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.

French Prose in 2000 stems in some important measure from work presented in September 1998 at the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990's held at Dalhousie University. A good number of papers given at that time, and since revisited in the light of exchanges, join here certain others specifically written for the purposes of this book. Together they constitute a wide-ranging and modally varied interrogation of the current state of French and francophone prose writing, its multifaceted manners, its richly divergent fascinations, its many theoretical or philosophical groundings. The book thus ceaselessly moves its attention from fictional biography to the roman noir, from the writing of Glissant and Chamoiseau to that of the etonnants voyageurs, from the powerful discourse of women such as Chawaf or Conde, Ernaux or Germain, Sallenave or Kristeva, to that of writers as diverse in their modes as Le Clezio and Quignard, Duras and Renaud Camus. All chapters focus, however, in near-exclusive measure, on the prose production of the last ten or twelve years.

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.

The study develops a new theoretical approach to the relationship between two media (jazz music and writing) and demonstrates its explanatory power with the help of a rich sampling of jazz poems. Currently, the mimetic approach to intermediality (e.g., the notion that jazz poetry imitates jazz music) still dominates the field of criticism. This book challenges that interpretive approach. It demonstrates that a mimetic view of jazz poetry hinders readers from perceiving the metaphoric ways poets rendered music in writing. Drawing on and extending recent cognitive metaphor theories (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier), it promotes a conceptual metaphor model that allows readers to discover the innovative ways poets translate "melody," "dynamics," "tempo," "mood," and other musical elements into literal and figurative expressions that invite readers to imagine the music in their mind's eye (i.e., their mind's ear).

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.

Elizabeth Bishop represents a full-scale examination of Bishop's work--poetry, prose, and selected unpublished material--to reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self as fluid and unfixed and, at the same time, how gender and sexual identity inform the experience of loss in the act of writing. Susan McCabe argues that Bishop counters modernist claims for an autonomous art object and an impersonal artist; Bishop's writing never represents an escape into perfected forms, but instead calls attention to the processes of language that construct identity. McCabe emphasizes how personal experience is deeply enmeshed with Bishop's poetics. Bishop's project returns to her early losses--the death of her father and her mother's madness--and uses them to disclose the instability of the concepts of self or place through a rhetoric of indeterminacy and uncertainty. Although Bishop has recently begun to receive the critical attention she deserves, this book uniquely brings loss to the foreground in connection with identity, gender, and the fashioning of a feminist poetics.

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 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.

Book 4 of Lucan's epic contrasts Europe with Africa. At the battle of Lerida (Spain), a violent storm causes the local rivers to flood the plain between the two hills where the opposing armies are camped. Asso's commentary traces Lucan's reminiscences of early Greek tales of creation, when Chaos held the elements in indistinct confusion. This primordial broth sets the tone for the whole book. After the battle, the scene switches to the Adriatic shore of Illyricum (Albania), and finally to Africa, where the proto-mythical water of the beginning of the book cedes to the dryness of the desert. The narrative unfolds against the background of the War of the Elements. The Spanish deluge is replaced by the desiccated desolation of Africa. The commentary contrasts the representations of Rome with Africa and explores the significance of Africa as a space contaminated by evil, but which remains an integral part of Rome. Along with Lucan's other geographic and natural-scientific discussions, Africa's position as a part of the Roman world is painstakingly supported by astronomic and geographic erudition in Lucan's blending of scientific and mythological discourse. The poet is a visionary who supports his truth claims by means of scientific discourse.

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 .

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.

"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.

An Introduction to the Ilaid and the Odyssey

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before, during and after the preparation of Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques, Wilfred Watson published several articles on Hebrew poetry in a wide range of periodicals. The present volume collects together the most significant of these writings, including a chapter from a book on chiasmus, as well as a few unpublished items. After an opening survey of current work on Hebrew verse the articles cover the following topics: parallelism (including half-line parallelism, previously almost unnoticed), antithesis, word pairs, chiasmus, figurative language and introductions to speech in verse. The last section deals with structural devices and a folktale motif in narrative verse, hyperbole, apostrophe and alliteration. Previously unpublished items are on the contribution of ethnopoetics, from the study of Native American literature to Hebrew narrative verse (a new topic in biblical studies), parallelism in the Song of Songs and a metaphor in Jeremiah. This anthology is intended as a companion volume to Classical Hebrew Poetry. It includes additions and corrections to that book and there are also several indices.>