In this study, first published in 1951, the author examines the poetry of Yeats's last years, that poetry which reached and held to the 'intensity' which he had striven for all his life. Vivienne Koch explores the ways in which the great but troubled poems derive their energy from suffering, and examines thirteen of his last poems in detail, each with a slightly different focus. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

This chief aim of this title, first published in 1965, is to present a comprehensive picture of Yeats's achievement and some of the means for an evaluation of that achievement. To this end both the poems and plays have been examined and some of Yeats's critical ideas have been briefly discussed. Professor Rajan's study provides a compact introduction to Yeats's work, and will be of interest to the general reader as well as to students of literature.

The letters in this book, first published in 1953, throw light on the literary scene at a time in which William Butler Yeats and Thomas Sturge Moore regularly corresponded. In the early days of their friendship Yeats and Sturge Moore often saw each other in London where they both played an active part in the literary and artistic scene. When Yeats later lived chiefly in Ireland and Sturge Moore spent much of his time in the country and abroad they met less often but kept in touch by letter. Many of these letters, and therefore a record of their friendship, has been preserved and presented in this book. This title will be of interest to students of literature and literary history.

Yeats and his shadow are one of the most closely scrutinised pairs in contemporary literary history. The meaning and significance Yeats gave to the entity by which he was constantly pursued and with which he held frequent colloquy have been held under the critical microscope, and the shadow has emerged alternately as the course of human history, the poet's alter-ego, his inner self, the natural man, or as anything that Yeats wanted but believed himself not to be. This title, first published in 1988, examines the influence that Shelley had on Yeats and this 'shadow'. The study concentrates primarily on the complex influence of Shelley's Alastor on Yeats, tracing the problems it suggests and the questions it raises from Yeats's early, highly imitative poems through the austere, unromantic middle poems to the late poems where Yeats sees himself as the "last of the romantics". This title will be of interest to students of literature.

The only dictionary of its kind, this greatly expanded second edition lists objects, concepts, traits and situations ancient and modern and gives their appropriate symbols. A companion to Symbolism: A Comprehensive Dictionary (2012), this volume presents symbols and their referents in reverse association (but is not simply a reconfiguring of information). Examples: a symbol for "hell" is descending stairs; an attribute of Saint Benedict is a raven; joy after sorrow is signified by the gemstone amber. Ethnic, literary, artistic, religious, heraldic, numerological, folkloric, occult and psychological usages are included.

Presenting a multifaceted portrait of modernist culture in Russia, an array of distinguished scholars shows how artists and writers in the early twentieth century engaged with politics, science, and religion. At a time when many Russian social institutions looked to the past, modernist arts powerfully amplified a gamut of new ideas about individual and collective transformation. Expanding upon prior studies that focus more specifically on literary manifestations of the movement, Reframing Russian Modernism features original research that ranges broadly, from political aesthetics to Darwinism to yoga. These unique complementary perspectives counter reductionism of any kind, integrating the study of Russian modernism into the larger body of humanistic scholarship devoted to modernity.

Living or dead, present or absent, sadly dysfunctional or merrily adequate, the figure of the mother bears enormous freight across a child's emotional and intellectual life. Given the vital role literary mothers play in books for young readers, it is remarkable how little scholarly attention has been paid to the representation of mothers outside of fairy tales and beyond studies of gender stereotypes. This collection of thirteen essays begins to fill a critical gap by bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives by a rich mix of senior scholars and new voices. Following an introduction in which the coeditors describe key trends in interdisciplinary scholarship, the book's first section focuses on the pedagogical roots of maternal influence in early children's literature. The next section explores the shifting cultural perspectives and subjectivities of the twentieth century. The third section examines the interplay of fantasy, reality, and the ethical dimensions of literary mothers. The collection ends with readings of postfeminist motherhood, from contemporary realism to dystopian fantasy. The range of critical approaches in this volume will provide multiple inroads for scholars to investigate richer readings of mothers in children's and young adult literature.

First published in 1968, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric is designed primarily to assist the student of renaissance literature in the science of rhetoric. It gathers together the information provided by the various different authorities who contributed to the education of the renaissance author, particularly the writer in English. These authorities include key classical rhetoricians he would probably have read, well-known and important renaissance rhetoricians, and the writers of vernacular treatises and of major school textbooks. The information is arranged in a schematic and tabular form, so that enquiry can start from the object, the particular rhetorical form as it appears in a given literary text. The core of the book is the central section on elocutio, the art of using the devices of rhetorical ornament.

