This is a volume of international research on the European reception of P.B. Shelley.The widespread and culturally significant impact of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings in Europe constitutes a particularly interesting case for a reception study because of the variety of responses they evoked. If radical readers cherished the 'red' Shelley, others favoured the lyrical poet, whose work was, like Byron's, anthologized and set to music. His major dramatic works, "The Cenci" and "Prometheus Unbound", inspired numerous fin-de-siecle and expressionist dramatists and producers from Paris to Moscow. Shelley was read by, and influenced, the novelist Stendhal, the political theorist Engels, the Spanish symbolist Jimenez, and the Russian modernist poet Akhmatova.This exciting collection of essays by an international team of leading scholars considers translations, critical and biographical reviews, fictionalizations of his life, and other creative responses. It probes into transnational cross-currents to demonstrate the depth of Shelley's impact on European culture since his death in 1822. It will be an indispensable research resource for academics, critics, and writers with interests in Romanticism and its legacies.Our knowledge of British and Irish authors is incomplete and inadequate without an understanding of the perspectives of other nations on them. Each volume examines the ways authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed in Europe. In doing so, it throws light not only on the specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts.

The Roman poet Ovid was one of the most-imitated classical writers of the Elizabethan age and a touchstone for generations of English writers. In The Ovidian Vogue, Daniel Moss argues that poets appropriated Ovid not just to connect with the ancient past but also to communicate and compete within late Elizabethan literary culture.

Moss explains how in the 1590s rising stars like Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare adopted Ovidian language to introduce themselves to patrons and rivals, while established figures like Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton alluded to Ovid's works as a way to map their own poetic development. Even poets such as George Chapman, John Donne, and Ben Jonson, whose early work pointedly abandoned Ovid as cliche, could not escape his influence. Moss's research exposes the literary impulses at work in the flourishing of poetry that grappled with Ovid's cultural authority.

In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.

Comprising more than 30 substantial essays written by leading scholars, this companion constitutes an exceptionally broad-ranging and in-depth guide to one of America's greatest poets. It makes the best and most up-to-date thinking on Whitman available to students. It is designed to make readers more aware of the social and cultural contexts of Whitman's work, and of the experimental nature of his writing. It includes contributions devoted to specific poetry and prose works, a compact biography of the poet, and a bibliography.

Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her verse, especially her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, and her morbid embrace of death and pain. No work until now, however, has shown how her poetry reflects a search for an alternative, feminized discourse, a discourse that engages in an imaginative dialogue with Ruben Dario's recourse to literary paternity and undertakes an audacious rewriting of social, sexual, and poetic conventions.

In the first major exploration of Agustini's life and work, Cathy L. Jrade examines her energizing appropriation and reinvention of modernista verse and the dynamics of her breakthrough poetics, a poetics that became a model for later women writers.

This book develops a theory of multimodality - the participation of a text in more than one mode - centred on the poetry/poetics of Lillian Allen, Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and Marlene Nourbese Philip. How do these poets represent oral Caribbean English Creoles (CECs) in writing and negotiate the relationship between the high literary in Canadian letters and the social and historical meanings of CECs? How do the latter relate to the idea of "female and black"? Through fluid use of code- and mode-switching, the movement of Brand and Philip between creole and standard English, and written orality and standard writing forms part of their meanings. Allen's eye-spellings precisely indicate stereotypical creole sounds, yet use the phonological system of standard English. On stage, Allen projects a black female body in the world and as a speaking subject. She thereby shows that the implication of the written in the literary excludes her body's language (as performance); and she embodies her poetry to realize a 'language' alternative to the colonizing literary. Harris's creole writing helps her project a fragmented personality, a range of dialects enabling quite different personae to emerge within one body. Thus Harris, Brand, Philip, and Allen both project the identity "female and black" and explore this social position in relation to others. Considering textual multimodality opens up a wide range of material connections. Although written, this poetry is also oral; if oral, then also embodied; if embodied, then also participating in discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and a host of other systems of social organization and individual identity. Finally, the semiotic body as a mode (i.e. as a resource for making meaning) allows written meanings to be made that cannot otherwise be expressed in writing. In every case, Allen, Philip, Harris, and Brand escape the constraints of dominant media, refiguring language via dialect and mode to represent a black feminist sensibility.

This book investigates the various paraphrastic techniques employed by Nonnus of Panopolis (5th century AD) for his poetic version of the Gospel of John. The authors look at Nonnus' Paraphrase, the only extant poetic Greek paraphrase of the New Testament, in the light of ancient rhetorical theory while also exploring its multi-faceted relationship with poetic tradition and the theological debates of its era. The study shows how interpretation, cardinal both in ancient literary criticism and in theology, is exploited in a poem that is exegetical both from a philological and a Christian point of view and adheres, at the same time, to the literary principles of Hellenistic times and late antiquity.

This volume on Apollonius of Rhodes, whose "Argonautica" is the sole full-length epic to survive from the Hellenistic period, comprises articles by eighteen leading scholars from Europe and America. Their contributions cover a wide range of issues from the history of the text and the problems of the poet's biography through questions of style, literary technique and intertextual relations to the epic's literary and cultural reception. The aim of this 2nd edition is to give an up-to-date outline of the scholarly discussion in these areas and to provide a survey of recent and current trends in Apollonian studies which will be useful also to students of Hellenistic poetry in general.

The book illuminates the thinking and emotions of a young Caucasion who was brought up in New England, home of many famous poets and who had poets in his family tree.

