Constitutions of Self in Contemporary Irish Poetry explores the figure of the lyrical self in the work of six contemporary Irish poets: Paul Muldoon, Vona Groarke, Sinead Morrissey, Caitriona O'Reilly, Alan Gillis and Nick Laird. By focusing on the self, this study offers the first sustained exploration of what is arguably one of the most distinctive features of Irish poetry. Readings utilise the latest theories of the lyric filtered through the work of such philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman, and connect an interdisciplinary approach with attention to the operations of the poetic text to bring out aspects of the self in Irish writing that have been given only cursory critical attention so far.

Modern poetry, at least according to the current consensus, is difficult and often depressing. But as Humor in Modern American Poetry shows, modern poetry is full of humorous moments, from comic verse published in popular magazines to the absurd juxtapositions of The Cantos. The essays in this collection show that humor is as essential to the serious work of William Carlos Williams as it is to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley. For the writers in this volume, the point of humor is not to provide "comic relief," a brief counterpoint to the poem's more serious themes; humor is central to the poems' projects. These poets use humor to claim their own poetic authority; to re-define literary tradition; to show what audience they are writing for; to make political attacks; and, perhaps most surprisingly, to promote sympathy among their readers. The essays in this book include single-author studies, discussions of literary circles, and theories of form. Taken together, they help to begin a new conversation about modernist poetry, one that treats its lighthearted moments not as decorative but as substantive. Humor defines groups and marks social boundaries, but it also leads us to transgress those boundaries; it forges ties between the writer and the reader, blurs the line between public and private, and becomes a spur to self-awareness.

Although Mozart's Don Giovanni (1787) is the most analysed of all operas, Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto has rarely been studied as a work of poetry in its own right. The author argues that the libretto, rather than perpetuating the conservative religious morality implicit in the story of Don Juan, subjects our culture's myth of human sexuality to a critical rewriting. Combining poetic close reading with approaches drawn from linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political theory, legal history, intellectual history, literary history, art history and theatrical performance analysis, she studies the Don Giovanni libretto as a radical political text of the Late Enlightenment, which has lost none of its ability to provoke. The questions it raises concerning the nature of compassion, seduction and violence, and the autonomy and responsibility of the individual, are still highly relevant for us today.

A thorough and scholarly study of Spenser and Shakespeare and their contrary artistry, covering themes of theology, psychology, the depictions of passion and intellect, moral counsel, family hierarchy, self-love, temptation, folly, allegory, female heroism, the supernatural and much more. Renaissance psychologies examines the distinct and polarised emphasis of these two towering intellects and writers of the early modern period. It demonstrates how pervasive was the influence of Spenser on Shakespeare, as in the "playful metamorphosis of Gloriana into Titania" in A Midsummer Night's Dream and its return from Spenser's moralizing allegory to the Ovidian spirit of Shakespeare's comedy. It will appeal to students and lecturers in Spenser studies, Renaissance poetry and the wider fields of British literature, social and cultural history, ethics and theology. -- .

In this study, Kathryn Walls challenges the standard identification of Una with the post-Reformation English Church, arguing that she is, rather, Augustine's City of God - the invisible Church, whose membership is known only to God. Una's story (its Tudor resonances notwithstanding) therefore embraces that of the Synagogue before the Incarnation as well as that of the Church in the time of Christ and thereafter. It also allegorises the redemptive process that sustains the true Church. Una is fallible in canto I. Subsequently, however, she comes to embody divine perfection. Her transformation depends upon the intervention of the lion as Christ. Convinced of the consistency and coherence of Spenser's allegory, Walls offers fresh interpretations of Abessa (as Synagoga), of the fauns and satyrs (the Gentiles), and of Una's dwarf (adiaphoric forms of worship). She also reinterprets Spenser's marriage metaphor, clarifying the significance of Red Cross as Una's spouse in the final canto. -- .

