"Savage Songs & Wild Romances "considers the various types of poetry - from short songs and laments to lengthy ethnographic epics - which nineteenth-century settlers wrote about indigenous peoples as they moved into new territories in North America, South Africa, and Australasia. Drawing on a variety of texts (some virtually unknown), the author demonstrates the range and depth of this verse, suggesting that it exhibited far more interest in, and sympathy for, indigenous peoples than has generally been acknowledged. In so doing, he challenges both the traditional view of this poetry as derivative and eccentric, and more recent postcolonial condemnations of it as racist and imperialist. Instead, he offers a new, more positive reading of this verse, whose openness towards the presence of the indigenous Other he sees as an early expression of the tolerance and cultural relativity characteristic of modern Western society. Writers treated include George Copway, Alfred Domett, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, George McCrae, Thomas Pringle, George Rusden, Lydia Sigourney, and Alfred Street.

Virgil's story of Aeneas, exiled from fallen Troy and leading his people to a new life through the founding of Rome, was familiar in the middle ages. The first true and full translation into any form of English was completed in Scotland in 1513 by Gavin Douglas and published in print forty years later. His version (still considered by some to be the finest of all) is significant historically but also for its intrinsic qualities: vigour, faithfulness, and a remarkable flair for language. Douglas was a scholar as well as a poet and brought to his task a detailed knowledge of the Latin text and of its major commentators, together with a sensitive mastery of his own language, both Scots and English, contemporary and archaic. The present edition is the first to regularise his spelling and make access easier for the modern reader without compromising the authentic Scots-English blend of his language. Glossaries (side- and end-) explain obscurities in his vocabulary while the introduction and notes set the work in context and indicate how Douglas understands and refocusses the great Virgilian epic. It will be of interest to medievalists and Renaissance scholars, to classicists and to students of the English language, and not least to the general reader whom Douglas had especially in mind. Gordon Kendal is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English, University of St Andrews.

"Poetic Revolutionaries" is an exploration of the relationship between radical textual practice, social critique and subversion. From an introduction considering recent debates regarding the cultural politics of intertextuality allied to avant-garde practice, the study proceeds to an exploration of texts by a range of writers for whom formal and poetic experimentation is allied to a subversive politics: Jean Genet, Monique Wittig, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Kim Scott and Brian Castro. Drawing on theories of avant-garde practice, intertextuality, parody, representation, and performance such as those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gerard Genette, Margaret A. Rose, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Ross Chambers and Judith Butler, these readings explore how a confluence of writing strategies - covering the structural, narratological, stylistic and scenographic - can work to boost a text's subversive power.

Virgil's story of Aeneas, exiled from fallen Troy and leading his people to a new life through the founding of Rome, was familiar in the middle ages. The first true and full translation into any form of English was completed in Scotland in 1513 by Gavin Douglas and published in print forty years later. His version (still considered by some to be the finest of all) is significant historically but also for its intrinsic qualities: vigour, faithfulness, and a remarkable flair for language. Douglas was a scholar as well as a poet and brought to his task a detailed knowledge of the Latin text and of its major commentators, together with a sensitive mastery of his own language, both Scots and English, contemporary and archaic. The present edition is the first to regularise his spelling and make access easier for the modern reader without compromising the authentic Scots-English blend of his language. Glossaries (side- and end-) explain obscurities in his vocabulary while the introduction and notes set the work in context and indicate how Douglas understands and refocusses the great Virgilian epic. It will be of interest to medievalists and Renaissance scholars, to classicists and to students of the English language, and not least to the general reader whom Douglas had especially in mind. Gordon Kendal is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English, University of St Andrews.

This important new book is the first monograph on children's poetry written between 1780 and 1830, when non-religious children's poetry publishing came into its own. Introducing some of the era's most significant children's poets, the book shows how the conventions of children's verse and poetics were established during the Romantic era.

An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.

Every poem, Robert Frost declared, ""is an epitome of the great predicament, a figure of the will braving alien entanglements."" This study considers what Frost meant by those entanglements, how he braved them in his poetry, and how he invited his readers to do the same. In the process it contributes significantly to a new critical awareness of Frost as a complex artist who anticipated postmodernism - a poet who invoked literary traditions and conventions frequently to set himself in tension with them. Using the insights of reader-response theory, Judith Oster explains how Frost appeals to readers with his apparent accessibility and then, because of the openness of his poetry's possibilities, engages them in the process of constructing meaning. Frost's poems, she demonstrates, teach the reader how they should be read; at the same time, they resist closure and definitive reading. The reader's acts of encountering and constructing the poems parallel Frost's own encounters and acts of construction. Commenting at length on a number of individual poems, Oster ranges in her discussion from the ways in which the poet dramatizes the inadequacy of the self alone to the manner in which he ""reads"" the Book of Genesis or the writing of Emerson. Oster illuminates, finally, the central conflict in Frost: his need to be read well against his fear of being read; his need to share his creation against his fear of its appropriation by others.

