Detailed textual analysis of the tales by the Miller, Nun's Priest, the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, as well as the General Prologue invites you to sharpen your critical faculties, extend your knowledge and engage with the text itself in order to fully appreciate the work of this fascinating, complex and surprisingly modern writer. Whether you consider yourself an expert or a student, this study has something for you as it demonstrates the various approaches which can be used to learn about style, structure, multiple voices and the key themes of Chaucer's work. It offers a careful support and thoughtful framework upon which to base your own analysis and challenging you to form your own ideas and opinions.

Recent scholarship in nineteenth-century literary studies consistently recognizes the profound importance of religion, even as it marginalizes the topic. There are few, if any, challenging yet manageable introductions to religion and literature in the long-nineteenth century, a factor that serves to fuel scholars' neglect of theological issues. This book aims to show how religion, specifically Christianity, is integral to the literature and culture of this period. It provides close readings of popular texts and integrates these with accessible explanations of complex religious ideas. Written by two scholars who have published widely on religion and literature, the book offers a detailed grounding in the main religious movements of the period 1750-1914. The dominant traditions of High Anglicanism, Tractarianism, Evangelicalism, and Roman Catholicism are contextualized by preceding chapters addressing dissenting culture (primarily Presbyterianism, Methodism, Unitarianism and Quakerism), and the question of secularization is considered in the light of the diversity and capacity for renewal within the Christian faith. Throughout the book the authors untangle theological and church debates in a manner that highlights the privileged relationship between religion and literature in the period. The book also gives readers a language to approach and articulate their own "religious" readings of texts, texts that are often concerned with slippery subjects, such as the divine, the non-material and the nature of religious experience. Refusing to shut down religious debate by offering only narrow or fixed definitions of Christian traditions, the book also questions the demarcation of sacred materialfrom secular, as well as connecting the vitality of religion in the period to a broader literary culture.

Consuming Keats explores the impact of John Keats on authors and artists, from the poet's death in 1821 to the end of the First World War. The study examines the work of authors including Shelley, Browning, Wilde, Hardy and Thomas Hall Caine, as well as the celebrated artists Holman Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, and other lesser-known figures. The study also includes tributes to Keats by women authors and artists, such as: Christina Rossetti, Alice Meynell and Jessie Marion King. The interdisciplinary approach provides a unique and comprehensive analysis of Keats's cultural heritage.

The Robert Browning volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series is the first one-volume fully annotated edition of Browning to offer a wide selection of work written throughout Browning's career, from the very first poem he published, Pauline, to Asolando, the volume that was published on the day that he died. The text chosen is, wherever possible, the text of the poem as it was first published by Browning himself, and as a consequence the volume also constitutes a kind of biography. It reveals a poet who began as a bold experimentalist, and who continued to experiment throughout a writing career of more than fifty years. Browning is best known for his dramatic monologues, and the dramatic monologues are fully represented in this volume, but he was also a narrative poet, a poet of philosophical reflection, and a poet who fashioned an extraordinary variety of lyric measures. This volume reveals Browning as a far more versatile poet than he is often taken to be. There are two important prose items, an essay on Shelley and a letter to Ruskin which clarify Browning's intellectual stance. The Notes include brief headnotes to each poem followed by detailed annotation. Browning is often a difficult poet, and the notes are designed to assist the reader to arrive at a full understanding of the poems. The volume also includes a general introduction and a detailed chronology of Browning's life and times.

This book examines the influence of American poetry on Seamus Heaney's achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career, including his appointments in Berkeley and Harvard. Beginning with an examination of Heaney's education at Queen's University, this study presents comparative close readings which explore the influence of five American poets he read during this period: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Laverty demonstrates how Heaney returned to several of these poets in response to difficulty and to consolidate later aesthetic developments. Heaney's ambivalent critical treatment of Sylvia Plath is investigated, as is his partial misreading of Bishop, who is understood today more sensitively than in her lifetime. This study also probes the reasons for his elision of other prominent American writers, making this the first comprehensive assessment of American influence on Heaney's poetry.