Yeats's Poetry and Poetics brings together some of the finest Yeats criticism ever published, together with some new pieces specially written for this volume. Spanning the whole of Yeats's career, the essays are organised into three main parts. The first deals with Yeats's concern with the speaking voice and its bearing on public and private readings of his verse; and on hisuse of certain kinds of images in his poetry and plays, from ghosts and fairies, to figures borrowed from painters and sculptors and, extraordinarily, to the actual dancer for whom he makes room in his work. The second section puts Yeats's poetry in context with the work of Synge, D.H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and other 'Georgians', and with that of T.S. Eliot and other modernists; assessing the continuities (real and asserted) in Yeats's long poetic career against the revolutions in the poetry of his time. The profound connections between the writings of Yeats and Joyce, including the coupling of Finnegans's Wake and 'The Wanderings of Oisin' are also examined. Rounding off the volume 'Phantasmagoria', explores the implications for his poetics of Yeats's spiritualist philosophy, especially in terms of his co

To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller's The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.

This first full-length cognitive poetic study of a single author and her composition process combines cognitive linguistics with genetic and literary criticism. It portrays two minds: the poet creating her poetics and poetry as well as the reader creating her interpretations of this poetry. It focuses on eight poems and their drafts, examining Elizabeth Bishop's poetic conceptualizations. It demonstrates how our awareness of such universal structures of invention as categorization, image schemas, metaphor, conceptual integration, metonymy, idealized cognitive models, licensing stories can assist us in deducing the original movement of writing during genetic analysis or in arriving at a reading of the poem's published version. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the most eminent American poets. Her work has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, Ph.D. in Linguistics, was a Fulbright scholar at the Vassar College Special Collections, which holds the Elizabeth Bishop archives. She translates contemporary Polish poetry and poetry written in English. She lives in Copenhagen.

It has long been accepted that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected the Unitarianism of his youth and returned to the Church of England, he did so while accepting a general Christian orthodoxy. Christopher Corbin clarifies Coleridge's religious identity and argues that while Coleridge's Christian orthodoxy may have been sui generis, it was closely aligned with moderate Anglican Evangelicalism. Approaching religious identity as a kind of culture that includes distinct forms of language and networks of affiliation in addition to beliefs and practices, this book looks for the distinguishable movements present in Coleridge's Britain to more precisely locate his religious identity than can be done by appeals to traditional denominational divisions. Coleridge's search for unity led him to desire and synthesize the "warmth" of heart religion (symbolized as Methodism) with the "light" of rationalism (symbolized as Socinianism), and the evangelicalism in the Church of England, being the most chastened of the movement, offered a fitting place from which this union of warmth and light could emerge. His religious identity not only included many of the defining Anglican Evangelical beliefs, such as an emphasis on original sin and the New Birth, but he also shared common polemical opponents, appropriated evangelical literary genres, developed a spirituality centered on the common evangelical emphases of prayer and introspection, and joined Evangelicals in rejecting baptismal regeneration. When placed in a chronological context, Coleridge's form of Christian orthodoxy developed in conversation with Anglican Evangelicals; moreover, this relationship with Anglican Evangelicalism likely helped facilitate his return to the Church of England. Corbin not only demonstrates the similarities between Coleridge's relationship to a form of evangelicalism with which most people have little familiarity, but also offers greater insight into the complexities and tensions of religious identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain as a whole.

This book explores Wordsworth's extraordinary influence on the tourist landscapes of the Lake District throughout the age of railways, motorcars and the First World War. It reveals how Wordsworth's response to railways was not a straightforward matter of opposition and protest; his ideas were taken up by both advocates and opponents of railways, and through their controversies had a surprising impact on the earliest motorists as they sought a language to describe the liberty and independence of their new mode of transport. Once the age of motoring was underway, the outbreak of the First World War encouraged British people to connect Wordsworth's patriotic passion with his wish to protect the Lake District as a national heritage - a transition that would have momentous effects in the interwar period, when popular motoring paradoxically brought a vogue for open-air activities and a renewal of romantic pedestrianism. With the arrival of global tourism, preservation of the cultural landscape of the Lake District became an urgent national and international concern. This book explores how patterns of tourist behaviour and environmental awareness changed in the century of popular tourism, examining how Wordsworth's vision and language shaped modern ideas of travel, self-reliance, landscape and environment, cultural heritage, preservation and accessibility.

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.

"Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain" examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.