This comprehensive overview of Julia Alvarez's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry offers biographical information and parses the author's important works and the intentions behind them. Reading Julia Alvarez reviews the author's acclaimed body of writing, exploring both the works and the woman behind them. The guide opens with a brief biography that includes the saga of the Alvarez family's flight from the Dominican Republic when Julia was ten, and carries her story through the philanthropic organic coffee farm that she and her husband now operate in that nation. The heart of the book is a broad overview of Alvarez's literary achievements, followed by chapters that discuss individual works and a chapter on her poetry. The book also looks at how the author's writings grapple with and illuminate contemporary issues, and at Alvarez's place in pop culture, including an examination of film adaptations of her books. Through this guide, readers will better understand the relevance of Alvarez's works to their own lives and to new ways of thinking about current events. Chapters on individual works to help the user understand the author's plots, themes, settings, characters, and style Discussion questions in each chapter to foster student research and facilitate book-club discussion Sidebars of interesting information An up-to-date guide to Internet and print resources for further study

This is a book about the biographical afterlives of the Romantic poets and the creation of literary biography as a popular form. It focuses on the Lives of six major poets of the period: Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Landon, published from the 1820s, by Thomas Moore, Mary Shelley, Thomas De Quincey, and others. It situates these within the context of the development of biography as a genre from the 1780s to the 1840s. Starting with Johnson, Boswell, and female collective Lives, it looks at how the market success of biography was built on its representation and publication of domestic life. In the 1820s and 30s biographers 'domesticated' Byron, Shelley, and other poets by situating them at home, opening up their (often scandalous) private lives to view, and bringing readers into intimate contact with greatness.
Biography was an influential transmitter of the myth of 'the Romantic poet', as the self-creating, masculine genius, but it also posed one of the first important challenges to that myth, by revealing failures in domestic responsibility that were often seen as indicative of these writers' inattention to the needs of the reader. The Domestication of Genius is the most comprehensive account to date of the shaping of the Romantic poets by biography in the nineteenth-century.
Written in a lively and accessible style, it casts new light on the literary culture of the 1830s and the transition between Romantic and Victorian conceptions of authorship. It offers a powerful re-evaluation of Romantic literary biography, of major biographers of the period, and of the posthumous reputations of the Romantic poets.

This title provides a comprehensive guide to studying Wordsworth at undergraduate level. William Wordsworth continues to be one of the most popular and widely studied poets from the nineteenth century. This Reader's Guide provides an overview of Wordsworth's career, which began in obscurity, persisted through ridicule, and culminated finally in popular success and acclaim. It introduces readers to the literary, philosophical, and political contexts crucial to understanding Wordsworth's poetry, offering fresh approaches for reading his most important poems in light of recent developments in literary studies while also spotlighting traditional ones. This guide explores the reasons why Wordsworth continues to be the leading figure of British Romantic literature. It is an indispensable guide to studying Wordsworth's poetry, language, contexts and criticism. "Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

Was Ezra Pound the first theorist of world literature? Or did he inaugurate a form of comparative literature that could save the discipline from its untimely demise? Would he have welcomed the 2008 financial crisis? What might he say about America's economic dependence on China? Would he have been appalled at the rise of the "digital humanities," or found it amenable to his own quasi-social scientific views about the role of literature in society? What, if anything, would he find to value in today's economic and aesthetic discourses? Ezra Pound in the Present collects new essays by prominent scholars of modernist poetics to engage the relevance of Pound's work for our times, testing whether his literature was, as he hoped it would be, "news that stays news."

Authorship and Greek Song is a collection of papers dealing with various aspects of authorship in the song culture of Ancient Greece. In this cultural context the idea of the poet as author of his poems is complicated by the fact that poetry in archaic Greece circulated as songs performed for a variety of audiences, both local and "global" (Panhellenic). The volume's chapters discuss questions about the importance of the singers/performers; the nature of the performance occasion; the status of the poet; the authority of the poet/author and/or that of the performer; and the issues of authenticity arising when poems are composed under a given poet's name. The volume offers discussions of major authors such as Pindar, Sappho, and Theognis.

The epic calls to mind the famous works of ancient poets such as Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. These long, narrative poems, defined by valiant characters and heroic deeds, celebrate events of great importance in ancient times. In this thought-provoking study, Christopher N. Phillips shows in often surprising ways how this exalted classical form proved as vital to American culture as it did to the great societies of the ancient world.

