Richard Hooker (1554-1600) is one of the greatest theologians of the Church of England. In the light of fierce recent debate, this book argues vigorously against the new orthodoxy that Hooker was a Reformed or Calvinist theologian. In so doing it considers such central religious questions as human freedom, original sin, whether people can deserve salvation, and the nature of religious authority.

A beautiful and inspiring collection of poetry by Maya Angelou, author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS and 'a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' (BARACK OBAMA). 'I write about being a Black American woman, however, I am always talking about what it's like to be a human being. This is how we are, what makes us laugh, and this is how we fall and how we somehow, amazingly, stand up again' Maya Angelou Maya Angelou's poetry - lyrical and dramatic, exuberant and playful - speaks of love, longing, partings; of Saturday night partying, and the smells and sounds of Southern cities; of freedom and shattered dreams. 'Her poetry is just as much a part of her autobiography as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the volumes that follow.' Kirkus 'It is true poetry she is writing . . . it has an innate purity about it, unquenchable dignity' M. F. K. Fisher

Grounded in historical sources and informed by recent work in cultural, sociological, geographical and spatial studies, Romantic Geography illuminates the nexus between imaginative literature and geography in William Wordsworth's poetry and prose. It shows that eighteenth-century social and political interest groups contested spaces through maps, geographical commentaries and travel literature; and that by configuring 'utopian' landscapes Wordsworth himself participated in major social and political controversies in post-French Revolutionary England.

Today Blake scholarship is experiencing a period of unprecedented variety and mutuality. These essays reflect the methodological cross-fertilisations now taking place in Blake scholarship and explore the range of debates and contentions generated by these encounters, embracing figurative, structural, and material readings of Blake's life and works.

Oxford Readings in Catullus is a collection of articles that represent a sampling of the most interesting and important work on Catullus from around 1950 to 2000, together with three very short pieces from the Renaissance. The readings, selected for their intrinsic interest and importance, are intended to be thought-provoking (and in some cases provocative) and to challenge readers to look at Catullus in different ways. They demonstrate a number of approaches - stylistic, historical, literary-historical, New Critical, and theoretical (of several flavours). Such hermeneutic diversity is particularly appropriate in the case of Catullus, whose oeuvre is famously - some might say notoriously - varied in length, genre, tone, and subject matter. The collection as a whole demonstrates what has interested Catullus' readers in the last half century and suggests some of the ways in which they might approach his poetry in the future. It is accompanied by an introduction by Julia Haig Gaisser on themes in Catullan criticism from 1950 to 2000.

"This book consists mostly of a title and first-line index, (frequently requested by general readers), supplemented by indexes to authors and to 1,100 subjects." Choice

It has long been assumed that the language of Roman poetry was constructed under the dictates of elaborately defined rules of rhetoric, and its content determined according to the system of comparable classifications called invention. This belief has persisted in spite of the difficulty of fitting the works of Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius, and Tibullus into such a rigid scheme. In this book Gordon Williams demonstrates that, although Ovid and his successors did indeed assimilate their poetry to the rhetorical rules devised for prose, the earlier poets employed a quite different method. Williams sees this method as falling into either a metaphorical or metonymic mode, both of which permitted the poet "to say one thing and mean another." Delicate and often startling transitions of thought could be grasped-though not necessarily on first reading-by readers "assumed by the poet to have a special access to the poet's process of thought." This access presupposed similarities of "education, social position, and sympathetic understanding." Through close analyses of many poems, Williams shows how poets in the fifty years before Horace's death exploited metaphor, metonymy, and a third device that he calls thematic anticipation to evoke subtle associations of thought. In doing so he elucidates problems of Latin poems that have been generally misunderstood almost since they day they were written.

This book gathers together some of the most important and influential scholarly articles of the last sixty to seventy years (three of which are translated into English here for the first time) on the Roman poet Lucretius. Lucretius' philosophical epic, the De Rerum Natura or On the Nature of the Universe (c.55 BC), seeks to convince its reader of the validity of the rationalist theories of the Hellenistic thinker Epicurus. The articles collected in this volume explore Lucretius' poetic and argumentative technique from a variety of perspectives, and also consider the poem in relation to its philosophical and literary milieux, and to the values and ideology of contemporary Roman society. All quotations in Latin or Greek are translated.

This book is a study of war and the perceptions of war. It deals specifically with the British Romantic period writers who lived through the Napoleonic wars, and the way in which those wars affected the writing of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and many of their contemporaries. Watson discusses the particular fascination of those wars, and the way in which they affected a way of thinking about war that lasted until the early twentieth century.

