One of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot is generally regarded as a leading exponent of the literary movement which came to be known as Modernism. In this volume, Harriet Davidson collects key recent essays by such internationally renowned critics as Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert, Jacqueline Rose, Jeffrey Perl, Christine Froula, Maud Ellmann, and Michael North, placing Eliot's work centrally in the context of postmodern critical theory. Eliot's writing is often perceived as incompatible with or resistant to new theoretical approaches, but this volume demonstrates the continuity between Eliot's own theoretical writings and contemporary theory, and illuminates his poetry with imaginative readings from deconstructive, Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist perspectives. Headnotes to the essays and a bibliography which lists other informative readings make this book an invaluable guide to all students of twentieth-century poetry, and to scholars interested in the relationship between critical and creative writing.

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 new addition to the Longman Critical Readers Series provides an overview of the various ways in which modern critical theory has influenced Chaucer Studies over the last fifteen years. There is still a sense in the academic world, and in the wider literary community, that Medieval Studies are generally impervious to many of the questions that modern theory asks, and that it concerns itself only with traditional philological and historical issues. On the contrary, this book shows how Chaucer, specifically the Canterbury Tales, has been radically and excitingly 'opened up' by feminist, Lacanian, Bakhtinian, deconstructive, semiotic and anthropological theories to name but a few. The book provides an introduction to these new developments by anthologising some of the most important work in the field, including excerpts from book-length works, as well as articles from leading and innovative journals. The introduction to the volume examines in some detail the relation between the individual strengths of each of the above approaches and the ways in which a 'postmodernist' Chaucer is seen as reflecting them all. This convenient single volume collection of key critical analyses of Chaucer, which includes work from some journals and studies that are not always easily available, will be indispensable to students of Medieval Studies, Medieval Literature and Chaucer, as well as to general readers who seek to widen their understanding of the forces behind Chaucer's writing.

Often seen as the exception to generalisations about Romanticism, Byron's poetry - and its intricate relationship with a brilliant, scandalous life - has remained a source of controversy throughout the twentieth century. This book brings together recent work on Byron by leading British and American scholars and critics, guiding undergraduate students and sixth-form pupils through the different ways in which new literary theory has enriched readings of Byron's work, and showing how his poetry offers a rewarding focus for questions about the relationship between historical contexts and literary form in the Romantic period. Diverse and fresh perspectives on canonical texts such as Don Juan, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred are included together with stimulating analyses of less well-known narrative poems, lyrics and dramas. A clearly structured introduction traces key developments in Byron criticism and locates the essays within wider debates in Romantic studies. Detailed headnotes to each essay and a guide to further reading help to orientate the reader and offer pointers for further discussion. The collection will enable students of English literature, Romantic studies and nineteenth-century cultural studies to assess the contribution that different critical methodologies have made to our understanding of individual poems by Byron, as well as concepts like the Byronic hero and evolving definitions of Romanticism.

Andrew Marvell brings together ten recent and critically informed essays by leading scholars on one of the most challenging and important seventeenth-century poets. The essays examine Marvell's poems, from lyrics, such as 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', to celebrations of Cromwell and Republican Civil War culture and his biting Restoration satires. Representing the most significant critical trends in Marvell criticism over the last twenty years, the essays and the authoritative editorial work provide an excellent introduction to Marvell's work. Students of Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, English Civil War writing, and seventeenth-century social and cultural history will find this collection a useful guide to helping them appreciate and understand Marvell's poetry.

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.

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.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Plutarch Award A Washington Post 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the Year New York Times Review of Books Editors' Choice Non-Fiction Title Longlisted for the 2022 PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Sunday Times Best Paperback of 2022 'Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling' Washington Post 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention. Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame. She remains Britain's greatest woman poet, whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirty years, incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal the woman herself: a literary giant and a high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage; and a writer who defied chronic illness and long-term disability to change the course of cultural history. It holds up a mirror to the woman, her art - and the art of biography itself.

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.

This fresh and comprehensive guide to Chaucer's most famous poem "The Canterbury Tales" introduces readers to Chaucer's life and times and reconsiders both the impact and the context of its inception. It carefully details Chaucer's cultural and literary world, as well as reviewing the publishing history of the Tales and examining some of the issues surrounding the nature of the material production of medieval texts. In addition, it raises matters of 'Englishness' and Chaucer's choice of the vernacular in which to write his works. A highly-readable survey of the critical reception of the Tales, from early responses to recent critical perspectives, works together with a series of exemplary, close readings of key tales and ideas to explore questions such as narrative voice, genre, language and form, gender and authority. This introduction to the text is the ideal companion to study, offering guidance on: literary and historical context; language, style and form; reading "The Canterbury Tales"; critical reception and publishing history; adaptation and interpretation; and, further reading. Continuum Reader's Guides are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.

This volume replaces the traditional image of George Herbert as meditative recluse with a portrait of the poet as engaged throughout his life with the religion, politics and society of his time. Instead of an isolated genius living in retreat from the world, Herbert appears as a man writing public verse, active within an important social circle, and committed to nationalistic Protestantism. The book attends to the poetic brilliance of his verse as well as the institutions and contexts that influenced him: the upper class coterie, Cambridge University, and the Church of England.

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.

In Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, an international group of theologians and Dante scholars provide a uniquely rich set of perspectives focused on the relationship between theology and poetry in the Commedia. Examining Dante's treatment of questions of language, personhood, and the body; his engagement with the theological tradition he inherited; and the implications of his work for contemporary theology, the contributors argue for the close intersection of theology and poetry in the text as well as the importance of theology for Dante studies. Through discussion of issues ranging from Dante's use of imagery of the Church to the significance of the smile for his poetic project, the essayists offer convincing evidence that his theology is not what underlies his narrative poem, nor what is contained within it: it is instead fully integrated with its poetic and narrative texture. As the essays demonstrate, the Commedia is firmly rooted in the medieval tradition of reflection on the nature of theological language, while simultaneously presenting its readers with unprecedented, sustained poetic experimentation. Understood in this way, Dante emerges as one of the most original theological voices of the Middle Ages. Contributors: Piero Boitani, Oliver Davies, Theresa Federici, David F. Ford, Peter S. Hawkins, Douglas Hedley, Robin Kirkpatrick, Christian Moevs, Vittorio Montemaggi, Paola Nasti, John Took, Matthew Treherne, and Denys Turner.

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 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.

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.

"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

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.

This handbook for the reading of early Greek poetry is intended to be both a manual for teachers and a guide for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. It covers poetry in the elegiac and iambic genres, as well as melic poetry which is provisionally divided into the personal and the public. The book takes a critical look at scholarly trends applied in interpreting this poetry, exploring, for example, the problems of defining the nature of the elegiac genre, the origins of iambic poetry, the personal voice used by the poets, and the validity of historical criticism. Appearing in the "Classical Tradition" series, it considers the impact of modern literary theory on the reading of these texts - for instance the new interpretations suggested by feminism - and guides readers to a full bibliography on scholarly debates from the 19th century to the present.

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.

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.

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.

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.