This collection of essays reassesses the importance of verse as a medium in the long eighteenth century, and as an invitation for readers to explore many of the less familiar figures dealt with, alongside the received names of the standard criticism of the period.

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.

This study shows how poets worked within and against the available forms of nature writing to challenge their place within physical, political, and cultural landscapes. Looking at the treatment of different ecosystems, it argues that writing about the environment allowed labouring-class poets to explore important social and aesthetic questions.

Warren's major theme--whether man can live on a purely naturalistic level--is seen as a parallel to the major intellectual currents of American literature in the past 25 years.

The thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose was a major bestseller - largely due to its robust treatment of 'natural' sexuality. Alastair Minnis's innovative study considers the ways in which Jean de Meun, in imitation of Ovid as understood within medieval scholarship, assumed the mock-mastership of love. The reception of the Rose is placed within the European history of literary criticism.

This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyzes the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that, rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasizes the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly, an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.

Born in 1749, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the giants of world literature and the last European to embody the multi-faceted expertise of the Renaissance personality. Assembled to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death, the essays included here are appropriately written from a variety of perspectives-- literary, humanistic, and scientific. A genuinely interdisciplinary collection, this volume is witness to the powerful influence Goethe's works have had on a wide range of subjects from fiction, drama, and art to physics, psychology, and psychiatry. The collection also demonstrates the extent to which his ideas have transcended national boundaries, as well as historic ones.

"These essays trace the Western poem as it confronts indigenous alterity in Latin America. Rather than extend Western conceptions of writing in search of an alleged Amerindian ethno-literature, Ajens approaches literature as a Western invention. This book discusses a wide range of indigenous American, Hispanic, and European texts, with a focus on language, authorship, genre, and translation"--

A Poetry of Things examines the works of four poets whose use of visual and material culture contributed to the remarkable artistic and literary production during the reign of Philip III (1598-1621). Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Gongora, Juan de Arguijo, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza cast cultural objects - ranging from books and tombstones to urban ruins, sculptures, and portraits - as participants in lively interactions with their readers and viewers across time and space. Mary E. Barnard argues that in their dialogic performance, these objects serve as sites of inquiry for exploring contemporary political, social, and religious issues, such as the preservation of humanist learning in an age of print, the collapse of empires and the rebirth of the city, and the visual culture of the Counter-Reformation. Her inspired readings explain how the performance of cultural objects, whether they remain in situ or are displayed in a library, museum, or convent, is the most compelling.

The tenth-century Old English lament and twentieth-century blues song each speak the language of a distinct poetic tradition, yet the voices are remarkably similar in their emotive expression of loneliness. This innovative study juxtaposes the texts of each corpus to explore the features that characterize their vocal poetics. McGeachy examines how the texts evoke the dynamic of performance and explores the role of recording--in manuscript and on 78 rpm record--in establishing the distinctive formulas of each genre. Featured are a study of blues artist Robert Johnson's work and a comparison of two anthologies: the Exeter Book and the Folkways "Anthology of American Folk Music."

Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian are the three most influential poets from Northern Ireland who have composed poems with a link to pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. Their attraction to the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union reflects the increasing fascination with Eastern European literature among western writers. Russian authors finding their way into the poetry are, among others, Alexander Pushkin, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky. By incorporating intertextual links into their work, Heaney, Paulin and McGuckian establish parallels between Russia and Northern Ireland in terms of history, politics, literature and culture. They attempt to reconsider the Northern Irish conflict through a Russian framework in order to subvert the established discourse of the Troubles based on British Unionism and Irish Nationalism. Their references to Russia allow the three poets to achieve a geographical and mental detachment in order to turn a fresh eye on the Northern Irish situation.

"In The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era, Lisa Szefel investigates the place of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry in transmitting ideas about political reform during the Progressive Era. It charts the work of poets, critics, and editors who created an institutional infrastructure of organizations, magazines, and prizes to nurture writers who addressed the problems wrought by unregulated industrial capitalism. Many of these figures were African Americans, women, and immigrants who forged literary networks and popularized political ideas that contributed in unrecognized ways to both the development of literary Modernism and a progressive articulation of rights"--

