In T. S. Eliot's Ascetic Ideal, Joshua Richards charts an intellectual history of T. S. Eliot's interaction with asceticism. This history is drawn from Eliot's own education in the topic with the texts he read integrated into detailed textual analysis. Eliot's early encounters with the ascetic ideal began a lifetime of interplay and reflection upon self-denial, purgation, and self-surrender. In 1909, he began a study of mysticism, likely, in George Santayana's seminar, and thereafter showed the influence of this education. Yet, his interaction with the ascetic ideal and his background in mysticism was not a simple thing; still, his early cynicism was slowly transformed to an embrace.

William Blake is one of the most important influences on twentieth-century literature. This study will ask why he is a figure central to the Modernist re-definition of past art. He also appears to be an acceptable sage for postmodernists, he can be associated with an opposition to authority without imposing one version of his own mythology.

Fuseli's Milton Gallery challenges the antipictorial theories and canons of Romantic period culture. Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures. Fuseli's project and other literary galleries developed within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used to reading British and other 'classics' in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. Thus transformed into repositories of virtual pictures literary texts became ideal sources of subjects for painters. Illustrating British literature was a way of inventing a national 'grand style' to fit the needs of a consumer society. Cale calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices. To 'turn readers into spectators' meant to place readers and reading within the dizzying world of associations offered by an emerging culture of exhibitions. Attending to the energized reading effects developed by Fuseli's Gallery we rediscover a new side of the Romantic imagination which is not the solitary mentalist experience preferred by Wordsworth and Coleridge, nor divorced from the senses, let alone a refuge from the crowded public spaces of the Revolutionary period. Rather, Fuseli's embodied aesthetic exemplifies the associationist psychology espoused by the radical circle convening around the publisher Joseph Johnson, including Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. This book analyses exhibitions as important sites of Romantic sociability and one of many interrelated mediums for the literature, debates and controversies of the Revolutionary period.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.

A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.

Of all the wide-ranging interests Coleridge showed in his career, religion was the deepest and most long-lasting; and Beer demonstrates in this book that none of his work can be fully understood without taking this into account. Beer reveals how Coleridge was preoccupied by the life of the mind, and how closely this subject was intertwined with religion in his thinking. The insights that emerge in this collection are of absorbing interest, showing the efforts of a pioneer to reconcile traditional wisdom, both inside and outside orthodox Christianity, with the questions that were becoming evident to a sensitive enquirer.

"Comedy Matters" traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, "Comedy Matters" demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions between active and passive seers and viewers, optical discourse had social and moral implications for gender difference in late fourteenth-century England. By exploring ocularity's equal dependence on "invisibility," Chaucer offers men and women access to a vision of "manhed," one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity.

In addition to being the leading philosopher of English Romanticism and one of its greatest poets, Coleridge explores the dynamics of consciousness and mental functioning more extensively than any of his contemporaries. This book compares his psychological theories with his diverse exemplifications of Romanticism's self-reflexive quest for transcendence, showing how he continually highlights the circular and mutual influence of ideas and emotions underlying Romantic idealism and the cult of the sublime.

William Blake and the Myths of Britain is the first full-length study of Blake's use of British mythology and history. From Atlantis to the Deists of the Napoleonic Wars, this book addresses why the eighteenth century saw a revival of interest in the legends of the British Isles and how Blake applied these in his extraordinary prophetic histories of the giant Albion, revitalising myths of the Druids and Joseph of Arimathea bringing Christ to Albion.

"At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the contexts of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death" --

Focusing on orally transmitted cultural forms in the Caribbean, this book reaffirms the importance of myth and symbol in folk consciousness as a mode of imaginative conceptualization. Paul A. Griffith cross-references Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates with issues at seminal sites where Caribbean imaginary insurgencies took root. This book demonstrates the ways residually oral forms distilled history, society, and culture to cleverly resist aggressions authored through colonialist presumptions. In an analysis of the archetypal patterns in the oral tradition--both literary and nonliterary, this impressive book gives insight into the way in which people think about the world and represent themselves in it.

Much poetic writing in France in the post-1945 period is set in an elemental landscape and expressed through an impersonal poetic voice. It is therefore often seen as primarily spatial and cut off from human concerns. This study of three poets, Andre du Bouchet, Philippe Jaccottet and Bernard Noel, who have not been compared before, argues that space is inseparable from time in their work, which is always in transition. The different ways in which the provisional operates in their writing show the wide range of forms that modern poetry can take: an insistence on the figure of the interval, hesitant movement, or exuberant impulse. As well as examining the imaginative universes of the poets through close attention to the texts, this book considers the important contribution they have made in their prose writing to our understanding of the visual arts and poetry translation, in themselves transitional activities. It argues that these writers have, in different ways, succeeded in creating poetic worlds that attest to close and constantly changing contact with the real. Emma Wagstaff teaches French literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.

Chuvash-born poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is considered the father of late-Soviet avant-garde Russian poetry. This first full-length critical study of his work and poetics in any language brings a new voice into the critical conversation of twentieth-century poetry of witness. It charts the development of Aygi's poetics from his Mayakovsky-inspired verses as a student under the tutelage of Boris Pasternak, to those of a full-fledged poet's poet, drawing equally on the Russian poetic and religious tradition, European literature and philosophy, and Chuvash literature, folk culture, and cosmology. Writing from 1955 until his death in 2006, Aygi bridges the Soviet and post-Soviet, lyrical and avant-garde, personal and political. The transcultural roots and global reach of his work bring together Chuvash, Russian, European, and Volga Tatar languages and traditions to form a truly unique transnational poetics and a model for a new category of Russophone literature.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's "lines on virtue" written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's "Asolando" (1889). This Chronology seeks to guide readers through this mass of material in three main sections: youth, contrasting early backgrounds and careers, and growing interest in each other's work to 1845; followed by courtship, marriage, Italy, and work including "Aurora Leigh" and "Men and Women" (1845-61); and concluding with Browning's later life of relentless socializing and prolific writing from his return to London to his death in Venice in 1889. This book provides not only precise dating but also in-depth information on such topics as the Brownings' extensive reading in English, French and classical literature, their friendships, and their sometimes conflicting political beliefs.

Probably the most famous of the Romantic poets, William Wordsworth worked with and influenced many of the leading poets of the age. This excellent introduction to his life and works sets his writing firmly in the context of his times. John Purkis provides an outline of Wordsworth's life and cultural background and their effect on his work, and examines his verse, from the earliest school poems to the final years.

T. S. Eliot is arguably the most influential poet of the 20th century, and "The Waste Land" one of its most significant poems. This introduction to the life and works of T.S. Eliot sets his writing clearly in the context of his times. Outlining his life and cultural background and their effect on his work, Ronald Tamplin examines his poetry and focuses in detail on three major works: "The Waste Land," "Four Quartets "and the play, "Murder in the Cathedral."

A Preface to Hardy remains the best introduction to one of the most important and popular writers in English literature. The first section concentrates on Hardy the man and outlines the intellectual and cultural context in which he lived. The author then moves on to examine a wide range of Hardy's work, with particular reference to The Mayor of Casterbridge. There is new material on Hardy's short stories and their relation to the major novels, and on The Dynasts, which accompanies a study of a range of Hardy's other poetry.