric of his philosophy. In a reading that spans the breadth of Coleridge's achievement, through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, this book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel." Gregory Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange, in a study that unfolds into an essay on poetry, spirituality, and the drama of human becoming.

The foremost critical edition of the Greek lyric poets: Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides and Corinna, and other minor poets, and songs and fragments.

"Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse" explores literary modernism through the lens of cultural history. Focusing on the intersection of scientific and religious discourse in the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer, Lara Vetter argues that a peculiarly modern spiritual understanding of science appealed to modernist writers as a way of negotiating the perceived threats to a radically unstable body. Analyzing literary and extraliterary writing, this study offers articulate conclusions on how these writers came to construct their own worldviews in response to the arts, science and religion of their time.

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion offers a challenge to the Blake establishment. By placing some of Blake's early prophetic works in startlingly new historical contexts (most provocatively those of female conduct and pornography) a very different image of the radical Blake emerges. The book shows what can be achieved when a challenging methodology, feminist historicism, is brought to bear on a canonical writer and on now canonized interpretations of his work.

Series Information:
Routledge Literary Sourcebooks

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

Deeply involved with Irish culture and history, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest poets writing in the last two centuries. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook provides essential help for readers who wish to learn more about his powerful, haunting poems.
Considering Yeats's early, dreamily evocative poems as well as his passionate, tension-ridden later work, Michael O'Neill offers a refreshingly clear discussion of:
*contexts - through an invaluable, accessible overview, a detailed chronology and contemporary documents revealing Yeats's understanding of his vocation as a poet;
*interpretations - through helpfully introduced extracts from criticism of Yeats's work, ranging from early responses through to modern critical texts;
*key poems - in a section where insightful commentary accompanies the full annotated text of many of Yeats's major poems;
*further reading - to guide those interested in additional study.
The Sourcebook is ideal for those new to Yeats's poetry or those who wish to look deeper into its workings, its reception and the contexts from which it emerged.

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.