This book covers the life and work of a wide range of writers from Coleridge to Wollstonecraft, Hemans, Beckford and their contemporaries. Also encompassing a wealth of material on contexts from the treason trials of 1794 to the coming of gas-light to the London stage in 1817, it provides a panorama of one of the richest periods in British culture.

Discussing authors as diverse in time and type as Sir Fulke Greville, Christopher Hill, Charles Lamb, Edmund Waller, and Thomas Warton the elder, Richard Hillyer analyzes Sir Philip Sidney's reputation from his own day to the present. More important than how Sidney's works have fared over many centuries' worth of critical fashion, Hillyer argues, is how Sidney's versatility as a "Renaissance man" has elicited varying degrees of wonder, incomprehension, and skepticism. Even when least appreciated as an author, he has remained a cultural icon, a prominent figure on the landscapes of English culture and literature, and an influence that later authors and commentators have continued to address.

This work takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasizing the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasions. The book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

Dowdy uncovers and analyzes the primary rhetorical strategies, particularly figures of voice, in American political poetry from the Vietnam War-era to the present. He brings together a unique and diverse collection of poets, including an innovative section on hip hop performance.

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary debates in poetry and poetics. Gareth Farmer explores Forrest-Thomson's relationship to the conflicting models of literary criticism in the twentieth century such as the close-reading models of F.R Leavis and William Empson, postructuralist models, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Written by the leading scholar on Forrest-Thomson's work, this study explores Forrest-Thomson's published work as well as unpublished materials from the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive. Drawing on close readings of Forrest-Thomson's writings, this study argues that her work enables us reevaluate literary-critical history and suggests new paradigms for the literary aesthetics and poetics of the future.

What, for a poet, could 'passive making' mean? What does Wordsworth imagine he is doing, in commanding the moon to shine, the wind to blow in 'Tintern Abbey'? Heralded as the age of social contract and the Rights of Man, romanticism-this book argues-instead engages in non-contractual poetics. In the period's burgeoning economics of 'fiat' money, as much as in the natural and supernatural imagination of its poets, the legacy of romanticism involves a series of absolutist gestures of verbal fiat: a rhetoric subject to historical and philosophical pressures, which so far has largely escaped critical attention. Focused on William Wordsworth, but in constant range of his poet-successors and modern critics, Romantic Fiat argues for the dialectical perils of the urge to reach freedom from illusion. The study presents a rich and emphatic new argument for a double romantic signature of 'let there be' and 'let be.'

First published in 1988, this annotated selection of Wilfred Owen's poetry and prose provides a comprehensive one-volume text of his best work. As well as the war poems, it includes illuminating early pieces such as 'Impressionist' and 'Little Claus and Big Claus', which illustrate Owen's early command of satire and narrative. The prose includes Owen's well-known draft Preface and a wide range of his letters, showing the devotion he felt for his mother, his poetic development after meeting Siegfried Sassoon, and, above all, his war experiences. With a detailed introduction and helpful commentary, this timely reissue will be of particular value to A-Level and undergraduate students with an interest in the work of Wilfred Owen, his contemporaries, and the context of the First World War.

A surprisingly large number of English poets have either belonged to a secret society, or been strongly influenced by its tenets. One of the best known examples is Christopher Smart's membership of the Freemasons, and the resulting influence of Masonic doctrines on A Song to David. However, many other poets have belonged to, or been influenced by not only the Freemasons, but the Rosicrucians, Gormogons and Hell-Fire Clubs. First published in 1986, this study concentrates on five major examples: Smart, Burns, William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling, as well as a number of other poets. Marie Roberts questions why so many poets have been powerfully attracted to the secret societies, and considers the effectiveness of poetry as a medium for conveying secret emblems and ritual. She shows how some poets believed that poetry would prove a hidden symbolic language in which to reveal great truths. The beliefs of these poets are as diverse as their practice, and this book sheds fascinating light on several major writers.

