'York Notes Advanced' offer an accessible approach to English Literature. This series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced introduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why was Milton so important to the Romantics? How did 'Milton the Regicide', a man often regarded in his lifetime as a dangerous traitor and heretic, become 'the Sublime Milton'? The late eighteenth century saw a sudden and to date almost undocumented craze for all things Miltonic, the symptoms of which included the violation of his grave and the sale of his hair and bones as relics, the republication of all his works including his political tracts in unprecedented numbers, the appearance of the poet in the works, letters, dreams and visions of all the major British Romantic poets and even frequent reports of hauntings by his ghost. Drawing on the traditions of cultural, intellectual and bibliographic history as well as recent trends in literary scholarship on the romantic period, Joseph Crawford explores the dramatic shift in Milton's cultural status after 1790. He builds on a now significant literature on Milton's legacy to the Romantic poets, uncovering the cultural historical background against which the Romantics and their contemporaries encountered and interacted with Milton's reputation and works.

Hardy was a poet of ghosts. In his poetry he describes himself as posthumous; as rekindling the cinders of passion; as the guardian of the dead forgotten by history; and as haunted by ghosts, particularly the specter of the lost child (as in the rumor that he fathered a child in the 1860s). Using Derrida, Abraham, and Torok and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism, this book investigates ghostliness, historicity, and memory in Hardy's poetry.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth 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.

From 'open field' to the internet, and via concrete and experimental poetry, this book draws out connections between the turn towards ideas of space in cultural and social theory and developments in contemporary poetry. Readings of a range of poets from the UK and the USA explore the relationship between their work, the processes and politics of globalization and issues of nationality, identity, language and geography.

"Chaucerian Aesthetics" examines "The Canterbury Tale" and "Troilus and Criseyde" from both medieval and post-Kantian vantage points. These sometimes congruent, sometimes divergent perspectives illuminate both the immediate pleasure of encountering beauty and its haunting promise of intelligibility. Although aesthetic reflection has sometimes seemed out of sync with modern approaches to mind and language, Knapp defends its value in general and demonstrates its importance for the analysis of Chaucer's narrative art. Focusing on language games, persons, women, humor, and community, this book ponders what makes art beautiful.

This book provides a lively exploration of the way in which several of the major British Romantic poets confront the writing and theorising of poetry. The question 'What is a poet?' is asked and answered with great frequency and variety; invariably there is an underlying sense of unease, often in the shadow, as it were, of Wordsworth's lines: We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness . The apparent confidence of the manifestoes is undermined by the self-doubts of much of the poetry, ranging from Coleridge to John Clare.

"An important part of the Irish national imaginary, Yeat's poems and plays have helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern Irish state that emerged from the nation's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of poetry, contextualizing and analyzing them in light of Irish cultural and political history."--

Reliquaries, elaborate containers housing the remains of the holy dead, informed numerous aspects of medieval culture. Incorporated into religious ceremonies, they contributed to the voiced, world-creating work of performance. At the same time, their decoration often included inscription, silent and self-referential. In the reliquary, silent inscription and spoken performance enshrined one another to produce a visual language about representation. Using texts by Chaucer, along with anonymous plays, lyrics, and hagiographic verse, "The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary" shows how the reliquary's visual language explicated the representational processes of late-medieval English poetry.

Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter is an innovative study of Scott's and Byron's poetical engagement with borders (actual and metaphorical) and the people living on and around them. The author discusses Scott's edited collection of Border Ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and his narrative poetry, and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage , cantos 1 and 2, his Eastern Tales, and his late, utopian South-Sea poem The Island. This fascinating study provides a detailed exegesis of the importance of borders to these leading poets and the public, during the early years of the Nineteenth-Century, with an emphasis on reciprocal literary influences, and on attitudes towards cultural instability.

R. S. Thomas's presentation of God has given rise to controversy and dissent. In exploring Thomas's techniques of creating his image of God, Elaine Shepherd addresses the problems surrounding the language of religion and of religious poetry. After a consideration of the possibilities of both the positive and negative ways of imaging God and the problematics of religious poetry as a genre, a sequence of close readings engages the reader in an exploration of language and image. Each chapter focuses on a significant image, examining its construction and its potential to stand as an image for God, from the image of woman as constructed by the Impressionists to the non-image of the mystical theologian.

This is a reprint of the authoritative six-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Superbly edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, each volume contains illustrations, appendices, and an index.

Romantic Indians considers the views that Britons, colonists, and North American Indians took of each other during a period in which these people were in a closer and more fateful relationship than ever before or since. It is, therefore, also a book about exploration, empire, and the forms of representation that exploration and empire gave rise to-in particular the form we have come to call Romanticism, in which 'Indians' appear everywhere. It is not too much to say that Romanticism would not have taken the form it did without the complex and ambiguous image of Indians that so intrigued both the writers and their readers. Most of the poets of the Romantic canon wrote about them-not least Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; so did many whom we have only recently brought back to attention-including Bowles, Hemans, and Barbauld. Yet Indians' formative role in the aesthetics and politics of Romanticism has rarely been considered. Tim Fulford aims to bring that formative role to our attention, to show that the images of native peoples that Romantic writers received from colonial administrators, politicians, explorers, and soldiers helped shape not only these writers' idealizations of 'savages' and tribal life, but also their depictions of nature, religion, and rural society. The romanticization of Indians soon affected the way that real native peoples were treated and described by generations of travellers who had already, before reaching the Canadian forest or the mid-western plains, encountered the literary Indians produced back in Britain. Moreover, in some cases Native Americans, writing in English, turned the romanticization of Indians to their own ends. This book highlights their achievement in doing so-featuring fascinating discussions of several little-known but brilliant Native American writers.

