African-American expressive arts draw upon multiple traditions of formal experimentation in the service of social change. Within these traditions, Jennifer D. Ryan demonstrates that black women have created literature, music, and political statements signifying some of the most incisive and complex elements of modern American culture. "Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History" examines the jazz-influenced work of five twentieth-century African-American women poets: Sherley Anne Williams, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Wanda Coleman, and Harryette Mullen. These writers' engagements with jazz-based compositional devices represent a new strand of radical black poetics, while their renditions of local-to-global social critique sketch the outlines of a transnational feminism.

Responding to the reassertion of orality in the twentieth century in the form of electronic media such as the telegraph, film, video, computers, and television, this unique volume traces the roots of classical rhetoric in the modern world. Welch begins by changing the current view of classical rhetoric by reinterpreting the existing texts into fluid language contexts -- a change that requires relinquishing the formulaic tradition, acquiring an awareness of translation issues, and constructing a classical rhetoric beginning with the Fifth Century B.C. She continues with a discussion of the adaptability of this material to new language situations, including political, cultural, and linguistic change, providing it with much of its power as well as its longevity. The book concludes that classical rhetoric can readily address any situation since it focuses not only on critical stances toward discourse that already exists, but also presents elaborate theories for the production of new discourse.

This book is the first comprehensive cultural and historical introduction to modern Georgia. It covers the country region by region, taking the form of a literary journey through the transition from Soviet Georgia to the modern independent nation state. Peter Nasmyth traveled extensively in Georgia over a period of 5 years, and his lively and topical survey charts the nation's remarkable cultural and historical journey to statehood. This authoritative, lively and perceptive book is based on hundreds of interviews with modern Georgians, from country priests to black marketeers. Georgia: Mountains and Honour will be essential reading for anyone interested in this fascinating region, as well as those requiring an insight into the life after the collapse of the old Soviet order in the richest and most dramatic of the former republics.

The poetry of Edmund Spenser is among the most wide-ranging and allusive ever written. This work offers a detailed literary guide to the life, works, and influence of one of England's greatest poets, and summarizes the scholarship in this area since the publication of the Spenser Variorum 50 years ago. Comprehensive in scope and international in coverage, this work contains over 700 alphabetical entries by 422 contributors from 20 countries. Entries fall into three categories: synoptic essays on individual poems and on the major biographical, historical and social issues, articles providing a full collection of information on a particular topic and its relation to the tradition and articles providing information relevant to the current state of Spenser studies. Throughout the work, Spenser's place in the English literary tradition is fully explored, and in particular his relationship to the minor Elizabethan poets is stressed. The volume also examines Spenser's reputation in other countries, such as France and Japan, and the effects of his influence on writers world-wide.

No fewer than 223 verses in Proverbs appear two times (79 sets), three times (15 sets), or even four times (5 sets) in identical or slightly altered form-more than 24% of the book. Heim analyzes all of these, presenting them in delineated Hebrew lines and in English translation. Where appropriate, the translations are followed by textual notes that discuss uncertainties regarding the textual witnesses (textual criticism) and explore lexical, grammatical, and syntactical problems. Heim also analyzes the way the parallelism in each verse of a variant set has been constructed, presenting diagrams and tables with columns that highlight the corresponding similarities and differences among repeated verses. Key to this investigation is the search for links between the variants and their surrounding verses, such as repetitions of sound and sense. Heim shows that most variant repetitions result from skillful poetic creativity. Reconstruction of the editorial and creative poetic process highlights what poets did, how they did it, and why they did it. He develops criteria for determining the direction of borrowing between the verses and demonstrates that the phenomenon of variant repetition is an editorial concern that operates on the level of the book as a whole. He develops and refines a range of interpretive techniques and skills, arrives at fresh interpretations, and shows that ancient proverbial wisdom is relevant to modern societies. This study sheds new light on the nature of biblical poetry and on the methods and virtues best suited for its study. While specific to the book of Proverbs in the first instance, the findings in this study apply to poetry elsewhere. Three fundamental insights should inform future work on poetry: the creative combination of repetition with variation is the very essence of poetry; what has been written with imagination should be read with imagination; imaginative interpretation values the normal features of poetic expression and celebrates the truly unusual.

Rudyard Kipling has been one of the most loved and the most loathed of English writers. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life is a study of the forces and influences that shaped his work--including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of Empire, and the deaths of two of his children--and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him, but could never ignore him.

This edited collection brings together scholars from across the world, including France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the USA and India, to offer a truly international perspective on the global reception of Shakespeare's Sonnets from the 18th century to the present. Global Shakespeare has never been so local and familiar as it is today. The translation, appropriation and teaching of Shakespeare's plays across the world have been the subject of much important recent work in Shakespeare studies, as have the ethics of Shakespeare's globalization. Within this discussion, however, the Sonnets are often overlooked. This book offers a new global history of the Sonnets, including the first substantial study of their translation and of their performance in theatre, music and film. It will appeal to anyone interested in the reception of the Sonnets, and of Shakespeare across the world.

