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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets > General
The present volume, which contains miscellaneous English and Latin
verse, written throughout his career, shows Smart as he appeared to
his contemporaries: a brilliant but wayward scholar, who threw away
a life of distinction at Cambridge to engage in the raffish world
of the London theaters and pleasure gardens. By presenting the
poems in chronological order, it also reveals the pattern of his
evolution from both academic and popular roles into a poet
dedicated to Christian service. Over thirty pieces in this volume
have not appeared in any previous collection, and several are
reprinted for the first time since the 18th century. Translations
are provided for all Latin poems.
Epic Negation examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry
over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the
method of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to conceive a
negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of
disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force
of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the
function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and
late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical
reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it
prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the
editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review's
totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic's critical
function from its style, Eliot not only includes history
differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account
of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of
a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war's
onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone
underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis
MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of
unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against
consciousness. With H.D.'s war trilogy, produced in a terse
exchange with Freud's Moses, even the poetic image lapses,
associating epic with the silent historical force of the
unconscious as such.
Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background,
discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to
the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play
or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the
piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters;
learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures,
patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the
Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice
on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the
text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test
questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare
for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV,
theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen
text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text,
enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and sister to Sir Philip Sidney, is the most important woman writer of the Elizabethan era outside the royal family. This scholarly edition in two volumes is the first to include all her extant works: Volume I prints her three original poems, the disputed 'Dolefull Lay of Clorinda', her translations from Petrarch, Mornay, and Garnier, and all her known letters. Volume II contains her metrical paraphrases of Psalms 44-150. The edition also provides a biographical introduction, discussion of her sources and methods of composition, textual annotation, and a detailed commentary.
Approaching the writings of Mary Wroth through a fresh 21st-century
lens, this volume accounts for and re-invents the literary
scholarship of one of the first "canonized" women writers of the
English Renaissance. Essays present different practices that emerge
around "reading" Wroth, including editing, curating, and digital
reproduction.
American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a
framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by
eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese'
subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the
contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems
alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between
1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous,
the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets
attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of
commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent
dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in
the English language, for the rise of China in the American
imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including
the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese
universities working on American literature and comparative
cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and
students in the west.
"A Manner of Utterance" offers a collection of responses to J.H.
Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets,
composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works
is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton
(also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard
Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas
Templeton and Erik Ulman.
This book attempts to explain the nature of the influence of
Platonism on English poetry, exclusive of drama, of the 16th and
17th centuries. The subject is not treated from the standpoint of
the individual poet but, rather, the whole body of English poetry
of the period is interpreted as an integral output of the spiritual
thought and life of the time.
This is a fascinating literary-critical study of the ways the
Virgin Mary has been presented in English poetry, from the later
Middle Ages to today. Ranging across a vast variety of approaches
to this timeless topic, Spurr shows how poets have spoken of their
own beliefs and preoccupations (and of their cultures and their
historical periods) in giving poetic expression to the most famous
woman in history. Spurr's ground-breaking account is a 'must read'
for anyone interested in the history of poetry, of religious verse
and of representations of the eternal feminine in literature.
This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban
space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period.
Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the
volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites
irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended
reading of The Waste Land .
This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John
Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates
various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the
widely divergent views about his attitudes towards women, the focus
on the Songs and Sonets to the exclusion of his other works, and
the tendency to separate discussions of his poetry and prose. On a
broader scale, it joins a small but growing number of feminist
re-readings of Donne's works. Using the cultural criticism of
French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Meakin explores works
throughout Donne's career, from his earliest verse letters to
sermons preached while Divinity Reader at Lincoln's Inn and Dean of
St. Paul's in London. Donne's articulations of four feminine
figures in particular are examined: the Muse, Sappho, Eve as `the
mother of mankind', and a young girl who lived and died in Donne's
own time, Elizabeth Drury. Meakin's reading of Donne's
self-described `masculine perswasive force' asserting itself upon
the `incomprehensibleness' of the feminine suggests that the Donne
canon needs to be reassessed as even richer and more complex than
previously asserted, and that his reputation as a supreme
Renaissance poet - revived at the beginning of this century - needs
to be carried into the next.
Best remembered today as the author of The Song of Hiawatha,
Longfellow continues to be one of the most popular poets in
American literary history. This book is a guide to his life and
writings. A brief introductory essay overviews Longfellow's life
and accomplishments. A chronology then summarizes the chief events
in his career. Hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries follow,
discussing individual poems, his other writings, his family members
and professional associates, and topics related to his life and
literary achievements. Entries list works for further reading, and
the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography. Longfellow
has also enjoyed fame worldwide; in England, his poems outsold
those of Browning and Tennyson. In addition to being a gifted poet,
Longfellow had a brilliant career as a college professor. He wrote
numerous critical works and translations, and was also a leading
American Dante scholar. He frequently wrote letters, and his
admirers often sought his advice on personal and professional
matters.
"A Sense of Regard," says Laura McCullough, "is an effort to
collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and
considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and
race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared,
the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases."
The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse
racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style
from the personal and lyrical to the critical, are organized into
four broad groupings: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing
and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself.
To read them is to listen in as the contributors speak what they
know, discover what they do not, and in the process often find
something new in themselves and their topic. As a reader you are
invited, says McCullough, "to be moved from one sense of regard to
another: to be provoked and to linger in that state. . . . To
query, quarrel, and consider."