Two and a half centuries after his birth, Blake's influence on later generations of writers and artists is more important than ever, extending into film, psychology, children's literature, and graphic novels as well as poetry, painting, and fiction. "Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture" explores the ways in which Blake reacted to the subcultures of his day, as well as how he has inspired popular, modernist and postmodernist figures until the present day.

Even if Bentham and Coleridge] had had no great influence they would still have been the classical examples they are of two great opposing types of mind. . . . And as we follow Mill's analysis, exposition and evaluation of this pair of opposites we are at the same time, we realize, forming a close acquaintance with a mind different from either. From the introduction

To have a clear understanding of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the reader needs to know about the vocations of the pilgrims. For some 600 years, this information has been difficult to locate. This reference provides a detailed historical description of the occupations of Chaucer's pilgrims. An entry is devoted to each traveler, and the entries have similar formats to foster comparison. Each entry discusses the historical daily routine of the pilgrim's occupation, the portrayal of the profession in Chaucer's poem, and the relationship between the tale and Chaucer's General Prologue. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is one of the oldest and most widely studied works of English literature. The tales provide a glimpse of medieval life, and the professions of the pilgrims figure prominently in the poetry. To have a clear understanding of Chaucer's work, the reader needs to know about the vocations of the pilgrims. For some 600 years, this information has been difficult to locate. This reference work conveniently synthesizes and discusses information about the occupation of each of Chaucer's pilgrims and provides an historical context. The volume contains individual entries for each of Chaucer's pilgrims, and the entries share a similar format to foster comparison. Each entry includes three parts. First, the pilgrim's profession is discussed in terms of the daily routine of the medieval occupation. Second, the vocation is examined in terms of its reflection in the tale told by the pilgrim. Third, the vocation and the tale are discussed, when possible, in relation to the descriptions of the characters provided in the General Prologue. Each entry includes a bibliography, and the volume concludes with a list of works for further reading.

Dr. Brett brings joy into the hearts of many as they experience her collections of poems and proses. She expresses the labyrinth of life as a maze, difficult, challenging, joyous, spiritual and fulfilling with angels.

Ambrose Bierce was born in 1842 and mysteriously disappeared in 1914. During his lifetime, he was a controversial and prolific writer, and there is growing interest in his works. As a Union soldier during the Civil War, he witnessed bloodshed and the atrocities of battle. After the war, he began a career as a journalist in San Francisco, where many of his newspaper columns were filled with venom and daring. In addition, he wrote war stories and tales of the supernatural, along with an assortment of poems. Today, he is probably best remembered as the author of "The Devil's Dictionary, " originally published as "The Cynic's Dictionary" in 1906. This reference is a guide to his life and writings.

An opening essay overviews Bierce's contribution to literature and journalism, and a chronology summarizes the most important events in his life. The bulk of the Companion comprises alphabetically arranged entries on Bierce's major works and characters and on historical persons and writers who figured prominently in his life and career. Thus the volume provides coverage of Bierce's contemporaries, many of whom he satirized in his scathing newspaper columns. Many of the entries list works for further reading, and the book closes with a selected, general bibliography. Because of Bierce's concern with so many issues of his day, the volume offers a valuable perspective on American culture during the time in which he lived.

Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. "Romanticism and the Object" adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive and comparative study of some of the fundamental structural aspects of modernist poetic writing in English, French and German in the first decades of the twentieth century. The work concerns itself primarily with basic structural elements and techniques and the assumptions that underlie and determine the modernist mode of poetic writing. Particular attention is paid to the theories developed by authors and to the essential principles of construction that shape the structure of their poetry. Considering the work of a number of modernist poets, Theo Hermans argues that the various widely divergent forms and manifestations of modernistic poetry writing can only be properly understood as part of one general trend. "

Reissuing works originally published between 1958 and 1993, this five-volume set offers a selection of scholarship on the greatest classical poet, whose two monumental epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, remain foundational to the Western cultural tradition. Routledge Library Editions: Homer helps to situate this immense artistic achievement in its historical and cultural context, considering issues such as the relationship between the Homeric epics and the Mycenaean civilisation which preceded them, the importance of Homer for the flowering of Greek tragedy, and the reception of Homer during and after the Enlightenment.