So many male critics have attacked Ireland's contemporary women poets -- whether through hostile reviews, outright silence, or condescending praise -- that the impression has been created that very few men appreciate these women's poetry. Gonzalez has produced the first book ever to appear in Irish studies in which men make it a point to praise literature written by Irish women. Included are two essays studying the structure of Eavan Boland's poetry sequences, some close readings of Medbh McGuckian's most challenging poems, and the first formal scholarly pieces ever devoted exclusively to Paula Meehan, Rita Ann Higgins, and Mary O'Malley. Additional chapters treat the works of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.

Women poets have made substantial contributions to Irish literature, particularly in the last few decades. However, so many male critics have attacked Ireland's women poets, whether through hostile reviews, outright silence, or condescending praise, that the impression has been created that very few men appreciate these women's poetry. With some notable exceptions, most academic appraisals by men have been less than enthusiastic. Many women also point to the treatment these poets receive in various anthologies, which typically include only token portions of literature written by women. In his book, Gonzalez has responded to these slights by offering a forum to a significant number of men to express their highest praise for Ireland's women poets.

Until now, no book has ever appeared in Irish studies in which men make it a point to praise literature written by Irish women. In this book, Gonzalez includes two essays on each of Ireland's best-known women poets, Eavan Boland, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, and Medbh McGuckian. Three other essays are the first formal scholarly pieces entirely dedicated to Paula Meehan, Rita Ann Higgins, or Mary O'Malley. In his pioneering effort, Gonzalez helps establish the place of these contemporary women poets in the Irish literary canon, corrects the popular misconception that male critics are unresponsive to their works, and encourages further exploration of Irish women poets by male scholars and critics.

Responding to the reassertion of orality in the twentieth century in the form of electronic media such as the telegraph, film, video, computers, and television, this unique volume traces the roots of classical rhetoric in the modern world. Welch begins by changing the current view of classical rhetoric by reinterpreting the existing texts into fluid language contexts -- a change that requires relinquishing the formulaic tradition, acquiring an awareness of translation issues, and constructing a classical rhetoric beginning with the Fifth Century B.C. She continues with a discussion of the adaptability of this material to new language situations, including political, cultural, and linguistic change, providing it with much of its power as well as its longevity. The book concludes that classical rhetoric can readily address any situation since it focuses not only on critical stances toward discourse that already exists, but also presents elaborate theories for the production of new discourse.

Traditionally literary modernism has been seen as a movement marked by transcendent epiphanies, episodes of estrangement, and a privileging of the extraordinary. Yet modernist writings often take great pains to describe the material, seemingly insignificant details of daily life. Modernismand the Ordinary upends our perceived notions of the period's literature as it recognizes just how pivotal commonplace activities are to modernist aesthetics.
Through pointed readings of prose and poetry from both the U. S. and abroad, Liesl Olson highlights the variety of ways modernist writers represented the quotidian details of modern life, even during times of political crisis and war. Run of the mill experiences like walking to work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress were often resistant to shock, and these daily actions presented a counter-force to the aesthetic of heightened affect with which modernism is often associated. In a series of persuasively argued chapters, we see how the ordinary operates in its many modernist manifestations: the minutiae of list-making and the decidedly unheroic qualities of Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses; Virginia Woolf's rendering of the ordinary as an affective experience in Mrs. Dalloway; the retreat into daily routine as a refuge from the tumult of World War II in Gertrude Stein's Mrs.Reynolds; Wallace Steven's conception of the commonplace as rooted in pragmatist philosophy; and how Beckett and Proust are simultaneously compelled and repelled by the banalities of modern life. These works are read alongside the ideas of philosophers such as William James, Henri Bergson, and Henri Lefebvre to illustrate how these artists responded to the difficulty of representing the mundane without making it transcendent.
A trenchant, richly textured monograph, Modernism and the Ordinary reveals how the non-transformative power of everyday experiences-what Virginia Woolf called the "cotton wool of daily life"-exerts a profound influence on the epoch-defining art of some of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers.

Why did no one read Sonnet 18 for over one hundred years? What traumatic memories did Sonnet 111 conjure up for Charles Dickens? Which Sonnet did Wilfred Owen find particularly offensive on the WW1 battlefront? What kind of love does Sonnet 116 celebrate and why? Filling a surprising gap in Shakespeare studies, this book offers a challenging new reception history of the Sonnets and explores their belated entry into the Shakespeare canon. Jane Kingsley-Smith reveals the fascinating cultural history of individual Sonnets, identifying those which were particularly influential and exploring why they rose to prominence. This is a highly original study which argues that we should redirect our attention away from the story that the Sonnets tell as a sequence, to the fascinating afterlife of individual Shakespeare Sonnets.