This new collection of essays by major scholars in the field looks at the ways in which cross-fertilization has taken place in Gothic writing from France, Germany, Britain and America over the last 200 years, and argues that Gothic writing reflects international exchanges in theme and form.

This is the first book to look at the quasi-religious aspects of the romantic cult of Shakespeare. Focusing on England, Hungary, and some other European countries, the book explores the latent religious patterns in the appropriation of Shakespeare from the 1769 Stratford Jubilee to the tercentenary of 1864. Surveying both the verbal and non-verbal manifestations of the Shakespeare cult, the author highlights their analogies with those of traditional religious cults and shows the appropriation of Shakespeare and his texts to be inseparable from quasi-religious acts of reverence such as literary pilgrimages, relic worship, the erection and dedication of monuments, and public celebrations of anniversaries. This cult made use of some important romantic notions (genius, originality, imagination, transcendental analogies of artistic creation), and the ensuing quasi-transcendental authority was to be utilized for political purposes. The book suggests a theoretical framework and a comprehensive anthropological context for the interpretation of literature.

In the winter of 1798-99, shut up in the freezing German town of Goslar, William Wordsworth began producing a series of lyrical fragments that appeared first in letters written to Coleridge and emerged eventually as source texts for "The Prelude". These lyrics are revolutionary because they reconstruct a new version of the autobiographical "I". This work explores the many voices of the poetic speaker "Wordsworth" and their relationship to the historical figure who shared the same name.

Provides an introduction to the life and works of Ezra Pound, a major modernist poet, theorist and literary critic. Throughout his life Pound was regarded by many to be a contentious and controversial figure, and since his death in 1972, theoretical, literary, political and biographical comentators have done much to perpetuate this view. Peter Wilson's survey, however, presents a balanced view of his life and work allowing the reader to judge for themselves. The major sections of the book offer introductions to the complex life and work of Pound, outlining the various cultural, political and literary issues which are important to a full understanding of his place in twentieth century English literature. Critical commentaries are then given on all of Pound's major poetry, adopting some analytical techniques from stylistics. Brief biographies of important figures in Pound's career, and in the development of literary modernism are provided. A gazeteer, glossary, and suggestions for further reading complete the book.

"Astute." Times Literary Supplement Beginning in the late 1930s, this is the first book-length critical study of Larkin's early work: his poetry, novels, short fictions, essays, and letters. The book tells the story of Philip Larkin's early literary development, starting with Larkin's earliest literary efforts and his remarkable correspondence with Jim Sutton, and ending at the point Larkin's maturity begins, with the writing of his first great poems. In providing a comprehensive and systematic study of this part of Larkin's life, this book also presents a new and surprising narrative of Larkin's development. Critics have presented Larkin's early career as a false start which he overcame by swapping Yeats's influence for Hardy's. Having re-discovered Hardy's poetry in 1946, the story goes, Larkin realised the potential of writing about his own life, and disavowed Yeats. Central to this book's controversial counter-narrative is an insistence on the significance of Brunette Coleman, the female heteronym Larkin invented in 1943. Three years before his re-discovery of Hardy, Larkin wrote a strange and unique series of works for schoolgirls under Coleman's name. These writings not only led him away from Yeats and other hindering influences, but also away from himself. Whereas the Yeats-to-Hardy narrative emphasises the autobiographical qualities of Larkin's mature verse, Early Larkin proposes that the writer's breakthrough was a result of his burgeoning 'interest in everything outside himself' - itself the consequence of his curious experiment with Brunette Coleman.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a richly imaginative life that he expressed in his poems. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times and as the creator of a poetry that continues to shape how we understand and define ourselves. A lawyer who rose to become an insurance-company vice president, Stevens composed brilliant poems on long walks to work and at other stolen moments. His first book of poems, Harmonium, published when he was forty-four, drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. Over time he became acquainted with peers such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, but his personal style remained unique. The complexity of Stevens's poetry rests on emotional, philosophical, and linguistic tensions that thread their way intricately through his poems. And while he can be challenging to understand, Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to read.

This collection represents some of the best recent critical writing on Edmund Spenser, a major Renaissance English poet. The essays cover the whole of Spensers work, from early literary experiments such as The Shepeardes Calendar, to his unfinished crowning work,The Fairie Queene. The introduction provides an overview of critical responses to Spenser, setting his work and the debates which it has generated in their perspective contexts: new historicist, post-structural, psychoanalytic and feminist. His study also covers the critical responses of leading British, Irish and American scholars.