"A Sense of Regard" grew out of a recent gathering of the
Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where a poet's
comments on the work of another sparked impassioned and contentious
conversations in person, in print, and online. Though race is often
thought of as an age-old topic in poetry, McCullough saw clearly
that there is still much to discuss, study, and tease apart. Moving
the conversation beyond the specificity of those initial AWP
encounters, with their mostly black/white focus on race, these
essays provide a context and a safe starting place for some
urgently needed discussions we too rarely have.
While the sociology of literary translation is well-established,
and even flourishing, the same cannot be said for the sociology of
poetry translation. Sociologies of Poetry Translation features
scholars who address poetry translation from sociological
perspectives in order to catalyze new methods of investigating
poetry translation. This book makes the case for a move from the
singular 'sociology of poetry translation' to the pluralist
'sociologies', in order to account for the rich variety of
approaches that are currently emerging to deal with poetry
translation. It also aims to bridge the gap between the 'cultural
turn' and the 'sociological turn' in Translation Studies, with the
range of contributions showcasing the rich diversity of approaches
to analysing poetry translation from socio-cultural,
socio-historical, socio-political and micro-social perspectives.
Contributors draw on theorists including Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas
Luhmann and assess poetry translation from and/or into Catalan,
Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Slovakian,
Spanish, Swahili and Swedish. A wide range of topics are featured
in the book including: trends in poetry translation in the modern
global book market; the commissioning and publishing of poetry
translations in the United States of America; modern
English-language translations of Dante; women poet-translators in
mid-19th century Ireland; translations of Russian poetry
anthologies into modern English; the translation of Shakespeare's
plays and sonnets in post-colonial Tanzania and socialist
Czechoslovakia; translations and translators of Italian poetry into
20th and 21st century Sweden; modern European poet-translators; and
collaborative writing between prominent English and Spanish
poet-translators.
Constructing Coleridge examines Coleridge's penchant for
re-invention and carefully demonstrates how the Coleridge family
editors followed his lead in constructing his posthumous
reputation. Following his death in 1834, the family editors faced
immediate scandals and sought to construct the Coleridge they
preferred in these trying circumstances.
"Byron's Romantic Celebrity" offers a new history and theory of
modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus
that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print
and culture and that Lord Byron should be understood as one of its
earliest examples and most astute critics. Under that rubric, it
investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour
and commercial enterprise, the material conditions of Byron's
publications, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the
self.
This study considers George Eliot's novels in relation to Dante and
to nineteenth-century Italian culture during the Italian national
revival and shows how these helped shape her fiction. Thompson
argues that Eliot was able to draw selectively on a powerful
Risorgimento mythology of national regeneration and that her
engagement with the work of Dante Alighieri increases steadily in
her later novels, where the Divine Comedy becomes a sustaining
metaphor for Eliot's meliorist vision and for her theme of moral
growth through suffering.
Famously, Blake believed that "without contraries" there could be
no "progression." Conflict was integral to his artistic vision, and
his style, but it had more to do with critical engagement than any
urge to victory. The essays in this volume look at conflict as it
marked Blake's thinking on politics, religion and the visual arts.
An Introduction to the Ilaid and the Odyssey
The story of the Beatles begins not with the rock-'n'-roll
revolution of the 1950s, but in the Romantic revolution of the
1790s, when age-old notions about literature, politics, education,
and social relations changed forever. Tracing the Beatles to their
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetic, musical, and
philosophic roots, "The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the
Beatles "weaves literary criticism and cultural analysis together
to how the Fab Four--in their songs, personalities, and relations
with each other--mirror the themes and history of Anglo-American
Romanticism.
One of the characteristic features of Victorian poetry is dimness,
a vanishing away-things blur with the motion of their passing,
which seems inseparable from the mind's fading as it lets them go.
Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and the young Yeats are elegists of
the self; they render life as transparent, ghostlike, dissolving,
ungraspable, nearly unrememberable. This vanishing away, this
dimness, of Victorian poetry is most obvious in the twilights,
mists, shadows, deep horizons, and flowing waters of its central
landscape, but it is also a matter of sound and syntax, of
repetition and rhythm, texture and line movement. Vanishing Lives
examines these features and links them to larger issues, such as
the psychology of the individual poets, and the Victorian and
modern frames of mind. The tendencies under consideration are less
ideas than forms or styles of feeling. They are so universal in the
nineteenth century that they may not seem to call for comment, but
for all their vagueness they are deep, powerful, resistant to
change-an essential stratum of the experience of Victorian poetry.
For poets like Yeats, who struggled to move beyond them, they were
far more than the trappings of an outmoded poetry. They were a
deeply ingrained aesthetic, a style, a morality, not only a way of
art to be revised, but a way of living to be outgrown-a Tennysonian
way.
This is a study of ancient didactic poetry, a type of literature which uses verse as the medium for teaching theoretical knowledge or practical skills. Volk combines a general discussion of didactic poetry as a genre in Greek and Latin literature with detailed interpretations of four famous Latin didactic poems by Lucretius, Vergil, Ovid, and Manilius.
Byron is at the forefront of debate on politics, gender, sexuality,
reception studies and popular culture in the Romantic period. This
collection presents twelve outstanding new essays on Byron by
leading critics from the US, Canada, and the UK including Steven
Bruhm, Peter Cochran, Paul Curtis, Caroline Franklin, Peter Kitson,
Ghislaine McDayter, Tim Morton, David Punter and Pamela Kao,
Michael Simpson, Philip Shaw, Nanora Sweet and Susan Wolfson.
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