Sylvia Plath is one of the defining voices in twentieth-century poetry. This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath's four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and include many of her most celebrated works, such as 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Wuthering Heights'.

Pastoralist traditions have long been extraordinarily important to the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the
region of western India called Maharashtra. The Marathi-language oral literature of the Dhangar shepherds of
Maharashtra is not only one of the most important elements of their own traditional cultural life, but also a treasure of
world literature. This volume presents two lively and well-crafted examples of the ovi, a genre typical of the oral literature of Dhangars. The two ovis in the volume narrate the stories of Biroba and Dhuloba, two of the most important gods of Dhangar shepherds. Each of the ovis tells an elaborate story of the birth of the god--a miraculous and complicated process in both cases--and of the struggles each one goes through in order to find and win his bride. The extensive introduction provides a literary analysis of the ovis and discusses what they reveal about the cosmology, geography, society, administrative structures, and economy of their performers' world, and about the performers views of pastoralistsand women.

Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems of the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors' correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

The poet of the Odyssey was a seriously flawed genius. He had a wonderfully inventive imagination, a gift for pictorial detail and for introducing naturalistic elements into epic dialogue, and a grand architectural plan for the poem. He was also a slapdash artist, often copying verses from the Iliad or from himself without close attention to their suitability. With various possible ways of telling the story bubbling up in his mind, he creates a narrative marked by constant inconsistency of detail. He is a fluent composer who delights in prolonging his tale with subsidiary episodes, yet his deployment of the epic language is often inept and sometimes simply unintelligible. The Making of the Odyssey is a penetrating study of the background, composition, and artistry of the Homeric Odyssey. Martin West places the poem in its late seventh-century context in relation to the Iliad and other poetry of the time. He also investigates the traditions that lie behind it: the origins of the figure of Odysseus, and folk tales such as those of the One-eyed Ogre and the Husband's Return.

"Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud" considers how the crisis of the lyric subject in the middle of the nineteenth century in France is a direct response to the aesthetic principles of Parnassian poetry, which dominated the second half of the century much more than critics often think. The poets considered here rebel against the strict confines of traditional and contemporary poetry and attempt to create radically new discursive practices. Specifically, the close readings of poems apply recent studies of subjectivity in poetry and focus on the works of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to see how each subverts the dominant tradition of French poetry in a unique way. Whereas previous studies considered isolated aspects of each poet's lyric subject, "Leaving Parnassus" shows that the situation of the lyric is a source of subversion throughout the poets' entire work, and as such it is crucial to our full understanding of their respective innovations.

"Historicizing Blake" puts Blake back into the cultural context of his times. These essays by both established and younger scholars re-address Blake's contemporary milieu after the neglect of ten years of post-structuralist, reader-orientated, methodology. By employing notions of history wider than the purely 'literary', and featuring an important new essay by the period's foremost subcultural historian, lain McCalman, "Historicizing Blake" represents a significant contribution towards the re-historicizing of Romanticism.

Conversations with Dana Gioia is the first collection of interviews with the internationally known poet and public intellectual, covering every stage of his busy, polymathic career. Dana Gioia (b. 1950) has made many contributions to contemporary American literature and culture, including but not limited to crafting a personal poetic style suited to the age; leading the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative through New Formalism; walloping the "intellectual ghetto" of American poetry through his epochal article "Can Poetry Matter?"; helping American poetry move forward by organizing influential conferences; providing public service and initiating nationwide arts projects such as Poetry Out Loud through his leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts; and editing twenty best-selling literary anthologies widely used in American classrooms. Taken together, the twenty-two collected interviews increase our understanding of Gioia's poetry and poetics, offer aesthetic pleasure in themselves, and provide a personal encounter with a writer who has made poetry matter. The book presents the actual voice of Dana Gioia, who speaks of his personal and creative life and articulates his unique vision of American culture and poetry.

