This study uncovers a vital thematic unity within Blake's early work: his far-reaching use of humor. Although often dismissed as a product of his eccentricity, the comic was an essential key to Blake's concept of Vision. With special reference to Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book offers new readings of Blake's works, demonstrating how he was influenced by contemporary theatre, verbal and visual satirists and the Shakespearean clown.

This is a collection of previously published essays on late medieval and early modern literature, designed to act as a companion to "Chaucer to Spenser: An Anthology of Writings in English 1375 -1575," edited by Derek Pearsall (1999).

The object of the accompanying anthology is to provide representation of a variety of kinds of prose and verse, including some not traditionally regarded as canonically "literary," and also to trespass beyond the boundaries of the conventional medieval/early modern divide. This new volume provides some of the critical backing for those decisions about the canon and about periodization, and also give evidence of the vigor of opinion and debate in the field in general.

Most of the essays are from the last 20 years, and some are very recent, though space is also found for some earlier classics. The collection pays particular attention to those critics who have had the most powerful recent impact on our reading of the texts of the period: they are selected for their excellence and importance, whether in themselves or as representatives of an influential critical approach, and not for their adherence to any one school of interpretation. They will provide a companion to the texts in the anthology, a commentary and counterpoint to the views expressed in the editor's headnotes and explanatory notes, and a perspective on the best that has been thought and said about the writing of these two extraordinary centuries of creativity, consolidation and seed-sowing.

In this book, 15 scholars from the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan examine Eliot's work in the context of his personal history and that of his century. Using unpublished and newly released primary materials scholars analyze Eliot's legacy in relation to idealist philosophy, music, popular culture, anti-Semitism, feminism, and literary studies.

This revised and updated edition of a Ted Hughes annotated, descriptive bibliography includes a new section recording over 1000 of his manuscripts.

The third-century BC Greek poet Herodas had been all but forgotten until a papyrus of eight of his Mimiambs (plus fragments) turned up in the Egyptian desert at the end of the 19th century. They have since been translated into various modern languages and supplied with scholarly commentaries. This book is the first to attempt to reproduce in English Herodas' 'choliambic' or 'limping' metre (sic) - distinctive for its signatory reversed final foot, a variant on the standard Greek iambic trimeter. The present volume provides an accessible introduction to Herodas and his Mimiambs requiring no knowledge of Greek. The translation steers a judicious course between literal accuracy and fidelity to this linguistically very demanding poet's spirit and intention. The contextual introductions and notes on the poems take into account the most recent scholarship, providing explanation of the context of the Mimiambs and guiding the reader to an appreciation of the poetry itself. The General Introduction places the author in his cultural world and context, namely urban society in the Ptolemaic Empire of the hellenistic period. This he conjures up in his Mimiambs with an often scathing vividness.

In "The Edge of Modernism, " Walter Kalaidjian explores American poetry on genocide, the Holocaust, and total war as well as on postwar social antagonisms, racial oppression, and domestic violence. By asking what it means for traumatic memory to have agency in the American verse tradition, Kalaidjian creates an original historical account of how American poets became witnesses, often unconsciously, to modern extremity. Combining psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, this intense, sweeping account of modern poetics analyzes the ways in which literary form gives testimony to the trauma of twentieth-century history.

Through close readings of well-known and less familiar poets--among them Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Edwin Rolfe, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Peter Balakian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anne Sexton, and Anthony Hecht--Kalaidjian discerns the latent "edge" of modern trauma as it cuts through the literary representations, themes, and formal techniques of twentieth-century American poetics. In this way, "The Edge of Modernism" advances an innovative and dynamic model of modern periodization.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Opus Maximum, written in the early 1820s and first published in 2002, is a challenge to every scholar who has encountered it. Sublime Coleridge offers an entry point to this important text of British Romanticism, with a reader's guide and background information. Murray J. Evans introduces each major theme of the Opus Maximum--the Will, divine ideas, human subjectivity, and the Trinity--and shows their importance in explaining Coleridge's ideas about religion, psychology, and the sublime.

This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in America and Nobel Prize laureates in literature. To create this truly original work, Irena Grudzinska Gross draws from poems, essays, letters, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky. The dual portrait of these poets and the elucidation of their attitudes toward religion, history, memory, and language throw a new light on the upheavals of the twentieth-century. Gross also incorporates notes on both poets' relationships to other key literary figures, such as W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, Robert Haas, and Derek Walcott.

Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson form an engaging triad of poets who, considered together, enrich the poetics of each other; the works of the three poets address language, birth, and scientific aspects of culture in ways that frame new perceptions of sex roles. Exacerbating 19th-century American expectations for sexually-constructed experience, they employ tactics that disrupt patriarchal signification. The first book to group these three poets together, this volume examines the daring language experiments in which they engage. It explores their use of pseduoscientific and scientific studies of alchemy, hydropathy, and botany to inform their understanding of language and birth and to discover expressions that challenge expectations for 19th-century poetry.

The rising awareness of women's rights, which concurred with the antebellum call for a new American literature, also informed the emerging sense of the feminine that prompts the poets to use the maternal in their poetry. While they do not address the woman question of the 19th century in concrete ways, they nonetheless relied upon the female experience of birthing to create a new relationship with language and to question the nature of signification.

