First published in 1956. Arthur Waley here presents an engrossing account of the works and life of Yuan Mei (1716-1797), the best-known poet of his time. Gaiety is the keynote of his works and the poet was a friend of the Manchu official with whom Commodore Anson had dramatic dealings at Canton in 1743. Yuan Mei gives an account (not previously translated) of Anson's interview with the Manchu authorities. The book contains many translations of Yuan Mei's verse and prose.

This book reads the work of contemporary women poets against recent debates in "third wave" feminism and democratic theory in exploring the range of ways in which women poets have interrogated the complexities of being "public" in contemporary U.S culture.

Drawing on contemporary material, including Auden's unpublished diary, this book places personal experience in the context of the life of Berlin - not only its political, artistic and cultural life, but the life of the streets, bars and cafes. The biography brings together a major phase in the life of Auden, Isherwood, and the city. It presents portraits of figures with whom Auden and Isherwood came into contact, and it demonstrates how, especially in Isherwood's fiction, the material of daily existence was transformed into literature. The wide scope of this study, which ranges from poetry and cinema to street violence and prostitution, provides a detailed context for its account of two writers engaged in the process of self-definition.

What is the relation between the language being heard and the picture being simultaneously exhibited on the stage? Typically there is an identity between sound and sight, but often there is a divergence between what the audience hears and what is sees. These divergences are 'insets' and examines the motives, mechanics and poetic qualities of these narrative poems embedded in the plays.

Drawing upon historicist and cultural studies approaches to literature, this book argues that the Romantic construction of the self emerged out of the growth of commercial print culture and the expansion and fragmentation of the reading public beginning in eighteenth-century Britain. Starting with an overview of eighteenth-century developments and their impact of authorship, this book explores the construction of personal and poetic identity in the writing of Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, James Beattie, William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. Arguing for continuity between eighteenth-century literature and the rise of Romanticism, this groundbreaking book traces the influence of new print market conditions on the development of the Romantic poetic self.

First published in 1957. This edition re-issues the second edition of 1965. Recognized as one of the leading books in its field, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare presents the most comprehensive account available of the English historical drama from its beginning to the closing of the theatres in 1642 and relates this development to Renaissance historiography and Elizabethan political theory.

The poetry of John Stewart of Baldynneis, one of James VI's soi disant Castalian Band, is a relatively unknown phenomenon of the Renaissance period. This book is a critical edition of his epic poem Roland Furious, supposedly a translation of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso into Scots but actually a brilliantly original poem which directly follows guidelines given by James VI for the creation of such literature in the Scottish vernacular. A fully annotated version of the text is given, along with a critical induction discussing the main European influences on Stewart's work, notes to the text, an appendix of proper and personal names, and a full glossary. This book provides an important link in the history of Scottish poetry. Brill's Texts and Sources in Intellectual History, vol. 4

First published in 1971. This volume explains and analyses the last plays of Shakespeare as dramatic structures. Beginning from the dark comedies, the author describes the ways in which Shakespeare was affected by the new techniques and possibilities for drama opened up by the innovations of the years after 1600, notably by the rise in children's companies. The main line of development of Shakespeare's dramatic skills is shown as leading from the dark comedies, through the late tragedies, to the last plays. A major part of the book is devoted to analyses of Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and King Henry VIII.

First published in 1952. An invaluable introduction to Shakespeare, this book places Shakespeare's work and criticism against the background of Elizabethan life in its historical, social, political, religious, linguistic and literary aspects. Contents include: The Problem of Interpretation; Shakespeare at Work; Man and Society; Man and the Universe; The Inner Life.

A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies provides an authoritative guide to debate on Elizabethan England's poet laureate. Its twelve chapters cover key topics (such as politics and gender) and provide reception histories for all of the primary texts. Some of today's most prominent Spenser scholars offer lively accounts of debates on the poet, from the Renaissance to the present day. Essential for those producing new research on Spenser, the Companion also provides an ideal introduction to the non-specialist.

