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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets > General
This collection of original essays by literary critics and
historians analyzes a wide range of Milton's writing, from his
early poetry, through his mid-century political prose, to De
Doctrina Christiana, which was unpublished in his lifetime, and
finally to his last and greatest poems. The contributors
investigate the rich variety of approaches to Milton's engagement
with Catholicism and its relationship to reformed religion. The
essays address latent tensions and contradictions, explore the
nuances of Milton's relationship to the easy commonplaces of
Protestant compatriots, and disclose the polemical strategies and
tactics that often shape that engagement. The contributors link
Milton and Catholicism with early modern confessional conflicts
between Catholics and Protestants that in turn led to new models
and standards of authority, scholarship, and interiority. In
Milton's case, he deployed anti-Catholicism as a rhetorical device
and the negative example out of which Protestants could shape their
identity. The contributors argue that Milton's anti-Catholicism
aligns with his understanding of inwardness and conscience and
illuminates one of the central conflicts between Catholics and
Protestants in the period. Building on recent scholarship on
Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses over the English Tudor and
Stuart period, new understandings of martyrdom, and scholarship on
Catholic women, Milton and Catholicism, provides a diverse and
multifaceted investigation into a complex and little-explored field
in Milton studies. Contributors: Alastair Bellany, Thomas Cogswell,
Thomas N. Corns, Ronald Corthell, Angelica Duran, Martin
Dzelzainis, John Flood, Estelle Haan, and Elizabeth Sauer.
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.
While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent
1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses,
scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural
Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that
addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic
writings. Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama,
Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as
a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods
approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological
analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM
artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge
misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental
explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became
more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black
consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., were
assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's
interpretation in their literary exposes that a riot's disjointed
and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice.
Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black
racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to
compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship
rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and
education-tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement.
Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write
literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they
understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.
In ancient didactic poetry, poets frequently make use of imagery -
similes, metaphors, acoustic images, models, exempla, fables,
allegory, personifications, and other tropes - as a means to
elucidate and convey their didactic message. In this volume, which
arose from an international conference held at the University of
Heidelberg in 2016, we investigate such phenomena and explore how
they make the unseen visible, the unheard audible, and the unknown
comprehensible. By exploring didactic poets from Hesiod to
pseudo-Oppian and from Vergil and Lucretius to Grattius and Ovid,
the authors in this collective volume show how imagery can clarify
and illuminate, but also complicate and even undermine or obfuscate
the overt didactic message. The presence of a real or implied
addressee invites our engagement and ultimately our scrutiny of
language and meaning.
The rediscovery in the fifteenth century of Lucretius' De rerum
natura was a challenge to received ideas. The poem offered a vision
of the creation of the universe, the origins and goals of human
life, and the formation of the state, all without reference to
divine intervention. It has been hailed in Stephen Greenblatt's
best-selling book, The Swerve, as the poem that invented modernity.
But how modern did early modern readers want to become? This
collection of essays offers a series of case studies which
demonstrate the sophisticated ways in which some readers might
relate the poem to received ideas, assimilating Lucretius to
theories of natural law and even natural theology, while others
were at once attracted to Lucretius' subversiveness and driven to
dissociate themselves from him. The volume presents a wide
geographical range, from Florence and Venice to France, England,
and Germany, and extends chronologically from Lucretius'
contemporary audience to the European Enlightenment. It covers both
major authors such as Montaigne and neglected figures such as
Italian neo-Latin poets, and is the first book in the field to pay
close attention to Lucretius' impact on political thought, both in
philosophy - from Machiavelli, through Hobbes, to Rousseau - and in
the topical spin put on the De rerum natura by translators in
revolutionary England. It combines careful attention to material
contexts of book production and distribution with close readings of
particular interpretations and translations, to present a rich and
nuanced profile of the mark made by a remarkable poem.
In this book, Heather McAlpine argues that emblematic strategies
play a more central role in Pre-Raphaelite poetics than has been
acknowledged, and that reading Pre-Raphaelite works with an
awareness of these strategies permits a new understanding of the
movement's engagements with ontology, religion, representation, and
politics. The emblem is a discursive practice that promises to
stabilize language in the face of doubt, making it especially
interesting as a site of conflicting responses to Victorian crises
of representation. Through analyses of works by the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, A.C. Swinburne, and William Morris, Emblematic
Strategies examines the Pre-Raphaelite movement's common goal of
conveying "truth" while highlighting differences in its adherents'
approaches to that task.
Drawing extensively on archival research, The Late Cantos of Ezra
Pound critically explores the textual history of Pound's late
verse, namely Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959).
Examining unpublished letters, draft manuscripts and other
prepublication material, this book addresses the composition,
revision and dissemination of these difficult texts in order to
shed new light on their significance to Pound's wider project, his
methods and techniques, and the structures of authority -literary
and political-that govern the meaning of his poetry. Illustrated by
reproductions of archival documents, The Late Cantos of Ezra Pound
is an innovative new study of one of the most important poets of
the 20th century.