This series contains poetry and prose anthologies composed of writers from across the English-speaking world. Parts of Songs of Ourselves Volume 2 are set for study in Cambridge IGCSE (R), O Level and Cambridge International AS & A Level Literature in English syllabuses. Following on from the popular Songs of Ourselves 1, the anthology includes work from over 100 poets, combining famous names - such as William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Les Murray - with lesser-known voices. This helps students to create fresh and interesting contrasts as they explore themes that range from nature to war.

In this 2nd edition of her classic work Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Isobel Armstrong provides:

• a new preface that notes key directions in Victorian poetry criticism the turn to form, the turn to affect and the emotions, cosmopolitan and global impulses, and the attention to optical culture
• an afterword devoted to the Fin de Siecle, discussing Michael Field and Vernon Lee, the late epics of Swinburne and Morris, and a selection of Hardy lyrics
• a full bibliography for the last twenty years, taking into account in particular the work of Herbert Tucker, Yopie Prins, Cornelia Pearsall, Catherine Robson, Mike Sanders, Danny Karlin, Ana Vadillo and Marion Thain.

Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid contributes to our understanding of the Roman poet Ovid, the Renaissance writer Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions through history. It examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, as well as the long tradition of reception that had begun with Ovid himself, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past, and especially his relation to Virgil, gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works. Throughout his career Milton thinks through and with Ovid, whose stories and figures inform his exploration of the limits and possibilities of creativity, change, and freedom. Examining this specific relation between two very individual and different authors, Kilgour also explores the forms and meaning of creative imitation. Intertextuality was not only central to the two writers' poetic practices but helped shape their visions of the world. While many critics seek to establish how Milton read Ovid, Kilgour debates the broader question of why does considering how Milton read Ovid matter? How do our readings of this relation change our understanding of both Milton and Ovid; and does it tell us about how traditions are changed and remade through time?

In the mid-eleventh century, secular Byzantine poetry attained a hitherto unseen degree of wit, vividness, and personal involvement, chiefly exemplified in the poetry of Christophoros Mitylenaios, Ioannes Mauropous, and Michael Psellos. This is the first volume to consider this poetic activity as a whole, critically reconsidering modern assumptions about Byzantine poetry, and focusing on Byzantine conceptions of the role of poetry in society. By providing a detailed account of the various media through which poetry was presented to its readers, and by tracing the initial circulation of poems, this volume takes an interest in the Byzantine reader and his/her reading habits and strategies, allowing aspects of performance and visual representation, rarely addressed, to come to the fore. It also examines the social interests that motivated the composition of poetry, establishing a connection with the extraordinary social mobility of the time. Self-representative strategies are analyzed against the background of an unstable elite struggling to find moral justification, which allows the study to raise the question of patronage, examine the discourse used by poets to secure material rewards, and explain the social dynamics of dedicatory epigrams. Finally, gift exchange is explored as a medium that underlines the value of poetry and confirms the exclusive nature of intellectual friendship.

This edited collection explores the work of highly awarded and twice American Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin. Spanning Merwin's early career, his mid-career success, his Hawaiian epic, his eco-poetry, his lesser-known later poetry and the influence of Buddhism on his work, the volume offers new perspectives on Merwin as a major poet. Exploring his works across the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection presents Merwin as a necessary and contemporary poet. It emphasizes contemporary readings of Merwin as an environmental advocate, showing how his poetry seeks to help each reader re-establish an intimate relationship with the natural world. It also highlights how Merwin's work presents our place in history as a pivotal moment of transition into a new era of international cooperation. This volume both celebrates his life and writing and takes scholarship on his work forward into the new century.

This anthology is a new reading of the contemporary poetries. The largest challenge facing Liberal Arts and Sciences today is how to deal with the rapidly changing and increasingly complex world that all the phenomena under the label globalization have created. This world is 'multi'- many things: cultural, linguistic, ethnic, racial, etc. Over the last few decades, on a daily basis, some 'we' or another has found itself face to face with not the other but with many others, with not one language practice, but many. Educating for this world is the most pressing challenge we face. The raison d'etre for Poetry and Pedagogy is the belief that poetry is the linguistic laboratory of the times in which one lives. It is the genre in which our habitual language practices are daily stretched, challenged and reconfigured. The collection gathers together the work of a number of scholars, poets, and teachers on the challenges and productive possibilities that arise when teaching contemporary writing.