Paradise Lost has excited and provoked poets and critics for over 300 years. This introduction provides an accessible route into Milton's influential epic poem, guiding students through each of the twelve books by a combination of close textual analysis and summary of key themes and techniques. Without assuming prior knowledge, Nutt helps navigate the book's biblical and classical background and its relationship to seventeenth-century history. Focusing on developing the reading skills needed to approach this important and complex poem independently, A Guide to Paradise Lost is essential reading for all students of Milton.

Marvell and Liberty is a collection of original essays by leading scholars which treats this major poet in an entirely new light. Uniquely, it gives equal attention to the full range of Marvell's writings. Marvell is a writer deeply implicated in the history of his time, and as the essays in this volume show, also exercised a potent political influence after his death. Marvell and Liberty constitutes a major reassessment of a figure who lived much of his life close to the epicentre of the revolutionary upheavals of the seventeenth century.

Despite contemporary historical study of her contexts, Christina Rossetti continues to haunt the reader as a displaced subjectivity emptied of history. Through an analysis of the posthumous in her work, the construction of Christina Rossetti by her brothers, and the history of reception, this study asks how speaking with the dead can avoid critical ventriloquy. The figure of the mother is offered as a paradigm for theorizing a new reading that refuses to exorcise the ghost of Christina Rossetti.

Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity. Following organicism from its crucial radicalization in German Idealism, it shows how both Coleridge and Wordsworth developed some of their most profound ideas and poetry on its basis. Armstrong shows how the tenets and ideals of organicism--despite much criticism--remain an insistent, if ambivalent, backdrop for much of our current thought, including the work of Derrida amongst others.

This new study explores the poetic tradition of the love sonnet sequence in English as written by women from 1621-1931. It connects this tradition to ways of speaking desire in public in operation today, and to the development of theories of subjectivity in Western culture.

This literary life of the best-loved of all the major Romantic writers uses Coleridge's own "Biographia Literaria" as its starting point and destination. The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the "Biographia" was Coleridge's major statement to an embattled literary culture in which he sought to define and defend, not just his own, but all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge and his life in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it, and is a 'must-read' for any student or scholar of Coleridge.

From antiquity to the Renaissance the pursuit of patronage was central to the literary career, yet relationships between poets and patrons were commonly conflicted, if not antagonistic, necessitating compromise even as they proffered stability and status. Was it just a matter of speaking lies to power? The present study looks beyond the rhetoric of dedication to examine how traditional modes of literary patronage responded to the challenge of print, as the economies of gift-exchange were forced to compete with those of the marketplace. It demonstrates how awareness of such divergent milieux prompted innovative modes of authorial self-representation, inspired or frustrated the desire for laureation, and promoted the remarkable self-reflexivity of Early Modern verse. By setting English Literature from Caxton to Jonson in the context of the most influential Classical and Italian exemplars it affords a wide comparative context for the reassessment of patronage both as a social practice and a literary theme.

In The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) Georg Lukacs discussed how the power struggle of the Cold War made it all the more pressing for literary writers to present 'concrete potentialities' of individual character in novel ways. Powers of Possibility explores how American experimental writers since the 1960s have set about presenting exactly that while engaging with specific issues of social power. The book's five chapters cover a range of writers, literary genres, and political issues, including: Allen Ginsberg's anti-Vietnam War poems; LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Black Power theatre; William S. Burroughs's novels and the Space Programmes; Kathy Acker's fiction and Biopolitics; and Lyn Hejinian, Language poetry, and the Cold War. Each chapter examines how relations of character and social power were widely discussed in terms of potentiality: Black Power groups, for example, debated the 'revolutionary potential' of African Americans, while advances in the space programmes led to speculation about the evolution of 'human potential' in space colonies. In considering how the literary writers engage with such debates, Alex Houen also shows how each writer's approach entails combining different meanings of 'potential': 'possible as opposed to actual'; 'a quantity of force'; a 'capacity' or 'faculty'; and 'potency'. Such an approach can be characterised as a literary 'potentialism' that turns literary possibilities (including experiments with style and form) into an affective aesthetic force with which to combat or reorient the effects of social power on people. Potentialism is not a literary movement, Houen emphasises, so much as a novel concept of literary practice-a concept that stands as a refreshing alternative to notions of 'postmodernism' and the 'postmodern avant-garde'.