The Tibetan Gesar epic, considered "the world's longest poem," has been the object of countless retellings, translations, and academic studies in the two centuries since it was first introduced to European readers. In The Many Faces of Ling Gesar, its many aspects-historical, cultural, and literary-are surveyed for the first time in a single volume in English, addressed to both general readers and specialists. The original scholarship presented here, by international experts in Tibetan Studies, honours the contributions of Rolf A. Stein (1911-1999), whose studies of the Tibetan epic are the enduring standard in this field. With a foreword by Jean-Noel Robert, College de France. Contributors are: Anne-Marie Blondeau, Chopa Dondrup, Estelle Dryland, Solomon George FitzHerbert, Gregory Forgues, Frances Garrett, Frantz Grenet, Lama Jabb, Matthew W. King, Norbu Wangdan, Geoffrey Samuel, Siddiq Wahid, Wang Guoming, Yang Enhong.

Is poetry still relevant today, or is it merely a dwindling historical art? How have poets of the recent past dealt with challenges to poetics? Seeking to chart the poetic act in a period not so much hostile as indifferent to poetry, Language at the Boundaries outlines spaces where poetry and poetics emerge in migration, translation, world literature, canon formation, and the history of science and technology. One can only come so close to fully possessing or explaining everything about the poetic act, and this book grapples with these limits by perusing, analyzing, deconstructing, and reconstructing creativity, implementing different approaches in doing so. Peter Carravetta consolidates historical epistemological positions that have accrued over the last several decades, some spurred by the modernism/postmodernism debate, and unpacks their differences--juxtaposing Vico with Heidegger and applying the approaches of translation studies, decolonization, indigeneity, committed literature, and critical race theory, among others. What emerges is a defense and theory of poetics in the contemporary world, engaging the topic in a dialectic mode and seeking grounds of agreement.

'Beowulf', one of the earliest poems in the English language, recounts a tale of heroism played out against the backdrop of Scandinavia in the 5th to 6th centuries AD. And yet, this Old English verse narrative set in Scandinavia is - a little surprisingly, perhaps - populated with names of German descent. This insight into the personal names of 'Beowulf' acts the starting point for Philip A. Shaw's innovative and nuanced study. As Shaw reveals, the origins of these personal names provide important evidence for the origins of Beowulf as it enables us to situate the poem fully in its continental contexts. As such, this book is not only a much-needed reassessment of 'Beowulf''s beginnings, but also sheds new light on the links between 'Beowulf' and other continental narrative traditions, such as the Scandinavian sagas and Continental German heroics. In doing so, Names and Naming in 'Beowulf' takes readers beyond the continuing debate over the dating of the poem and provides a compelling new model for the poem's origins.

This study by Neil Corcoran considers the kinds of responsibility which some exemplary modern lyric poetry takes on, or to which it makes itself subject - social, cultural, political, aesthetic and personal. It treats its theme in British, Irish and American poets and in some influential foreign-language poets available in influential English translations. The book discusses the poetry of the First World War and the Cold War in such poets as Owen, Rosenberg, Pasternak, Zbigniew Herbert and Robert Lowell; the poetry and politics of modern Ireland in Yeats, MacNeice, Heaney and others; and poetry's relations with prose, painting and song in poets including Frank O'Hara, Ted Hughes and Bob Dylan. It focuses particularly on forms of modern elegy. Poetry & Responsibility includes such topics as the conflicting impulses in Owen between his obligations as a soldier and as a poet; Yeats's gradual creation of one of his greatest poems out of his responsibilities as an Irish schools inspector; Heaney's requirement that poetry make an 'apology' for itself; O'Hara's deployment of a camp sensibility in the interests of writing a politics of 1950s Black American culture; Herbert's rewriting of Hamlet as a reading of Warsaw Pact Poland; and the political and aesthetic significance of Dylan's restless self-revision. The book argues that exemplary modern lyric poetry can be shown to resist various forms of accommodation or appropriation. In its strategies of opposition, it becomes what Auden calls it in his elegy for Yeats: 'A way of happening, a mouth.'

The edition brings together the known writings in poetry and prose of Edward Rushton (1756--1814). Blinded by trachoma after an outbreak on the slaving ship in which he was a young officer, Rushton returned to Liverpool to scratch a living as a publican, newspaper editor, and finally bookseller and publisher. In his day Rushton was a well-known Liverpool poet and reformer, with an impressively wide range of causes (the Liverpool Blind School, the Liverpool Marine Society, and many radical political groups). Many of his songs, particularly the marine ballads, were very familiar in Britain and America. In the later Victorian period, as a particular version of romanticism began to dominate literary sensibilities, Rushton's overt politics fell from favour and he became rather obscure, at least by comparison with his like-minded (but much better off) friend William Roscoe. As the history of slavery abolition and other radical causes has come to be re-examined, the bicentenary of Rushton's death, falling in November 2014, has suggested an opportunity to take a new look at his remarkable career and impressive body of work. There has never been a critical edition of Rushton's poems. His own 1806 edition omits much, including what is his best-known work in modern times, the anti-slavery West-Indian Eclogues of 1787; the posthumous 1824 edition omits much from the 1806 collection while drawing in other work. The present edition works from the earliest datable sources, in newspapers, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides, providing a clean text with significant revisions and variants noted in the commentary. Unfamiliar words are glossed, and brief introductions and contextual commentaries, informed by the latest scholarship, are given for each piece of writing.