In this critical and historical interpretation of Petrarch's major Italian work, the collection of poems he called the Rerum vulgarium fagmenta, Peter Hainsworth presents Petrarch as a poet of outstanding sophistication and seriousness, occupied with issues which are still central to debates about poetry and language. In the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta Petrarch reformed the received Italian tradition, creating a new kind of lyric poetry. In particular, he found solutions to the intellectual, linguistic and imaginative problems which Dante's Divine Comedy posed for the succeeding generation of poets. Petrarch the Poet illumines the complexities of Petrarch's poetic vision, which is simultaneously a form of autobiographical narrative, a poetic encyclopaedia and a meditation on the nature of poetry. The book will appeal to Italian specialists, to those interested in European poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and also to readers interested generally in the nature and function of poetry.

Offers a clear analysis of this key concept in literary studies and aesthetics, which is essential to the study of Romanticism and English poetic tradition in general. 'Negative capability', the term John Keats used only once in a letter to his brothers, is a well-known but surprisingly unexplored concept in literary criticism and aesthetics. This book is the first book-length study of this central concept in seventy years. As well as clarifying the meaning of the term and giving an anatomy of its key components, the book gives a full account of the history of this idea. It traces the narrative of how the phrase first became known and gradually gained currency, and explores its primary sources in earlier writers, principally Shakespeare and William Hazlitt, and its chief Modernist successors, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Meanwhile, the term is also applied to Keats' own poetry, which manifests the evolution of the idea in Keats' poetic practice. Many of the comparative readings of the relevant texts, including "King Lear", illuminate the interconnections between these major writers. The book is an original and significant piece of scholarship on this celebrated concept.

This new volume demonstrates the extent and diversity of Coleridge's writings on the sublime. It highlights the development of his aesthetic of transcendence from an initial emphasis on the infinite progressiveness of humanity, through a fascination with landscape as half-revealing the infinite forces underlying it, and with literature as producing a similar feeling of the inexpressible, to an increasing emphasis on contemplating the ineffable nature of God, as well as the transcendent power of Reason or spiritual insight.

The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Groeber in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.

Combining encyclopedic information as well as a critical guide to the poetry of Robert Burns, this work attempts to show the complex nature of this supposedly uncomplicated poet. Born a farmer's son in 1759, Burns lived through many of the most important events of his century. The work is divided into six sections. Part I places Burns in context with a chronology, "The Burns Circle" and a topography. Part 2 looks at the Burnsian issues of religion, politics, philosophy, drink, drama and sex. Part 3, an essay on Burns as a poetic phenomenon, is sure to provoke debate about the relevance of Burns to his time and ours. The fourth and longest section of the book examines 25 poems, 18 verse epistles and 26 songs as well as commenting on the letters, political ballads and Common Place Books. A select bibliography and four appendices are followed by a glossary of Scots words and indices of poems and names.

In David Cope's strikingly intense new collection, Fragments for the Stars, we see the continued development of a highly original art. Rising directly out of Williams' graphic American measure, Cope's voice is everywhere infused with a characteristic stark lyricism-producing the powerful work that Carl Rakosi has called his "compassionate realism".

This interdisciplinary collection explores the ability of Old French fabliaux to disrupt the literal and figurative bodies with which they come into contact. Essays in this volume address theoretical issues including fragmentation and multiplication, social anxiety and excessive circulation, performative productions and creative formations, to trace the competing consequences that result from this literary body's unsettling capacity. Resisting the impulse to see the fabliaux as either liberatory or restrictive, comic or satiric, didactic or immoral, contributors assess the ways in which Old French fabliaux expose bodily relations that elude binary classifications. As a gathering of scholars in French, English, and History, this volume suggests that the Old French fabliaux form a corpus that is provocative across medieval studies.

Examining how labouring-class poets constructed themselves and were constructed by critics as part of a canon, and how they situated their work in relation to contemporaries and poets from earlier periods, this book highlights the complexities of labouring-class poetic identities in the period from Burns to mid-late century Victorian dialect poets.