This groundbreaking book attempts a fully contextualized reading of
the poetry written by Pindar for Hieron of Syracuse in the 470s BC.
It argues that the victory odes and other occasional songs composed
by Pindar for the Sicilian tyrant were part of an extensive
cultural program that included athletic competition, coinage,
architecture, sanctuary dedication, city foundation, and much more.
In the tumultuous years following the Persian invasion of Greece in
480, elite Greek leaders and their cities struggled to capitalize
on the Greek victory and to define themselves as free peoples who
triumphed over the threat of Persian monarchy. Pindar's victory
odes are an important contribution to Hieron's goal of panhellenic
pre-eminence, redescribing contemporary tyranny as an instantiation
of golden-age kingship and consonant with best Greek tradition. In
a delicate process of cultural legitimation, the poet's praise
deploys athletic victories as a signs of more general preeminence.
Three initial chapters set the stage by presenting the history and
culture of Syracuse under the Deinomenid tyrants, exploring issues
of performance and patronage, and juxtaposing Hieron to rival Greek
leaders on the mainland. Subsequent chapters examine in turn all
Pindar's preserved poetry for Hieron and members of his court, and
contextualizes this poetry by comparing it to the songs written for
Hieron by Pindar's poetic contemporary, Bacchylides. These odes
develop a specifically "tyrannical " mythology in which a hero from
the past enjoys unusual closeness with the gods, only to bring ruin
on him or herself by failing to manage this closeness
appropriately. Such negative exemplars counterbalance Hieron's good
fortune and present the dangers against which he must (and does)
protect himself by regal virtue. The readings that emerge are
marked by exceptional integration of literary interpretation with
the political/historical context.
John Kasper was a militant far-right activist who first came to
prominence with his violent campaigns against desegregation in the
Civil Rights era. Ezra Pound was the seminal figure in
Anglo-American modernist literature and one of the most important
poets of the 20th century. This is the first book to
comprehensively explore the extensive correspondence - lasting over
a decade and numbering hundreds of letters - between the two men.
John Kasper and Ezra Pound examines the mutual influence the two
men exerted on each other in Pound's later life: how John Kasper
developed from a devotee of Pound's poetry to an active right-wing
agitator; how Pound's own ideas about race and American politics
developed in his discussions with Kasper and how this informed his
later poetry. Shedding a disturbing new light on Ezra Pound's
committed engagement with extreme right-wing politics in Civil
Rights-era America, this is an essential read for students of
20th-century literature.
The Barret Browning volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors
series offers a comprehensive selection of the works of one of the
nineteenth-century's most famous poets. The revaluation of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her
an established (indeed standard) author in university syllabuses in
Britain and in America. Yet the emphasis upon her contribution to a
female tradition has tended to rigidify Barrett Browning's
contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century,
just as her popular image as
ringleted-invalid-turned-romantic-heroine served sentimentally to
eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or
corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to
witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction
- from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond.
In keeping with the aims of the series, the selection honours the
original sequencing of the published works as the best means of
indicating the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus,
following fairly limited selections from published juvenilia, The
Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems
(1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833),
there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other
Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the
full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from
Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora
Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems
(1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful
selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence,
including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where
applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century. The
edition comes with full scholarly apparatus (introduction,
chronology, explanatory notes), though it follows the series policy
of recording only significant variants between editions.
Bovo d'Antona by Elye Bokher (Elyiahu ben Asher haLevi Ashkenazi,
1469-1549) is a chivalry poem written in Yiddish in Padoa, in the
year 1507, and printed under the author's supervision in Isny
(Germany) in the year 1541. The present book intends to present a
critical edition of this poem, together with a commentary. An
introduction will focus on various related questions, such as the
place of the Bovo d'Antona in European literature and in Italian
literature, Bovo d'Antona and the chivalric genre in Old Yiddish
literature, the analysis of the manuscript versions in comparison
with the printed edition, the relationship with the Italian source
and the readership. An appendix will deal with later
transformations of the Bovo-Bukh. "Bovo Bukh is an excellent
example of the relationship between romances and folktales,and
Rosenzweig's introduction and edition of this important early
Yiddish text will be appreciated by scholars of early Modern
literature and folk narrative." - Dr. David Elton Gay, Indiana
University, in: Fabula 59:1-2 (2018)
In this unparalleled study of the forms of Hebrew poetry,
preeminent authority Benjamin Harshav examines Hebrew verse during
three millennia of changing historical and cultural contexts. He
takes us around the world of the Jewish Diaspora, comparing the
changes in Hebrew verse as it came into contact with the Canaanite,
Greek, Arabic, Italian, German, Russian, Yiddish, and English
poetic forms. Harshav explores the types and constraints of free
rhythms, the meanings of sound patterns, the historical and
linguistic frameworks that produced the first accentual iambs in
English, German, Russian, and Hebrew, and the discovery of these
iambs in a Yiddish romance written in Venice in 1508/09. In each
chapter, the author presents an innovative analytical theory on a
particular poetic domain, drawing on his close study of thousands
of Hebrew poems.
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