Ezra Pound belatedly conceded that T.S.Eliot "was the true Dantescan voice" of the modern world. This is the first study to deal with this assertion and the relationship between the two poets. It attempts to show how Dante's total vision impinges on Eliot's craft and thought. Eliot's indebtedness to his Italian master, whose poetry he deemed "as the most persistent and deepest influence" upon his own verse, manifests itself in a variety of literary strategies, including imitation, parody, citation and allusion. At the same time Eliot's debt transcends the literary to embrace Dante's total vision, or his philosophy, theology and politics. Various aspects of Eliot's recourse to Dante's craft and thought may appear in a new light - his recurring fascination with Ulysses in "Inferno XXVI" and especially with Arnaut Daniel in "Purgatorio XXVI"; the exodus motif as it informs "The Waste Land", "The Hollow Men" and "Ash Wednesday"; the metaphor of Dante's book of memory as it applies to Eliot's work; the notion of order in its ethical, aesthetic and political dimensions. Finally, light is shed on some of the reasons why Eliot's Dante ultimately differs radically from that of the other mod

Paradise Dislocated offers a radical rereading of William Morris's neglected masterpiece, The Earthly Paradise. While most critics have seen this poem as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career, or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that The Earthly Paradise is in fact central to Morris's political vision-indeed, it is the most radical manifestation of that vision. Paradise Dislocated explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations, and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole, as well as a judgement upon the possibilities (and impossibilities) of imaginative and cultural criticism at Morris's moment-and at our own.

This is a comprehensive study of Shakespeare's forgotten masterpiece 'The Phoenix and Turtle'. Bednarz confronts the question of why one of the greatest poems in the English language is customarily ignored or misconstrued by Shakespeare biographers, literary historians, and critics.

Bringing a fresh approach to the field, this study shows that poems by women do not always subvert the mainstream, the media, and the marketplace. With explorations of both Hollywood films, household advertising, children's books, mass magazines, and tabloid journalism as well as the poetry of H.D., Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Ai, and Carol Ann Duffy, Marsha Bryant assesses the counterintuitive innovations that these poets fashion through popular culture. Bridging feminist and cultural studies, this book analyzes the ways in which British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders, consuming music, movies, and magazines through poems that do not always conform to appropriation or critique.

This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.

Explores the representation of emotions as psychological concepts and cultural constructs in Geoffrey Chaucer's narrative poetry. McTaggart argues that Chaucer's main works including The Canterbury Tales are united thematically in their positive view of guilt and in their anxiety about the desire for sacrifice and vengeance that shame can provoke.

Dominic Rainsford examines ways in which literary texts may seem to comment on their authors' ethical status. Its argument develops through readings of Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, three authors who find especially vivid ways of casting doubt on their own moral authority, at the same time as they expose wider social ills. The book combines its interest in ethics with post-structuralist scepticism, and thus develops a type of radical humanism with applications far beyond the three authors immediately discussed.

Contrary to the monolithic impression left by postcolonial theories of Orientalism, the book makes the case that Orientals did not exist solely to be gazed at. Hermes shows that there was no shortage of medieval Muslims who cast curious eyes towards the European Other and that more than a handful of them were interested in Europe.

The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change. Of Land, Bones, and Money examines the shifting role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which they have helped inform responses to segregation, apartheid, the injustices of extractive capitalism, and contemporary politics in South Africa. Emily McGiffin first discusses the history of the amaXhosa people and the environment of their homelands before moving on to the arrival of the British, who began a relentless campaign annexing land and resources in the region. Drawing on scholarship in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and postcolonial ecocriticism, she considers isiXhosa poetry in translation within its cultural, historical, and environmental contexts, investigating how these poems struggle with the arrival and expansion of the exploitation of natural resources in South Africa and the entrenchment of profoundly racist politics that the process entailed. In contemporary South Africa, iimbongi remain a respected source of knowledge and cultural identity. Their ongoing practice of producing complex, spiritually rich literature continues to have a profound social effect, contributing directly to the healing and well-being of their audiences, to political transformation, and to environmental justice.

This volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.

Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory, the first book-length treatment of the character, examines the Pardoner in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the perspective of both medieval and twentieth-century theories of sex, gender, and erotic practice. Sturges argues for a discontinuous, fragmentary reading of this character and his tale that is genuinely both premodern and postmodern. Drawing on theorists ranging from St. Augustine and Alain de Lille to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sturges approaches the Pardoner as a representative of the construction of historical--and sexual--identities in a variety of historically specific discourses, and argues that medieval understandings of gender remain sedimented in postmodern discourse.

"Wordsworth's verse and compelling criticism have shaped our understanding of poetic art since the Romantic period. This collection is the first in years to reexamine Wordsworth's complex theory of poetry in depth. Designed to be equally useful and inspiring, it provides much-needed reassessments of a vital juncture of Romantic creativity"--Provided by publisher.

This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world. Based on extensive research and oral testimony, this biography embraces postcolonial realities and promise, and is a major contribution to British cultural history. -- .

The most influential East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchange that has taken place in modern and postmodern times was the reading and writing of haiku. Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku, Alice Walker's work reflects her affinity for Zen philosophy, and Ishmael Reed's work includes a discussion of Eastern thought. Here, esteemed contributors investigate the impact of Eastern philosophy and religion on African American writers from Richard Wright to Ralph Ellison to Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson, offering a fresh field of literary inquiry.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) has often been considered a particularly British writer in part as his official post as Poet Laureate inevitably committed him to a certain amount of patriotic writing. This volume focuses on his impact on the continent, presenting a major scholarly analysis of Tennyson's wider reception in different areas of Europe. It considers reader and critical responses and explores the effect of his poetry upon his contemporaries and later writers, as well as his influence upon illustrators, painters and musicians. The leading international contributors raise questions of translation and publication and of the choices made for this purpose along with the way in which his ideas and style influenced European writing and culture. Tennyson's reputation in Anglophone countries is now assured, following a decline in the years after his death. This volume enables us to chart the changes in Tennyson's European reputation during the later 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.