"DANTE AND SHAKESPEARE DIVIDE the modern world between them; there is no third." Understanding Dante attempts to explain and justify T. S. Eliot's bold claim. John Scott offers readers at all levels a critical overview of Dante's writings: five chapters deal with his New Life of love and poetry (Vita Nova), the Banquet of knowledge (Convivio), his Latin treatise on language and poetics (De Vulgari Eloquentia), Italian lyrics (Rime), and his blueprint for world government (Monarchia). The next five chapters concentrate on Dante's masterpiece, the Comedy. its structure, Dante's worldview (still relevant today), and the Comedy examined as a poem. Much has been written on Dante's moral, political, and religious ideas; important as these are, however, such discussions are perforce limited. It is above all as a work of poetry that the Divine Comedy maintains its appeal to readers of all backgrounds and beliefs. Firmly grounded in the latest advances of Dante scholarship, Understanding Dante offers an original and uniquely detailed, global analysis of Dante as poet of the Comedy that will be welcomed by those who read the poem in translation as well as by those fortunate enough to study the original Italian text. At the same time, Scott's book will be welcomed for its rich and insightful analysis of the whole corpus of Dante's writings, as well as Scott's mastery of the vast sea of critical literature in various languages. Scott bridges the gap that often exists between Dante studies in English-speaking countries and the great tradition of Dante scholarship in the poet's homeland. No work in English about the great Italian poet can rival Understanding Dante's scope in both depth and breadth ofclose reading and critical vision.

How does irony affect the evaluation and perception of the First World War both then and now? "Irony and the Poetry of the First World War "traces one of the major features of war poetry from the author's application as a means of disguise, criticism or psychological therapy to its perception and interpretation by the reader.

The sixteenth-century French poets Pierre de Ronsard and Guillaume Du Bartas enjoyed a wide, immediate and long-lasting, but varied and mixed reception throughout early modern Europe. Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe is the first book-length volume to explore the transnational reception histories of both poets in conjunction with each other. It takes into account the great variety of their readerships, including translators, imitating poets, poetical theorists, illustrators and painters, both male and female (Marie de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet), some of them illustrious (Tasso, King James VI and I of Scotland and England, Opitz...), others less known, even obscure, but worth to be saved from oblivion (such as the French Marc-Antoine Chalon, the English Mary Roper, and the Dutch poet Philibert van Borsselen). This volume offers a fascinating insight into the different reception modes in Europe and their underlying political, religious and literary identities. Contributors include: Peter Auger, Denis Bjai, Karel Bostoen , Philippe Chomety, Paola Cosentino, Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, Alisa van de Haar, Padraic Lamb, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Elisabeth Rothmund, Paul J. Smith, and Caroline Trotot.

Due to their popularity with the American counterculture, the poems attributed to Hanshan, Shide and Fenggan have been translated several times in recent decades. However, previous translations have either been broadly popular in nature or have failed to understand fully the colloquial qualities of the originals. This new version provides a complete Chinese/English edition of the poems, aimed at combining readability with scholarly accuracy. It will prove useful to students of Chinese poetry and of Chinese religion, as well as anyone interested in a better understanding of works that have proved so influential in the history of East Asian Buddhism and in world literature.

A new historical approach to Indian English literature Mary Ellis Gibson shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about figuration, multilingual literacies, and histories of nationalism than novels can. Gibson re-creates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that were experienced by writers in colonial India-writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities. Advancing new theoretical and historical paradigms for reading colonial literatures, Indian Angles makes accessible many writers heretofore neglected or virtually unknown. Gibson recovers texts by British women, by nonelite British men, and by persons who would, in the nineteenth century, have been called Eurasian. Her work traces the mutually constitutive history of English-language poets from Sir William Jones to Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Drawing on contemporary postcolonial theory, her work also provides new ways of thinking about British internal colonialism as its results were exported to South Asia. In lucid and accessible prose, Gibson presents a new theoretical approach to colonial and postcolonial literatures.

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.

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.

This book relates a story about the writing, reading, and reception of one text in three different cultural and political contexts across Europe. The focus is on the story of the Christian knight Elye and his Saracen princess Rosamunde, which was translated into Old Norse in the thirteenth century. This is a study of three of the manuscripts in which the work is preserved: one Old French manuscript from Flanders (BnF, fr. 25516, c. 1280) and two Old Norse manuscripts, one from Norway (DG 4-7 fol., c. 1270) and one from Iceland (Holm Perg 6 4 to, c. 1400). These manuscripts represent three different rhetorical and communicative situations and show how the writing and reading of the same text was conditioned by the respective cultural and political environment. The book innovatively conveys Old Norse culture as an active respondent, participant, and thus modulator of European literary tendencies. Tracing the translation, transmission, and transformation of the text throughout Europe redefines aspects of the Latin-vernacular nexus in the Middle Ages, and thus presents a new and valuable voice in the discussion of medieval European literary and cultural systems.

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.

While glosses on Heaney's verse forms figure more or less in critical accounts of his poetry, this is the first book to take the craft of his art as its focus. Setting out a historically informed approach to poetic form, the book places Heaney's developing versification in the context of mid-century Anglo-American theories of metre and rhythm.

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.