This edition of John Lydgate's Dance of Death offers a detailed comparison of the different text versions, a new scholarly edition and translation of Guy Marchant's 1485 French Danse Macabre text, and an art-historical analysis of its woodcut illustrations. It addresses the cultural context and historical circumstances of Lydgate's poem and its model, the mural of 1424-25 with accompanying French poem in Paris, as well as their precursors, notably the Vado mori poems and the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead. It discusses authorship, the personification and vizualisation of Death, and the wider dissemination of the Dance. The edited texts include commentaries, notes, and a glossary.

In Poet of Jordan, William Tamplin presents two decades' worth of the political poetry of Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya, a Bedouin poet from Jordan and a public figure whose voice channels a popular strain of popular Arab political thought. Tamplin's footnoted translations are supplemented with a biography, interviews, and pictures in order to contextualize the man behind the poetry. The aesthetics and politics of vernacular Arabic poetry have long gone undervalued. By offering a close study of the life and work of Hajaya, Tamplin demonstrates the impact that one poet's voice can have on the people and leaders of the contemporary Middle East.

Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca is the first extensive study of speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca (5th century AD). It presents an in-depth analysis of the narrative functions of direct speech and their implications for the presentation of the epic story. The digital appendix to this book (Database of Direct Speech in Greek Epic Poetry) can be consulted online at www.dsgep.ugent.be.

This book is the winner of the 2020 Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard analyzes images of women in painting and poetry of China's middle imperial period, focusing on works that represent female figures as preoccupied with romance. She discusses examples of visual and literary culture in regard to their authorship and audience, examining the role of interiority in constructions of gender, exploring the rhetorical functions of romantic images, and considering connections between subjectivity and representation. The paintings in particular have sometimes been interpreted as simple representations of the daily lives of women, or as straightforward artifacts of heteroerotic desire; Blanchard proposes that such works could additionally be interpreted as political allegories, representations of the artist's or patron's interiorities, or models of idealized femininity.

The instalments of Ezra Pound's life-project, The Cantos, composed during his incarceration in Washington after the Second World War were to have served as a "Paradiso" for his epic. Beautiful and tormented, enigmatic and irascible by turns, they express the poet's struggle to reconcile his striving for justice with his extreme Right politics. In heavily coded language, Pound was writing activist political poetry. Through an in-depth reading of the "Washington Cantos" this book reveals the ways in which Pound integrated into his verse themes and ideas that remain central to American far-right ideology to this day: States' Rights, White-supremacy and racial segregation, the usurpation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, and history as racial struggle. Pound's struggle was also personal. These poems also celebrate his passion for his muse and lover, Sheri Martinelli, as he tries to teach her his politics and, in the final poems, mount his legal defence against the unresolved treason charges hanging over his head. Reading the poetry alongside correspondence and unpublished archival writings, Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light is an important new work on a poet who stands at the heart of 20th-century Modernism. Building on his previous book John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (Bloomsbury, 2015), Alec Marsh explores the way the political ideas revealed in Pound's correspondence manifested themselves in his later poetry.

Through the variety of its scholarly perspectives, Brill Companion to Theocritus offers a tool for the study of one of antiquity's foremost poets. Offering a thorough examination of textual transmission, ancient commentaries, literary dialect, and poetic forms, the present volume considers Theocritus' work from novel theoretical perspectives, such as gender and emotions. It expands the usual field of inquiry to include religion, and the poet's reception in Late Antiquity and early modern times. The various chapters promote Theocritus' profile as an erudite poet, who both responds to and inaugurates a rich and variegated tradition. The combination of these various perspectives places Theocritus at the crossroads of Ptolemaic patronage, contemporary society, and art.

Fleeing the ashes of Troy, Aeneas, Achilles' mighty foe in the Iliad, begins an incredible journey to fulfill his destiny as the founder of Rome. His voyage will take him through stormy seas, entangle him in a tragic love affair, and lure him into the world of the dead itself -- all the way tormented by the vengeful Juno, Queen of the Gods. Ultimately, he reaches the promised land of Italy where, after bloody battles and with high hopes, he founds what will become the Roman empire.

In the context of a diversified and pluralistic arena of contemporary literature embodying previously marginalized voices of region, ethnicity, gender, and class, black poets living in Britain developed a distinct branch of contemporary poetry. Having emerged from a struggle to give voice to marginalized groups in Britain, the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, and Fred D'Aguiar helped define national identity and explored racial oppression. Motivated by a sense of responsibility towards their communities, these poets undertook the task of transmitting black history to young blacks who risked losing ties to their roots. They also emphasized the necessity of fighting racism by constructing an awareness of Afro-Caribbean national identity while establishing black cultural heritage in contemporary British poetry. In this book, Turkish literary scholar Dilek Bulut Sar?kaya examines their works. Linton Kwesi Johnson's Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Inglan is a Bitch (1980), and Tings an Times (1991) open the study, followed by David Dabydeen's Slave Song (1984), Coolie Odyssey (1988), and Turner (1994) and, finally, Fred D'Aguiar's Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989) and British Subjects (1993).

Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China explores the relationships between the artist, local society, and artistic practice during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Arranged as an investigation of the artist Hua Yan's work at a pivotal moment in eighteenth-century society, this book considers his paintings and poetry in early eighteenth-century Hangzhou, mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and finally their nineteenth-century afterlife in Shanghai. By investigating Hua Yan's struggle as a marginalized artist-both at his time and in the canon of Chinese art-this study draws attention to the implications of seeing and being seen as an artist in early modern China.

In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Rgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetic form, and how they change over time.

As the University of Erfurt collapsed in the early 1520s, Hessus faced losing his livelihood. To cope, he imagined himself a shape-changing Proteus. Transforming first into a lawyer, then a physician, he finally became a teacher at the Nuremberg academy organized by Philip Melanchthon. Volume 5 traces this story via Hessus's poems of 1524-1528: "Some Rules for Preserving Good Health" (1524; 1531), with attached "Praise of Medicine" and two sets of epigrams; "Three Elegies" (1526), two praising the Nuremberg school and one attacking a criticaster; "Venus Triumphant" (1527), with poems on Joachim Camerarius's wedding; "Against the Hypocrisy of the Monastic Habit" (1527), with four Psalm paraphrases; and "Seventeen Bucolic Idyls" (1528), updating the "Bucolicon" of 1509 and adding five idyls.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

The Silvae by Statius dethroned Virgil from the Studio in Naples, fostered the creation of a new genre, offered a model for court poetry, and seduced the most prestigious Humanists in the most vibrant centres of Renaissance Italy and the Netherlands. The collection preserves magnificent buildings otherwise lost; speaks of stones otherwise unknown; and memorializes people, rituals, and social relationships that would have passed into oblivion in silence. This volume offers a fresh look into approaches to the Silvae by editors and commentators, both at the time of the rediscovery of the poems and today.

Written in the late-twelfth century, the Old French Romance of Tristran by Beroul is one of the earliest surviving versions of the story of Tristran and Iseut. Preserved in only one manuscript, the poem records the tragic tale that became one of the most popular themes of medieval literature, in several languages. This volume is a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of the story, including the first ever diplomatic edition of the text, replicating the exact state of the original manuscript. It also contains a new critical edition, complemented by extensive notes and a brief analytic preface. Edited by noted medievalist Barbara N. Sargent-Baur, The Romance of Tristran by Beroul and Beroul II: A Diplomatic Edition and a Critical Edition will be an essential resource for specialists interested in the study of this important text. An English translation of the Old French text appears in The Romance of Tristran by Beroul and Beroul II: Student Edition and English Translation.