The Sugata Saurabha is an epic poem that retells the story of the Buddha's life. It was published in 1947 in the Nepalese language, Newari, by Chittadhar Hridaya, one of the greatest literary figures of 20th-century Nepal. The text is remarkable for its comprehensiveness, artistry, and nuance. It covers the Buddha's life from birth to death and conveys his basic teachings with simple clarity. It is also of interest because, where the classical sources are silent, Hridaya inserts details of personal life and cultural context that are Nepalese. The effect is to humanize the founder and add the texture of real life. A third point of interest is the modernist perspective that underlies the author's manner of retelling this great spiritual narrative. This rendering, in a long line of accounts of the Buddha's life dating back almost 2,000 years, may be the last ever to be produced that conforms to the traditions of Indic classic poetry. It will not only appeal to scholars of Buddhism but will find use in courses that introduce students to the life of the Buddha.

American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poetics-a playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies-have been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order. Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poets-Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine-use hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditions-consumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversiveness-these poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles. Robbins shows that while these poets employ widely varying linguistic strategies and topical range, they share a common and deeply critical vision of American popular culture as it promulgates bourgeois capitalist and imperialist values and forecloses possibilities for independent thought and creative resistance. They also share the view that contemporary history can be reimagined in intellectually liberating ways through hybrid poetics.

Including applied readings, this book explores the divide between practical criticism and theory in 20th century criticism to propose a new way of reading poetry. The history of poetry criticism in the 20th Century is often told as the story of two opposing sides. On the one hand, practical criticism emphasized close reading and a concern with authorial intention and technique; by contrast, the 'theory revolution' reacted against this in favour of a concern with the anonymous ideological forces at play in the text. Critically exploring this history of 20th Century literary criticism, "On Modern Poetry" draws on the insights of both traditions to offer a new way of reading poetry. Taking students through the work of such critics as T.S. Eliot, William Empson, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, the book considers such topics as rhyme, poetic 'voice' and language. The second part of the book then goes on to apply these critical insights through close readings of poems by such writers as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alfred Lord Tennyson. A new exploration of poetry criticism in the last hundred years, "On Modern Poetry" is an essential guide for readers and students at all levels.

In "Meetings with the Master" poetry meets with Deity bringing forth a message that will encourage, admonish, correct, direct, deliver and always keep your eye focused to the Lord and His Word. Even the poetry written with lightness, or remembrances of past times, is laced with the Lord in-between the lines. Further you will find a section devoted to brief eye opening nuggets and exhortations hidden in God's Word of Truth. It is the author's hope that the reader will be challenged to seek a deeper experience with the Lord of all life and creation and to press forward in every area of life to a spirit of excellence.

Why is Old English poetry so preoccupied with mental actions and perspectives, giving readers access to minds of antagonists as freely as to those of protagonists? Why are characters sometimes called into being for no apparent reason other than to embody a psychological state? Britt Mize provides the first systematic investigation into these salient questions in Traditional Subjectivities. Through close analysis of vernacular poems alongside the most informative analogues in Latin, Old English prose, and Old Saxon, this work establishes an evidence-based foundation for new thinking about the nature of Old English poetic composition, including the 'poetics of mentality' that it exhibits. Mize synthesizes two previously disconnected bodies of theory - the oral-traditional theory of poetic composition, and current linguistic work on conventional language - to advance our understanding of how traditional phraseology makes meaning, as well as illuminate the political and social dimensions of surviving texts, through attention to Old English poets' impulse to explore subjective perspectives.

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 1951.

Ovid's Fasti, based on the festivals of the Roman year, is a brilliantly varied and original poem by one of the world's greatest storytellers, written in the late years of the emperor Augustus and cut short (only six books of the planned twelve were written) when the emperor sent the poet into exile. Its tone ranges from tragedy to farce, and its subject matter from astronomy and obscure ritual to Roman history and Greek mythology. Among the stories Ovid tells at length are Arion and the dolphin, the rape of Lucretia, the adventures of Dido's sister, the Great Mother's journey to Rome, the killing of Remus, the bloodsucking birds, and the murderous daughter of King Servius. The poem has been unjustly neglected until recently, and this accurate prose translation into modern English, with a scene-setting Introduction, will enable readers to appreciate its subtleties.

Arguing that the consecrated body in the Eucharist is one of the central metaphors structuring The Divine Comedy, this book is the first comprehensive exploration of the theme of transubstantiation across Dante's epic poem. Drawing attention first to the historical and theological tensions inherent in ideas of transubstantiation that rippled through Western culture up to the early fourteenth century, Sheila Nayar engages in a Eucharistic reading of both the "flesh" allusions and "metamorphosis" motifs that thread through the entirety of Dante's poem. From the cannibalistic resonances of the Ugolino episode in the Inferno to the Corpus Christi-like procession seminal to Purgatory, Nayar demonstrates how these sacrifice- and Host-related metaphors, allusions, and tropes lead directly and intentionally to the Comedy's final vision, that of the Eucharist itself. Arguing that the final revelation in Paradise is analogically "the Bread of Life," Nayar brings to the fore Christ's centrality (as sacrament) to The Divine Comedy-a reading that is certain to alter current-day thinking about Dante's poem.

The issue of the Jews deeply engaged Milton throughout his career, and not necessarily in ways that make for comfortable or reassuring reading today. While Shakespeare and Marlowe, for example, critiqued rather than endorsed racial and religious prejudice in their writings about Jews, the same cannot be said for Milton. The scholars in this collection confront a writer who participated in the sad history of anti-Semitism, even as he appropriated Jewish models throughout his writings. Well grounded in solid historical and theological research, the essays both collectively and individually offer an important contribution to the debate on Milton and Judaism, and will inspire new directions in Milton studies. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Milton and of seventeenth-century literature, but also to historians of the religion and culture of the period.

This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.

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 1987.