This book explores the changing perception of time and space in avant-garde, modernist, and contemporary poetry. The author characterizes the works of modern Russian, French, and Anglo-American poets based on their attitudes towards reality, time, space, and history revealed in their poetics. The author compares the work of major Russian innovative poets Osip Mandelstam, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Joseph Brodsky with that of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and, in spite of the postmodernist "estrangement" of reality, the author proves that similar traces can be found in the work of contemporary American poets John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein. Both affinities and drastic differences are revealed in the poets' attitudes towards time-space, reality, and history.

It has long been recognised that there is an apparently paradoxical relationship between the revolutionary poetic style developed by Yeats, Eliot and Pound in the period during and after the First World War, and the reactionary politics with which they were associated in the 1920s and 1930s. Concentrating on their writings in the period up to the 1930s, this study, first published in 1982, helps to resolve the paradox and also provides a much needed reappraisal of the factors influencing their poetic and political development. The work of these poets has usually been seen as deriving from the tradition of continental symbolist poetics. Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry will be of interest to students of literature.

Why do Israelis dislike fantasy? Put so bluntly, the question appears frivolous. But in fact, it goes to the deepest sources of Israeli historical identity and literary tradition. Uniquely among developed nations, Israel's origin is in a utopian novel, Theodor Herzl's 'Altneuland' (1902), which predicted the future Jewish state. Jewish writing in the Diaspora has always tended toward the fantastic, the mystical, and the magical. And yet, from its very inception, Israeli literature has been stubbornly realistic. The present volume challenges this stance. Originally published in Hebrew in 2009, it is the first serious, wide-ranging, and theoretically sophisticated exploration of fantasy in Israeli literature and culture. Its contributors jointly attempt to contest the question posed at the beginning: why do Israelis, living in a country whose very existence is predicated on the fulfillment of a utopian dream, distrust fantasy?

This volume focuses on several Russian authors among many who immigrated to Israel with the ""big wave"" of the 1990s or later, and whose largest part of their works was written in Israel: Dina Rubina, Nekod Singer, Elizaveta Mikhailichenko and Yury Nesis, and Mikhail Yudson. They are popular and active authors on the Israeli scene, in the printed and electronic media, and some of them are also editors of the renowned journals and authors of literary and cultural reviews and essays. They constitute a new generation of Jewish-Russian writers: diasporic Russians and new Israelis.

Challenging the widely-held assumption that Slavoj Zizek's work is far more germane to film and cultural studies than to literary studies, this volume demonstrates the importance of Zizek to literary criticism and theory. The contributors show how Zizek's practice of reading theory and literature through one another allows him to critique, complicate, and advance the understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis and German Idealism, thereby urging a rethinking of historicity and universality. His methodology has implications for analyzing literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres and can enrich theoretical frameworks ranging from aesthetics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis to feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. The contributors also offer Zizekian interpretations of a wide variety of texts, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Samuel Beckett's Not I, and William Burroughs's Nova Trilogy. The collection includes an essay by Zizek on subjectivity in Shakespeare and Beckett. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek affirms Zizek's value to literary studies while offering a rigorous model of Zizekian criticism. Contributors. Shawn Alfrey, Daniel Beaumont, Geoff Boucher, Andrew Hageman, Jamil Khader, Anna Kornbluh, Todd McGowan, Paul Megna, Russell Sbriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Slavoj Zizek

First published in 1988. Fredrick Tomlin and T. S. Eliot were friends for almost thirty-four years. What emerges from Fredrick Tomlin's memories and the many letters which passed between them is a private Eliot, seen only by his closest family and a trusted few. Tomlin evokes the man as he was - quite different in his humanity and in his humour from the public image of the 'great poet' and the austere sage. With fresh insights and personal testimony, Tomlin directs light onto aspects of Eliot's character and personality of which the public has been unaware, thereby enhancing the reader's appreciation of Eliot's work as a whole. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

This collection, first published in 1963, includes 29 of George Eliot's essays written between 1846 and 1868. Through these essays, Pinney has managed to convey her range of subject-matters and variety of style. This title, with an introduction and footnotes written by the editor, will be of particular interest to students of literature.

his study places Defoe's major fiction squarely in the emerging Whig culture of the early eighteenth century. It offers an alternative to the view that Defoe is essentially a writer of criminal or adventure fiction and to the Marxist judgment that he extols individualism or derives his greatest inspiration from popular print culture. This study reads the novels as reflections of mainstream Whig social and political concerns, the same concerns Defoe revealed in his verse and expository writings before and after his major period of fiction writing, 1719-24.