The central character of Divine Yet Human Epics is the developing conception of epic itself. Its story unfolds as the ancient Greek idea of epic originates with Pindar and Herodotus on the basis of the Iliad and Odyssey. While this notion eventually leads their Sanskrit counterparts, the Ramaya?a and Mahabharata, to be understood selectively in modern times, medieval readers Anandavardhana and Rajasekhara reveal distinctive features of these ancient Indian poems earlier in this exegetical tale. Shubha Pathak's interpretative account concludes with a new way to connect these primary epics to their Greek analogues. Both epic pairs feature poetic kings who together affirm and interrogate their societies' central religious ideals: Greek kleos (or heroic glory, which assuages uncertainty about the afterlife) and Indian dharma (or righteousness, which counters encroaching immorality). The Greek and Sanskrit epics, by showing both the divine ease and the human difficulty with which kleos and dharma are achieved, employ similar teaching strategies to address the shared psychological needs of human beings learning to live within the disparate cultures of ancient Greece and India. This cross-cultural comparative study thus provides a more comprehensive perspective on the poems' religiosity than the vantage points of Hellenists or of Indologists alone.

At present, Emily Bronte's poetry is more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, the very uniqueness of her poems has made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poems written by Victorian women. Last Things seeks to reinstate Emily Bronte's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. It presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience of the world and seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. It develops Georges Bataille's insight that it doesn't matter whether Bronte had a mystical experience because she 'reached the very essence of such an experience'. Although the book does not discuss all of Bronte's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. For admirers of Wuthering Heights, Last Things will bring the concerns and methods of the novel into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.

This book re-places Lamb - as reader, writer and friend - in the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s.It taps into current interest in 'romantic sociability', a close study of the affiliations of writers who used to be grouped as 'the Wordsworth circle' and 'the Keats circle'. This book makes valuable contribution to emerging critical studies of Lamb and his writings. It offers the first book-length study of Lamb's early works and their relationship to other Romantic writers. It discusses Lamb's friendship with key Romantic writers, including Coleridge and Wordsworth and how their relationships informed their works. It gives attention to allusive practices of the time and the development of the essay as a genre.This book makes the case for a re-placing of Lamb as reader, writer and friend in the midst of the lively political and literary scene of the 1790s. Reading his little-known early works alongside others by the likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth, it allows a revealing insight into the creative dynamics of early Romanticism.

Present scholarly conversations about early European and global modernity have yet to acknowledge fully the significance of Spain and Spanish cultural production. Poetry and ideology in early modern Spain form the backdrop for ""Imperial Lyric"", which seeks to address this shortcoming. Based on readings of representative poems by eight Peninsular writers, ""Imperial Lyric"" demonstrates that the lyric was a crucial site for the negotiation of masculine identity as Spain's noblemen were alternately cajoled and coerced into abandoning their identifications with images of the medieval hero and assuming instead the posture of subjects. The book thus demonstrates the importance of Peninsular letters to our understanding of shifting ideologies of the self, language, and the state that mark watersheds for European and American modernity. At the same time, this book aims to complicate the historicizing turn we have taken in the field of early modern studies by considering a threshold of modernity that was specific to poetry, one that was inscribed in Spanish culture when the genre of lyric poetry attained a certain kind of prestige at the expense of epic. ""Imperial Lyric"" breaks striking new ground in the field of early modern studies.

The foremost critical edition of the Greek lyric poets: Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides and Corinna, and other minor poets, and songs and fragments.

Stanley Lombardo's deft abridgment of his 2005 translation of the Aeneid preserves the arc and weight of Virgil's epic by presenting major books in their entirety and abridged books in extended passages seamlessly fitted together with narrative bridges. W. R. Johnson's Introduction, a shortened version of his masterly Introduction to that translation, will be welcomed by both beginning and seasoned students of the Aeneid , and by students of Roman history, classical mythology, and Western civilization.