Through close readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Sigourney, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville, as well as the transcendentalists, Phillips traces the rich history of epic in American literature and art from early colonial times to the late nineteenth century. Phillips shows that far from fading in the modern age, the epic form was continuously remade to frame a core element of American cultural expression. He finds the motive behind this sustained popularity in the historical interrelationship among the malleability of the epic form, the idea of a national culture, and the prestige of authorship--a powerful dynamic that extended well beyond the boundaries of literature.

By locating the epic at the center of American literature and culture, Phillips's imaginative study yields a number of important finds: the early national period was a time of radical experimentation with poetic form; the epic form was crucial to the development of constitutional law and the professionalization of visual arts; engagement with the epic synthesized a wide array of literary and artistic forms in efforts to launch the United States into the arena of world literature; and a number of writers shaped their careers around revising the epic form for their own purposes.

Rigorous archival research, careful readings, and long chronologies of genre define this magisterial work, making it an invaluable resource for scholars of American studies, American poetry, and literary history.

The Romantic phenomenon of multiple texts has been shaped by the link between revision and authorial intent. However, what has been overlooked are the profound implications of multiple and contradictory versions of the same text for a materialist approach; using the works of Coleridge as a case study and the afterlife of the French Revolution as the main theme, this monograph lays out the methodology for a more detailed multi-layered analysis. Scrutinising four works of Coleridge (two poems, a newspaper article and a play), where every major variant is read as a separate work with its own distinct socio-historical context, Ve-Yin Tee challenges the notion that any one text is representative of its totality. By re-reading Coleridge in the light of alternative textual materials within that time, he opens a wider scope for meaning and the understanding of Coleridge's oeuvre.

A repository of subversive, melancholic and existentialist themes and ideas, the rubaiyat (quatrains) that make up the collected poems attributed to the 12th century Persian astronomer Omar Khayyam have enchanted readers for centuries. In this modern translation, complete with critical introduction and epilogue, Juan Cole elegantly renders the verse for contemporary readers. Exploring such universal questions as the meaning of life, fate and how to live a good life in the face of human mortality, this translation reveals anew why this singular collection of poems has struck a chord with such a temporally and culturally diverse audience, from the wine houses of medieval Iran to the poets of Western twentieth century modernism.

Jami in Regional Contexts: The Reception of 'Abd Al-Rahman Jami's Works in the Islamicate World is the first attempt to present in a comprehensive manner how 'Abd al-Rahman Jami (d. 898/1492), a most influential figure in the Persian-speaking world, reshaped the canons of Islamic mysticism, literature and poetry and how, in turn, this new canon prompted the formation of regional traditions. As a result, a renewed geography of intellectual practices emerges as well as questions surrounding authorship and authority in the making of vernacular cultures. Specialists of Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Georgian, Malay, Pashto, Sanskrit, Urdu, Turkish, and Bengali thus provide a unique connected account of the conception and reception of Jami's works throughout the Eurasian continent and maritime Southeast Asia.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

Though often assumed by scholars to be a product of traditional, and perhaps oral, compositional practices comparable to those found in early Greek epic, archaic elegy has not until this point been analyzed in similar detail with respect to such verse-making techniques. This volume is intended to redress some of this imbalance by exploring several issues related to the production of Greek elegiac poetry. By investigating elegy's metrical partitioning and its localizing patterns of repeated phraseology, Traditional Elegy makes clear that the oral-formulaic processes lying at the heart of Homeric epic bear close resemblance to those that also originally made archaic elegy possible. However, the volume's argument is then able to be pressed even further by looking at the most common metrical "anomaly" in early elegy-epic correption-in order to demonstrate that elegiac poets in the Archaic Period were not simply mimicking an earlier productive style but were actively engaging with such traditional techniques in order to produce and reproduce their own poems. Because correption exhibits several patterns of employment that depend upon the meshing and adapting of traditional phraseological units, it becomes clear that in elegy--just as it is in epic--this metrical phenomenon is inextricably entwined with traditional techniques of verse-composition, and we therefore have strong evidence that elegiac poets of the Archaic Period were still making active use of these oral-formulaic techniques, even if actual oral composition itself cannot be proven for any individual author or poetic fragment. The implications of such findings are quite large, as they require a wholesale shift in our modern methods of inquiry into elegy for a wide range of concerns of meter, phraseology, and even the much broader issues of intended meaning and overall aesthetics.

Conversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall's evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928-2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of ""Ox Cart Man"" to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon's death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process, the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the elusive psychology of creativity and loss.