Containing a wealth of new scholarship and rare primary documents, The Black Jacobins Reader provides a comprehensive analysis of C. L. R. James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to considering the book's literary qualities and its role in James's emergence as a writer and thinker, the contributors discuss its production, context, and enduring importance in relation to debates about decolonization, globalization, postcolonialism, and the emergence of neocolonial modernity. The Reader also includes the reflections of activists and novelists on the book's influence and a transcript of James's 1970 interview with Studs Terkel. Contributors. Mumia Abu-Jamal, David Austin, Madison Smartt Bell, Anthony Bogues, John H. Bracey Jr., Rachel Douglas, Laurent Dubois, Claudius K. Fergus, Carolyn E. Fick, Charles Forsdick, Dan Georgakas, Robert A. Hill, Christian Hogsbjerg, Selma James, Pierre Naville, Nick Nesbitt, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Matthew Quest, David M. Rudder, Bill Schwarz, David Scott, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Matthew J. Smith, Studs Terkel

Edward Lobb's study, first published in 1981, is a thorough examination of Eliot's relation to Romantic criticism. This title also makes extensive use of Eliot's Clark Lectures on metaphysical poetry. Delivered in 1926, the lectures complete the picture of literary history set out in Eliot's published work, and are, the author believes, essential to a full understanding of the poet's ideas and their place in tradition. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources and earlier scholarship, T. S. Eliot and the Romantic Critical Tradition will be of interest to students of literature.

This title, first published in 1961, explores the general background of attitudes, beliefs and ideas from which Eliot's works have originated. This study examines the influences of Eliot's work, and includes Eliot's personal views as told to the author. The book also looks at technique, structure and imagery of his poetry. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

In this fascinating and revealing book, first published in 1952, Maxwell shows the development of Eliot's poetry and poetic thought in the light of his political and religious attachments. This study traces Eliot's style from the earliest poems to the Quartets, and examines the characteristics of Eliot's earlier work adumbrate that of his maturity. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot is essential reading for students of literature.

Regency England was a pivotal time, remembered for its political uncertainty with a changing monarchy, the Napoleonic Wars, and a population explosion in London. In Susanna Clarke's fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the era is also witness to the unexpected return of magic. Locating the consequences of this eruption of magical unreason within the context of England's imperial history, this study examines Merlin and his legacy, the roles of magicians throughout history, the mythology of disenchantment, the racism at work in the character of Stephen Black, the meaning behind the fantasy of magic's return, and the Englishness of English magic itself. Looking at the larger historical context of magic and its links to colonialism, this inaugural treatment offers both a fuller understanding of the ethical visions underlying Clarke's groundbreaking novel of madness intertwined with magic, while challenging readers to rethink connections among national identity, rationality, and power.

Shakespeare's history plays are central to his dramatic achievement. In recent years they have become more widely studied than ever, stimulating intensely contested interpretations, due to their relevance to central contemporary issues such as English, national identities and gender roles. Interpretations of the history plays have been transformed since the 1980s by new theoretically-informed critical approaches. Movements such as New Historicism and cultural materialism, as well as psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches, have swept away the humanist consensus of the mid-twentieth century with its largely conservative view of the plays. The last decade has seen an emergence of feminist and gender-based readings of plays which were once thought overwhelmingly masculine in their concerns. This book provides an up-to-date critical anthology representing the best work from each of the modern theoretical perspectives. The introduction outlines the changing debate in an area which is now one of the liveliest in Shakespearean criticism.

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.

Written for readers at all levels, this book situates Jane Austen in her time, and for all times. It provides a biography; locates her work in the context of literary history and criticism; explores her fiction; and features an encyclopedic, readable resource on the people, places and things of relevance to Austen the person and writer. Details on family members, beaux, friends, national affairs, church and state politics, themes, tropes, and literary devices ground the reader in Austen's world. Appendices offer resources for further reading and consider the massive modern industry that has grown up around Austen and her works.

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs and symbols, a review quiz, and essay topics. Lively and accessible, SparkNotes is perfect for late-night studying and paper writing.