***Winner of the CCUE Book Prize 2012 ***
Fascinated by his own imagination, Coleridge secretly wrote that its characteristic blend of power and desire made him a "Daemon": a being superstitiously feared as "a something transnatural." "Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination" examines this simultaneous experience of exaltation and transgression as a formative principle in Coleridge's poetry and the fabric of his philosophy. In a reading that spans the breadth of Coleridge's achievement, through politics, religion and his relationship with Wordsworth, this book builds to a new interpretation of the poems where Coleridge's daemonic imagination produces its myths: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel." Gregory Leadbetter reveals a Coleridge at once more familiar and more strange, in a study that unfolds into an essay on poetry, spirituality, and the drama of human becoming.

William Blake and the Daughters of Albion offers a challenge to the Blake establishment. By placing some of Blake's early prophetic works in startlingly new historical contexts (most provocatively those of female conduct and pornography) a very different image of the radical Blake emerges. The book shows what can be achieved when a challenging methodology, feminist historicism, is brought to bear on a canonical writer and on now canonized interpretations of his work.

Series Information:
Routledge Literary Sourcebooks

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

"Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse" explores literary modernism through the lens of cultural history. Focusing on the intersection of scientific and religious discourse in the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer, Lara Vetter argues that a peculiarly modern spiritual understanding of science appealed to modernist writers as a way of negotiating the perceived threats to a radically unstable body. Analyzing literary and extraliterary writing, this study offers articulate conclusions on how these writers came to construct their own worldviews in response to the arts, science and religion of their time.

Take Note for Exam Success! York Notes offer an exciting approach to English literature. This market leading series fully reflects student needs. They are packed with summaries, commentaries, exam advice, margin and textual features to offer a wider context to the text and encourage a critical analysis. York Notes, The Ultimate Literature Guides.

The 12th edition of the International Who's Who in Poetry is a unique and comprehensive guide to the leading lights and freshest talent in poetry today. Containing biographies of more than 4,000 contemporary poets world-wide, this essential reference work provides truly international coverage. The well known poets, as well as talented up-and-coming writers are profiled. CONTENTS:* Each entry provides full career history and publication details * The career profile section is supplemented by lists of Poets Laureate of the United Kingdom and USA, Oxford University professors of poetry, poet winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, winners of the Pulitzer Prize for American Poetry and of the King's/Queen's Gold medal and other poetry prizes * A summary of poetic forms and rhyme schemes * Lists over 8,000 important and influential authors and poets of the last 3,000 years * An international appendices section lists prizes and past prize-winners, organizations, magazines and publishers.

Why are there so few 'happily ever afters' in the Romantic-period verse romance? Why do so many poets utilise the romance and its parts to such devastating effect? Why is gender so often the first victim? The Romantic Paradox investigates the prevalence of death in the poetic romances of the Della Cruscans, Coleridge, Keats, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Byron, and posits that understanding the romance and its violent tendencies is vital to understanding Romanticism itself.

Deeply involved with Irish culture and history, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest poets writing in the last two centuries. This Routledge Literary Sourcebook provides essential help for readers who wish to learn more about his powerful, haunting poems.
Considering Yeats's early, dreamily evocative poems as well as his passionate, tension-ridden later work, Michael O'Neill offers a refreshingly clear discussion of:
*contexts - through an invaluable, accessible overview, a detailed chronology and contemporary documents revealing Yeats's understanding of his vocation as a poet;
*interpretations - through helpfully introduced extracts from criticism of Yeats's work, ranging from early responses through to modern critical texts;
*key poems - in a section where insightful commentary accompanies the full annotated text of many of Yeats's major poems;
*further reading - to guide those interested in additional study.
The Sourcebook is ideal for those new to Yeats's poetry or those who wish to look deeper into its workings, its reception and the contexts from which it emerged.