Poetry. Winner of the 1991 American Book Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award. "Selected by Denise Levertov for the National Poetry Series, this generally strong first collection, often set in the San Francisco Bay Area or in the wilderness, showcases Centolella's gift for finding wonder in the quotidian, for recovering 'the taken-for-granted.' In 'Task,' the poet writes, 'It's not a savior the world needs / but a savoring spirit, a way to relish what's already / begun to vanish,' and his best work celebrates the beauty, evanescence and inevitable grief of mortal life. An elegy for his Lebanese grandmother, 'Sito,' is especially moving, as is 'Ossi dei morti' (bones of the dead), about the Italian sweet so named: 'It's dark and bittersweet, / this chocolate marrow, this brief time / people call a life. We bite into it / hard. We do this together. / A local cure for sorrow.' At their least interesting, the poems suffer from pedestrianism and an abrupt, gunshot style--e.g., in 'The Garden': 'The closer to terra firma one is / the more firma one feels. After a long hike, I stink, / therefore I am'"--Publishers Weekly.

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett's knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, this book traces in forensic detail the development of Beckett's understanding of painting in particular, as that understanding developed from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In doing so it demonstrates that Beckett's thinking about art and aesthetics radically changes in the course of his life, often directly responding to the intellectual and historical contexts in which he found himself. Moving fluently between art history, philosophy, literary analysis and historical context, Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts rethinks the trajectory of Beckett's career, and reorients his relationship to modernism, late modernism and the avant-gardes.

'Smith': a reader's guide to the poetry of Michael Donaghy is the first substantial critical work to be written on one of the UK's best-loved poets. Donaghy, a hugely popular, influential and much-loved figure in the UK poetry scene, died tragically early at the age of fifty in 2004. In fifty short essays accompanying fifty of Donaghy's best poems, his friend and editor Don Paterson makes the argument for Donaghy to be recognised as one of the greatest poets of recent years, and author of some of the most powerful, complex, moving and memorable poems to have been written in our lifetime. Unusually for a work of criticism, his commentary combines sharp and witty analysis of Donaghy's poems with biographical sketch and personal reminiscence, setting Donaghy's work in both a literary and a human context. This book coincides with the tenth anniversary of Donaghy's death, and the publication of the new paperback edition of his Collected Poems.

As an exceptionally long-lived author (1588-1679) whose protracted development, late appearance in print, subsequent muzzling, and profound notoriety raise fascinating questions about how, when, and to what effect his thinking exerted an impact as he sought to transform an entire culture, Hobbes supplies the ideal focus for a study of cultural transmission in early modern England. Ranging from Jonson to Rochester and including several critically neglected figures, select poetic contemporaries variously illuminate the scope of Hobbes's writing and the reach of his influence, in turn shedding diverse lights on the nature of their own work.

This work explores an aspect of Yeats's writing largely ignored until now: namely, his wide-ranging absorption with Coleridge. Matthew Gibson explores the consistent and densely woven allusions to Coleridge in Yeats's prose and poetry, often in conjunction with other Romantic figures, arguing that the earlier poet provided him with both a model of philosopher--"the sage"--and an interpretation of metaphysical ideas which were to have resounding effect on his later poetry, and upon his writing of A Vision.

By identifying a pervasive cultivation of attention as a perceptual and cognitive state in eighteenth-century poetry, this book explores overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention.

Robert Southey's preoccupation with the presumed danger of admitting Catholics to Parliament, following the Irish Act of Union, has always been an embarrassment to his admirers. Stuart Andrews, in "Robert Southey," ""argues that the Poet Laureate's denunciation of global Catholicism is essential to understanding his life, works, and times. On this issue Southey was absolutely consistent--from his first visit to Lisbon in 1795 to his "Colloquies" published in 1829. Echoes of the debate have faded, but Southey's partisan rhetoric reflects its intensity and reveals much about the religious culture and concern for English identity in this stormy period

This book deals with some (fragmentary) poems of Alcaeus, Archilochus, Hipponax and Stesichorus. The choice of the poems was determined by external factors: all of them are written on papyrus and were first published during the last few decades. After the first edition the fragments were discussed by many scholars, mainly in periodicals. The authors of this volume have assembled the results of this scholarly work and used it as a foundation for a carefully contituted text and an extensive overall commentary. In this way the poems will be more easily accessible than they were hitherto.

Poets writing in nineteenth-century Britain participated in a burgeoning culture of literary celebrity in which readers responded to writers with powerful feelings of fascination, desire, love or horror. Though critical treatments of the period often characterize the era's most artistically ambitious poets as preferring a lasting future fame to contemporary popularity, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity reveals that a sophisticated, strategic and fascinated engagement with new modes of fame and new kinds of fandom was central to these poets' experiments with literary form. The book offers new readings of both Romantic and Victorian texts, treating Byron, Keats, Shelley, Landon and Barrett Browning. Focusing on the exchanges between writers and their passionate readers, this study links the performative operation of language in poetic practice with the array of novel cultural practices through which celebrity is created and sustained.

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.