This book is the first academic study entirely devoted to Liverpool labouring-class poet and activist Edward Rushton (1756-1814), whose name was for a long time only associated with the foundation of the Royal School for the Blind in 1791. A former sailor, tavern keeper and editor of a paper, as of the turbulent 1790s Rushton owned a bookshop that was a hub of intense networking with many radical writers and intellectuals. His long-lasting, consistent commitment to the most pressing debates enflaming the Age of Revolution led him to question naval impressment and British repression in Ireland, the Napoleonic wars lacerating Europe and, most prominently, both the transatlantic traffic in human beings and the institution of slavery as such. A dedicated and unrelenting campaigner at the time of the dawning human rights discourse, Rushton was both a perceptive scrutinizer of the mechanisms of power and repression, and a remarkably complex poetic voice, fully consequent to his politics. In this book his work is the object of new and long-due critical enquiry, especially appropriate in the year that marks the bicentennial anniversary of his death. The opening up of eighteenth-century and Romantic studies to cross-disciplinary interchange allows for a more nuanced historical and critical investigation of previously erased or neglected individual and collective experiences. This expanding critical space, which highlights the systemic discursive interaction of culture, politics and society, constitutes the conceptual and methodological frame for what is intended as a comprehensive critical re-evaluation of the writer.

A medieval Catalan verse fantasy by Bernat Metge, the most important Catalan writer of the fourteenth century, Written around 1381 by Bernat Metge, the most important Catalan writer of the fourteenth century, the Llibre de Fortuna i Prudencia is a fantasy in verse, drawing on learned sources, principally The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. Early one morning, Bernat, the protagonist and narrator, decides to alleviate his sorrows by strolling around the harbour of Barcelona. He meets an old man, apparently a beggar, who tricks him into getting into a boat which, despite the absence of sails and oars, conveys him to an island where the goddess Fortuna appears to him. In a heated discussion, Bernat blames her for all his misfortunes. His next meeting is with Prudenciawho is accompanied by seven maidens representing the liberal arts. Prudencia is able to lessen his despair, and exhorts him to trust in providence and renounce material possessions. When she considers him cured, she and the maidens send him sailing back to Barcelona, where he quickly goes home to avoid gossiping townsfolk. Published in association with Editorial Barcino, Barcelona. DAVID BARNETT, whose doctorate is from Queen Mary, University of London, continues to be involved in research on medieval Catalan literature.

Women's Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970-2010: Body, Time and Locale presents the history and current state of a critically neglected, significant body of contemporary writing and places it within the wider social and political contexts of the period. Ranging from Geraldine Monk's ventriloquizing of the Pendle witches to Denise Riley's fiercely self-critical lyric poems, from the multi-media experiments of Maggie O'Sullivan to the globally aware, politicised sequences of Andrea Brady and Jennifer Cooke, David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy theorise women's alternative poetries in terms of Julia Kristeva's idea of 'women's time' and in terms of the female poetic voice constantly negotiating with dominant systems of representation. They also offer a much-needed re-theorising of the value of avant garde practices.

The Spatiality of the Hispanic Avant-Garde: Ultraismo & Estridentismo, 1918-1927 is a thorough exploration of the meanings and values Hispanic poets and artists assigned to four iconic locations of modernity: the city, the cafes, means of transportation, and the sea, during the first decades of the 20th century. Joining important studies on Spatiality, Palomares-Salas convincingly argues that an unsolvable tension between place and space is at the core of the Hispanic avant-garde cultural production. A refreshing, transatlantic perspective on Ultraism and Stridentism, the book moves the Hispanic vanguards forward into broader, international discussions on space and modernism, and offers innovative readings of well-known, as well as rarely studied works.

Volume 2 of the Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic presents seven articles. Contributors explore the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and Empedocles, investigate the nature of formulaic language, reveal Greek tragedy's connections with epic, and study the characters of Ganymede and Hekamede. This diverse collection will be of interest to all students and scholars of ancient Greek epic. Contributors are: Joel P. Christensen, Xavier Gheerbrant, Ahuvia Kahane, Lynn Kozak, Bruce Louden, Sheila Murnaghan, Polyxeni Strolonga.