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.

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.

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. "

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.

There has never been a book about Blake's last period, from his meeting with John Linnell in 1818 to his death in 1827, although it includes some of his greatest works. In The Traveller in the Evening, Morton Paley argues that this late phase involves attitudes, themes, and ideas that are either distinctively new or different in emphasis from what preceded them. After an introduction on Blake and his milieu during this period, Paley begins with a chapter on Blake's illustrations to Thornton's edition of Virgil. Paley relates these to Blake's complex view of pastoral, before proceeding to a history of the project, its near-abortion, and its fulfillment as one of Blake's greatest accomplishments as an illustrator. In Yah and His Two Sons the presentation of the divine, except where it is associated with art, is ambiguous where it is not negative. Paley takes up this separate plate in the context of artists's representations of the Laocoon that would have been known to Blake, and also of what Blake would have known of its history from classical antiquity to his own time. Blake's Dante water colours and engravings are the most ambitious accomplishment of the last years of his life, and Paley shows that the problematic nature of some of these pictures, with Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car as a main example, arises from Blake's own divided and sharply polarized attitude toward Dante's Comedy. The closing chapter, called 'Blake's Bible', is on the Bible-related designs and writings of Blake's last years. Paley discusses The Death of Abel (addressed to Lord Byron 'in the Wilderness') as a response to its literary forerunners, especially Gessner's Death of Abel and Byron's Cain. For the Job engravings Paley shows how the border designs and the marginal texts set up a dialogue with the main illustrations unlike anything in Blake's Job water colours on the same subjects. Also included here are Blake's last pictorial work on a Biblical subject, The Genesis manuscript, and Blake's last writing on a Biblical text, his vitriolic comments on Thornton's translations of the Lord's Prayer.

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.

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.

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.

No Japanese writer was more obsessed with desire than Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (1886-1965). Over a career that spanned half a century, he explored, with both joyful fascination and ruthless insight, the dazzling varieties of sexuality, the complementary attractions of exoticism and nostalgia, the human yearning for mastery over others, and the tense relationship between fantasy and the exterior world. His fiction is filled with portrayals of desire in all its violence, irony, pathos, and comedy.
In one of Tanizaki's novels, a young engineer fascinated with the West sets out to transform a Japanese bar girl into his very own version of Mary Pickford. He succeeds to such an extent that the girl, growing tired of his immutable Japaneseness, begins to take foreign lovers. Cuckolded and humiliated though his is, the engineer is unable to leave his fantasy-come-to-life and resigns himself to enslavement.
In another novel, a Westernized Japanese finds himself gradually drawn to the past. Specifically, he is attracted to his father-in-law's companion, a young woman who has been trained and costumed to play the part of an old-fashioned mistress. Though this woman is no more a flesh-and-blood embodiment of tradition than a bunraku doll, the protagonist contemplates a life with someone like her, a life defined by the pursuit of abstract, dehumanized cultural ideals.
Visions of Desire locates such novels in the shifting discourse on cultural identity and cultural aspiration that permeates Japanese life. Ito argues that Tanizaki's novels do not merely end in the reification and contemplation of cultural ideals but rather problematize the desire behind such ideals. He finds in the writer's fiction a subtle understanding of cultural aspiration as a process riddled with subversions, influenced by patterns of mediation, and circumscribed by the lonely efforts of individual subjectivity. He discovers in Tanizaki's fables about the male effort to transform women into cultural icons a clear awareness of the sexual and class hierarchies that make such transformation possible.
Visions of Desire is the first book in English on a writer who is possibly modern Japan's greatest novelist. Ito has written for both the specialist and the general reader, setting his argument in a discussion both of Tanizaki's times and of the life of a writer who believed in living out the fantasies that fueled his fictions.

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.

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of rationality realized objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own skeptical doubts.
Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these skeptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasizes the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine hisconfidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature.

Spanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today's avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation. Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century. Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the confines of enclosed national traditions bringing it into renewed contact with mostly European, but also other, cultures.

The interpretation of Paradise Lost has undergone remarkable changes in the last twenty years. This new collection of essays maps these changes, showing how they have been achieved by the combined discourses of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. The essays are by writers working at the forefront of current criticism, and not only provide an overview of contemporary readings of one of the seminal works of English literature, but also indicate the range and subtlety of the revolution in English studies that has taken place in the past two decades. Paradise Lost is revealed as a work of immediate and challenging relevance.

Why did Spenser write his epic, The Faerie Queene, in stanzas instead of a classical meter or blank verse? Why did he affect the vocabulary of medieval poets such as Chaucer? Is there, as centuries of readers have noticed, something lyrical about Spenser's epic style, and if so, why? In this accessible and wide-ranging study, David Scott Wilson-Okamura reframes these questions in a larger, European context. The first full-length treatment of Spenser's poetic style in more than four decades, it shows that Spenser was English without being insular. In his experiments with style, Spenser faced many of the same problems, and found some of the same solutions, as poets writing in other languages. Drawing on classical rhetoric and using concepts that were developed by literary critics during the Renaissance, this is an account of long-term, international trends in style, illustrated with examples from Petrarch, Du Bellay, Ariosto, and Tasso.

By reading T.S. Eliot literally and laterally, and attending to his intra-textuality, G. Douglas Atkins challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual. This study culminates in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading and writing, literature and commentary.

"Yeats Annual" is an established research-level publication for current thought and documentation upon the life and work of "the greatest poet in the English tongue of this century" (Dame Helen Gardner). The focus in this sixth number is on Yeats at work on various manuscripts and on his tours of America.;Almost every contributor draws on unpublished material and the items contained in this work included the complete surviving archive of letters to Yeats from Olivia Shakespear published for the first time, the earliest surviving manuscripts of "Cathleen ni Houlihan" by Lady Gregory and Yeats, an examination of the manuscripts of "Deirdre" and Yeats' interest in Arthurianism, plus an account of his first tour of California in 1904 and a re-examination of several of Yeats' works such as "Responsiblities". The volume also includes a number of reviews on works written about Yeats.

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Grossman examines the narrative form of Paradise Lost to discover Milton's thoroughly modern concept of self. Banished from paradise, the epic poem's protagonists become "authors to themselves in all/Both what they judge and what they choose," left to create their own story in relation to the story already written by God. Grossman believes the resulting structure of the poem must be understood in the context of seventeenth-century historical and theological developments, specifically Bacon's notion of history as progress and Protestant theology's notion of the inner voice. The book draws upon recent works in hermeneutics and analytic history to develop the argument that there is a common structure to the experience of time in action and in narrative. In developing this thesis, Grossman draws on the work Stephen Greenblatt, Ricoeur, Todorov, Genette, Derrida, and Lacan to construct an original reading of Paradise Lost that will fascinate Miltonists, specialists in seventeenth-century literature, and readers concerned with narrative theory.