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.

The romance or chivalric epic was the most popular form of literature in Renaissance Italy. This book shows how it owed its appeal to a successful fusion of traditional, medieval tales of Charlemagne and Arthur with the newer cultural themes developed by the revival of interest in classical antiquity which constitutes the key to Renaissance culture.

The force of example was a distinctive determiner of Roman identity. However, examples always rely upon the response of an audience, and are dependent upon context. Even where the example presented is positive, we cannot always suppress any negative associations it may also carry. In this study of the representation of certain central characters in Silius Italicus' Punica, Ben Tipping considers the virtues and vices they embody, their status as exemplars, and the process by which Silius as epic poet heroizes, demonizes, and establishes models. Tipping argues that example is a vital source of significance within the Punica, but also an inherently unstable mode, the lability of which affects both Silius' epic heroes and his villainous Hannibal.

By bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.

Coleridge and Contemplation is a multi-disciplinary volume on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, founding poet of British Romanticism, critic, and author of philosophical, political, and theological works. In his philosophical writings, Coleridge developed his thinking about the symbolizing imagination, a precursor to contemplation, into a theory of contemplation itself, which for him occurs in its purest form as a manifestation of 'Reason'. Coleridge is a particularly challenging figure because he was a thinker in process, and something of an omnimath, a Renaissance man of the Romantic era. The dynamic quality of his thinking, the 'dark fluxion' pursued but ultimately 'unfixable by thought', and his extensive range of interests make a philosophical yet also multi-disciplinary approach to Coleridge essential. This book is the first collection to feature philosophers and intellectual historians writing on Coleridge's philosophy. This volume opens up a neglected aspect of the work of Britain's greatest philosopher-poet - his analysis of contemplation, which he considered the highest of human mental powers. Philosophers including Roger Scruton, David E. Cooper, Michael McGhee, Andy Hamilton, and Peter Cheyne contribute original essays on the philosophical, literary, and political implications of Coleridge's views. The volume is edited and introduced by Peter Cheyne, and Baroness Mary Warnock contributes a foreword. The chapters by philosophers are supported by new developments in philosophically minded criticism from leading Coleridge scholars in English departments, including Jim Mays, Kathleen Wheeler, and James Engell. They approach Coleridge as an energetic yet contemplative thinker concerned with the intuition of ideas and the processes of cultivation in self and society. Other chapters, from intellectual historians and theologians, including Douglas Hedley clarify the historical background, and 'religious musings', of Coleridge's thought regarding contemplation.

This collation from Samuel T. Coleridge's contributions to the theory of language presents an imposing revision of the enlightenment approach to language. Selections from his verse, notebooks, journalism and ephemera are arranged under headings including the language of politics; language and culture; the language of poetry; theory of language; words and things; organ of language; and the language of religion. The editor's introduction situates Coleridge's thinking in its period, and with modern theory in mind.

Perhaps the most powerful feature of the Romantic imagination is its ability to dissolve existing form and order and create it anew. The Romantic investigation of the functions of the imagination also leads to important insights concerning its problems and dangers. Because it separates the person experiencing it from others around him, the imagination introduces ways of seeing which cannot be assumed to be simply communicable or easily shared, and which have as their objects different forms or 'things'. These forms, or figures, risk becoming for their originators both vehicles of power, in so far as they do convince others of their reality, and limiting constructs of prefigured order, inhibiting their users from the perception of new relations and alternative meanings. When the figured becomes the real, there thus arise difficulties in both individual and social perceptions. Arguing from the stance that all perception takes place by a creative (and hence potentially divisive) assembly of images or qualities into things, David Simpson shows that the analysis of figurative representation in Wordsworth's writing is of central importance to his idea of the human mind, and the way in which it is affected or allowed to function by its environment, both human and physical. In this way Wordsworth's ideas about the function of literature in society are seen to be more fully worked out than readers have often assumed them to be. Simpson pays particular attention to the ethical consequences of different ways of figuring the real, offering an explanation of Wordsworth's distinction between life in the town and life among the mountains and lakes of north-west England. In relating Wordsworth's poetry to important contemporary debates in political economy such as those concerning the division of labour and the evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of commerce and luxury, he suggests that Wordsworth is a notable precursor of that nineteenth-century tradition which sees the mind as open to critical determination by social and environmental factors.

The poet as an inheritor of an Emersonian tradition, and Paterson as an ethical autobiography in progress. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is the most influential figure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His simple language and focus on the familiar objects and voices of everyday life pulled poetry out of the past and restored its ability to express contemporary experience. Williams believed passionately in poetry's usefulness, abhorring its perception as an esoteric pursuit and insisting on the impact it could have on the life of a reader if only made relevant to his or her experience. Examining the sources of this belief, Ian Copestake breaks new ground by tracing the enduring impact of Williams's youthful experience of Unitarianism on his poetry and arguing that Williams is a poet in an Emersonian tradition. Two chapters focus on Williams's long poem Paterson, arguing that its long gestation -- from 1927 to 1951 -- reflects its role asan ethical autobiography in progress. Copestake investigates sources that point to the ethical heart of Williams's poetry and to his lifelong belief that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." Ian D. Copestake is a Lecturer at the University of Bamberg, Germany and editor of the William Carlos Williams Review.