This book examines intersections of poetry and performance during the British Poetry Revival. Its investigations are centered on four specific performance events: The First International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965; Denise Riley's first public reading at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1977; Eric Mottram's Pollock Record; and Allen Fisher's Blood Bone Brain. Drawing upon a range of archival resources, recordings, and interviews, Juha Virtanen offers engaging and detailed "archaeological" accounts and analyses of these largely unexamined events as well as the potential dialogues between them. The appendices of the book also feature previously unpublished interviews with both Fisher and Riley. This book is essential reading for poetry and performance enthusiasts, particularly those interested in innovative British Poetry.

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.

Key Features: * Study methods * Introduction to the text * Summaries with critical notes * Themes and techniques * Textual analysis of key passages * Author biography * Historical and literary background * Modern and historical critical approaches * Chronology * Glossary of literary terms

The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Groeber in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.

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.

Using a framework based on J. L. Austin's understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer's work on how things are done with words in Milton's and Blake's poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake's epic poem Milton. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard's Song, Blake's Milton is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse, an instant in which Milton is the protagonist, and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake's brief epic for the first time. For scholars, this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about Milton. For the common reader, it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called 'one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry'.

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.

Shelley and Vitality reassesses Percy Shelley's engagement with early nineteenth-century science and medicine, specifically his knowledge and use of theories on the nature of life presented in the debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence. Sharon Ruston offers new biographical information to link Shelley to a medical circle and explores the ways in which Shelley exploits the language and ideas of vitality. Major canonical works are reconsidered to address Shelley's politicised understanding of contemporary scientific discourse.

The New Woman sought vast improvements in Victorian culture that would enlarge educational, professional, and domestic opportunities. Although New Women resist ready classification or appraisal as a monolithic body, they tended to share many of the same beliefs and objectives aimed at improving female conditions. While novels about the iconoclastic New Woman have garnered much interest in recent decades, poetry from the cultural and literary figure has received considerably less attention. Yet the very issues that propelled New Woman fiction are integral to the poetry of the fin de siecle. This book - the first in-depth account on the subject - enriches our knowledge of exceptionally gifted writers, including Mathilde Blind, M. E. Coleridge, Olive Custance, and Edith Nesbit. It focuses on their long-neglected British verse, analyzing its treatment of crucial matters on both the personal and public level to provide the attention the poetry so richly deserves.

This volume explores 'the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge' (Virginia Woolf): his poems and prose, their sources, interpretation and reception; his life, troubled marriage and fatherhood, conversation, changing intellectual contexts and legacy. Major entries cover such canonical works as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, 'Kubla Khan', the 'conversation poems' and Biographia Literaria. But a fuller understanding of Coleridge must embrace many lesser-known poems - lyrics, satire, comical squibs. The prose - critical, philosophical, political, religious - ranges from his early radical writings to the more conservative On the Constitution of the Church and State, his influential Shakespeare lectures, and the vast resource of the notebooks. Coleridge read widely throughout his life and engaged extensively with the work of, among many others, Milton, Fielding, Berkeley, Priestley, Kant, Schelling. One of his most important relationships was with William Wordsworth. Another was with Sara Hutchinson. Entries trace Coleridge's changing reputation, from brilliant young activist to the 'Sage of Highgate' to the later apostle of the theories of the imagination and of Practical Criticism. Other topics covered include opium, plagiarism, the French Revolution, Pantisocracy, Unitarianism, and the Salutation and Cat tavern.

This is the first comprehensive study in English of one of the most important bodies of verse in European literature. Seventeenth-century Spanish poetry represents the culmination of a rich Renaissance tradition, and Professor Terry sets out to make this accessible not only to Hispanists but to readers of English, French and Italian poetry, with which it had many points of contact. He deals both with the major poets - Gongora, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz - and with the impressively large number of good minor poets, from the Argensolas to Bocangel and Soto de Rojas, whose work is still relatively little read. Drawing upon recent developments in literary criticism as well as paying close attention to individual poems, the book discusses a wide range of issues including the re working of classical and Renaissance models, the importance of rhetoric, and the relationship between author, poem and reader.

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.

Revolutionary thinking at the end of the eighteenth century prompted major English writers to probe the riddle of human consciousness and the ways in which it might differ from "Being" in a divine or universal sense. In the first of two studies, John Beer traces this question in writings by Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and the impact of their ideas on successors such as Keats, De Quincey, Byron and the Shelleys; relevance to later figures such as the Cambridge Apostles and Tennyson is also discussed.

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.

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.

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.

This book will create greater public awareness of some recent exciting findings in the formal study of poetry. The last influential volume on the subject, Rhythm and Meter , edited by Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, appeared fifteen years ago. Since that time, a number of important theoretical developments have taken place, which have led to new approaches to the analysis of meter. This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. In terms of empirical coverage, the papers focus on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese, Somali, Old Norse, Latin, and Greek. Thus, the collection is truly international in its scope. The volume also contains diverse theoretical approaches that are brought together for the first time, including Optimality Theory (Kiparsky, Hammond), other constraint-based approaches (Friedberg, Hall, Scherr), the Quantitative approach to verse (Tarlinskaja, Friedberg, Hall, Scherr, Youmans) associated with the Russian school of metrics, a mora-based approach (Cole and Miyashita, Fitzgerald), a semantic-pragmatic approach (Fabb), and an alternative generative approach developed in Estonia (M. Lotman and M. K. Lotman). The book will be of interest to both linguists interested in stress and speech rhythm, constraint systems, phrasing, and phonology-syntax interaction and poetry, as well as to students of poetry interested in the connection between language and literature.

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.

In her book The Regenerate Lyric, Elisa New presents a major revision of the accepted historical account of Emerson as the source of the American poetic tradition. New challenges the majority opinion that Emerson not only overthrew New England religious orthodoxy but founded a poetic tradition that fundamentally renounced that orthodoxy in favor of a secular, Romantic approach. She contends that Emerson's reinvention of the religion as a species of poetry is tested and found wanting by the very poetic innovators whom Emerson addressed and that a counter-tradition is evident in his major heirs--Whitman, Dickinson, Crane, Stevens, Frost, and Lowell. Indeed, Emerson's own poetry failed in many ways to live up to his views and instead revealed an inherent paradox: that coopting of religion by a poetic theory alienates religion from its life principle--theology--and disables the poem as well.

The poetry of the mid- and late-eighteenth century has long been regarded as essentially private and apolitical. Dustin Griffin argues in this study that the poets of the period were actually addressing the great issues of national life--rebellion at home, imperial wars abroad, an expanding commercial empire, and an emerging new British national identity. He also reveals that poets such as Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Cowper were engaged in the century-long debate about the nature of true patriotism.

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.

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.