This book explores the sexual implications of reading Keats. Keats was lambasted by critics throughout the 19th century for his sensuousness and his 'effeminacy'. The Victorians simultaneously identified with, imitated, and distrusted the 'unmanly' poet. Writers, among them Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Wilfred Owen came to terms with Keats's work by creating out of the 'effeminate' poet a sexual and literary ally.

The poetry produced by the British poets of the 17th and 18th centuries is considered to be among the best ever written. But many general readers feel intimidated by the language or structure of the poetry, and so tend to shy away from enjoying these poets and their works. Nelson takes readers on a tour of the major works and figures of 17th- and 18th-century British poetry, explaining major themes, devices, styles, language, rhythm, sound, tone, imagery, form, and meaning. Beginning each chapter with a sketch of the poet's life and career, the author then looks at five or six representative works, helping readers understand and appreciate the beauty of poetry itself. From Donne and Jonson, to Pope, Swift, and Burns, the book offers excerpts of the poetry these artists crafted, and carefully examines the various attributes that have helped to establish them as some of the greatest of all time. Writing in clear, accessible language, Nelson also introduces general poetry terms to the novice, providing examples and explanations where necessary. Readers will no longer feel intimidated by "difficult poetry." Instead, they will walk away with the tools they need to read, understand, and appreciate these titans of British letters.

Rereading Chaucer and Spenser is a much-needed volume that brings together established and early career scholars to provide new critical approaches to the relationship between Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser. By reading one of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages alongside one of the greatest poets of the English Renaissance, this collection poses questions about poetic authority, influence, and the nature of intertextual relations in a more wide-ranging manner than ever before. With its dual focus on authors from periods often conceived as radically separate, the collection also responds to current interests in periodisation. This approach will engage academics, researchers and students of Medieval and Early Modern culture. -- .

Spenser's Irish Experience argues that The Faerie Queen, traditionally regarded as one of the finest achievements of the English Renaissance, has to be read in terms of its author's life in Ireland, making it less a work of English literature than a colonial or British literary text. Hadfield's book will be of interest not only to all readers of Renaissance literature but also to students of early modern Ireland, Britain, colonial, and national identity and theories of reading narrative.

This book explores in depth the expressive resources peculiar to French verse, first through formal discussion of its poetics and then through thirteen detailed readings of texts from the seventeenth century to the present, including La Fontaine, Chénier, Vigny, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Éluard, and Césaire. At the same time, it offers a reassessment of the nature of the reading process itself, especially as it relates to verse.

This book offers a new paradigm for reading and appreciating animals in literature and addresses how human culture views animals in poetry. Part one sets up a theoretical overview and posits some aesthetic and ethical ideals for transposing animals into art, while part two presents a more focused practical application of these ideals in one strain of animal poetry (as seen in the works of Marianne Moore, José Emilio Pacheco, Gary Snyder, Pattiann Rogers, and others).

This Hopkins Chronology describes the poet's family and early education, then gives a day-by-day account of what he was doing, reading and writing, and the people he met. Drawing on some material not published before, it illustrates the working life of a priest-poet whose work was not made public until more than thirty years after his death. There are additional sections on the religious and political background of a major Victorian writer whose life was essentially enigmatic and private.

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.

Romanticism on the Road challenges critical orthodoxy by arguing that Wordsworth rejected the political dogmas of his age. Refusing to ally with either radicals or conservatives after the French Revolution, the poet seizes on vagrants to attack the binary thinking dominating public affairs and to question the value of the Georgian domestic ideal. Drawing on current and historical discussions of homelessness, the study offers a cultural history of vagrancy and explains why Wordsworth chose the homeless to bear his message.

How did Roman poets create character? The mythological figures that dot the landscape of Roman poetry entail their own predetermined plotlines and received characteristics: the idea of a gentle, maternal Medea is as absurd as a spineless and weak Achilles. For Roman poets, the problem is even more acute since they follow on late in a highly developed literary tradition. The fictional characters that populate Roman literature, such as Aeneas and Oedipus, link text and reader in a form of communication that is strikingly different from a first person narrator to an addressee. With Exemplary Traits, Mira Seo addresses this often overlooked question. Her study offers an examination of how Roman poets used models dynamically to create character, and how their referential approach to character reveals them mobilizing the literary tradition. Close readings of Virgil, Lucan, Seneca, and Statius offer a more nuanced discussion of the expectations of both authors and audiences in the Roman world than those currently available in scholarly debate. By tracing the philosophical and rhetorical concepts that underlie the function of characterization, Exemplary Traits allows for a timely reconsideration of it as a fruitful literary technique.