For the first time in scholarship, this essay collection interprets modernity through the literary micro-genres of the aphorism, the epigram, the maxim, and the fragment. Situating Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde as forerunners of modern aphoristic culture, the collection analyses the relationship between aphoristic consciousness and literary modernism in the expanded purview of the long twentieth century, through the work of a wide range of authors, including Samuel Beckett, Max Beerbohm, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Mansfield, and Stevie Smith. From the romantic fragment to the tweet, Aphoristic Modernity offers a compelling exploration of the short form's pervasive presence both as a standalone artefact and as part of a larger textual and cultural matrix.

This lively student compendium presents a comprehensive selection of the key critical views of Chaucer in the twentieth century. Stimulating introductions and editorial comment enable students to enter into dialogue with critical opinion, and thereby with Chaucer's writings, whilst the juxtaposition of past and present criticism equips them with a sense of historical perspective.

A preliminary chapter addresses the growth of Chaucer criticism over the centuries, and the main developments of the twentieth century, incorporating a range of brief extracts. The structure of the volume then reflects the three major divisions of Chaucer's writing:
The Dream Vision poetry
Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales

Linking discussions introduce the main themes and critical issues of these works. Each section then presents different seminal approaches. For the "Canterbury Tales," for example, students can chart their paths through early allegorical readings, iconographic studies, New Historical approaches, and gender theory. In this way, the volume furnishes the reader with a broader critical repertoire and encourages independence of thought, but also offers a unified discussion of Chaucer's work.

Brink's provocative biography shows that Spenser was not the would-be court poet whom Karl Marx's described as 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'. In this readable and informative account, Spenser is depicted as the protege of a circle of London clergymen, who expected him to take holy orders. Brink shows that the young Spenser was known to Alexander Nowell, author of Nowell's Catechism and Dean of St. Paul's. Significantly revising the received biography, Brink argues that that it was Harvey alone who orchestrated Familiar Letters (1580). He used this correspondence to further his career and invented the portrait of Spenser as his admiring disciple. Contextualising Spenser's life by comparisons with Shakespeare and Sir Walter Ralegh, Brink shows that Spenser shared with Sir Philip Sidney an allegiance to the early modern chivalric code. His departure for Ireland was a high point, not an exile. -- .

This collection of previously unpublished poems offers the author's take on squabbling neighbours, off-kilter lovers, would-be hangers-on, and the loneliness of a man afflicted with acute powers of observation. The tone is gritty and amusing, spiralling out towards a cock-eyed wisdom.

In Dickinson Unbound, Alexandra Socarides takes readers on a journey through the actual steps and stages of Emily Dickinson's creative process. In chapters that deftly balance attention to manuscripts, readings of poems, and a consideration of literary and material culture, Socarides takes up each of the five major stages of Dickinson's writing career: copying poems onto folded sheets of stationery; inserting and embedding poems into correspondence; sewing sheets together to make fascicles; scattering loose sheets; and copying lines on often torn and discarded pieces of household paper. In so doing, Socarides reveals a Dickinsonian poetics starkly different from those regularly narrated by literary history. Here, Dickinson is transformed from an elusive poetic genius whose poems we have interpreted in a vacuum into an author who employed surprising (and, at times, surprisingly conventional) methods to wholly new effect. Dickinson Unbound gives us a Dickinson at once more accessible and more complex than previously imagined. As the first authoritative study of Dickinson's material and compositional methods, this book not only transforms our ways of reading Dickinson, but advocates for a critical methodology that insists on the study of manuscripts, composition, and material culture for poetry of the nineteenth century and thereafter.

The presentation of Tennyson's personal and poetic development is supplemented by an introduction, brief biographical sketches of more than 30 of his friends, and maps of relevant areas in Lincolnshire and the Isle of Wight.