The Bible serves Wordsworth as a basis for his poetry and poetics, providing language, images, figures, and importantly, a paradigm of poetic genres. Working from three interrelated critical approaches--intertextuality, poetics, and metaphysics--Deeanne Westbrook first analyzes Wordsworth’s theory and practice as these reflect the New Testament doctrine of the Incarnation. Subsequent chapters consider Wordsworth’s adaptation of biblical narrative forms--etymological tales, parables, and mystical allegories. Closing chapters examine some extraordinary linguistic innovations in Wordsworth’s revisions of biblical apocalypse, techniques that permit the poet to express the ineffable and to reveal nothing.

"King Lear" is believed by many feminists to be irretrievably sexist. Through detailed line readings supported by a wealth of critical commentary, "Re-Visioning Lear's Daughters" reconceives Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia as full characters, not stereotypes of good and evil. These new feminist interpretations are tested with specific renderings, placing the reader in precise theatrical moments. Through multiple representations, this unique approach demonstrates the elasticity of Shakespeare's text.

This book offers fresh critical interpretation of two of the central tenets of Irish culture - migration and memory. From its starting point with the 'New Irish' generation of poets in the United States during the 1980s and concluding with the technological innovations of 21st-century poetry, this study spans continents, generations, genders and sexualities to reconsider the role of memory and of migration in the work of a range of contemporary Irish poets. Combining sensitive close readings and textual analysis with thorough theoretical application, it sets out the formal, thematic, socio-cultural and literary contexts of migration as an essential aspect of Irish literature. This book is essential reading for literary critics, academics, cultural commentators and students with an interest in contemporary poetry, Irish studies, diaspora studies and memory studies.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.

Die bundel, wat in P.J. Philander se nege-en-tagtigste jaar verskyn het, is geskryf terwyl hy in New York gewoon het. Ten spyte van die afstand tussen die digter en sy geboorteland, spreek die gedigte in die bundel steeds van 'n intieme verbintenis tussen hom en sy land van herkoms. In die middel van die winter word Miem Fischer saam met haar enigste seun en ander familielede weggevoer van hulle plaas naby Ermelo: eers na die konsentrasiekamp by Standerton en daarna na die kamp by Merebank naby Durban. In haar dagboekinskrywings ontvou dag na dag die aangrypende verhaal van hoe sy die haglike realiteit van lewe in ’n konsentrasiekamp moet verduur. Tant Miem Fischer se kampdagboek is een van maar ’n handjievol dagboeke wat die lyding van Boerevroue en -kinders van dag tot dag weergee en wat na die oorlog behoue gebly het.

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

Walter of Chatillon was one of the leading Medieval Latin poets, who flourished at the high point of Medieval Latin literature - the later twelfth century. This volume presents the Latin text and facing English translation of Walter's shorter poems, including love poems, satires, and (largely Christmas) hymns. His satirical poems, often written in Goliardic hexameters, of which he was an accomplished master, are fine examples of the form. The allusiveness of his hymns makes them often notoriously difficult, but they provide a fascinating insight into the mindset of the clergy of the time and the prevalence of allegorical interpretation of the Bible. This volume provides an outline of the author's life, and adds a further fifteen poems to the previously accepted canon of fifty-two poems which appear in earlier editions of Walter of Chatillon's poetry. The introduction discusses the attribution of the additional poems, Walter's use of rhythmical and metrical verse in these poems, the relevant manuscripts, the recurring themes of the Feast of Fools, and avarice and largesse, and the arrangement of the poems. This volume makes available in English for the first time the shorter poems of an important medieval poet together with an improved Latin text. Scholars of the twelfth century will find a great deal of primary evidence on a wide variety of social and religious issues now accessible to them.

This volume addresses the global reception of "untranslatable" concrete poetry. Featuring contributions from an international group of literary and translation scholars and practitioners, working across a variety of languages, the book views the development of the international concrete poetry movement through the lens of "transcreation", that is, the informed, creative response to the translation of playful, enigmatic, visual texts. Contributions range in subject matter from ancient Greek and Chinese pattern poems to modernist concrete poems from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This challenging body of experimental work offers creative challenges and opportunities to literary translators and unique pleasures to the sympathetic reader. Highlighting the ways in which literary influence is mapped across languages and borders, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of experimental poetry, translation studies and comparative literature.

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.

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.