Frederick Glaysher invokes a global vision beyond the prevailing postmodern conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary world culture. East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankind ranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Ryuichi Tamura, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature. Clearly the work of a poet-critic attempting to embrace a larger portion of human experience than the personal postmodern self, The Grove of the Eumenides reaches toward an epic vision of the twenty-first century. All the muck and glory of American and international experience and history mix in the complex tension of a mind struggling with itself and its Age. Acutely perceptive of the spiritual and moral nuances of literature, criticism, and culture, Glaysher confronts the loss of religious faith in the modern world and breaks through to a vision of the unity of the human longing for transcendence.

Once a byword for Protestant sobriety and moral idealism, Spenser is now better known for his irony and elusiveness. But this study argues that his sense of humour is still underestimated and misunderstood. In a series of bold reinterpretations of key episodes in The Faerie Queene, Victoria Coldham-Fussell demonstrates that humour goes to the heart of Spenser's moral and doctrinal preoccupations. She charts amusing rifts between the poem's ambitious and idealising postures and its Protestant vision of corruptible human nature; yet contends that Spenserian humour is an expression of tolerance and faith as well as an instrument of satire. This study's application of modern comic theory to a key text of the English Renaissance and its detailed survey of the comic influences that shaped Spenser's literary milieu will be indispensable to teachers of the Renaissance period, to students of comic literature, and to established Spenserians. -- .

It is often said that Rumi (aka Jalal al-Din, 1207-73) is now the most popular poet in the United States. This conquest of the new world by a middle-eastern medieval writer who died before Chaucer was even born has been achieved with extraordinary speed in less than thirty years.The main key to Rumi's success is the spiritual appeal of his work. It combines lyrical beauty with philosophical profundity, a sense of rapture and an acute awareness of human suffering in ways which speak directly to contemporary audiences. Like the metaphysical poets, Donne, Vaughan and Herbert, Rumi yokes together everyday images with complex ideas. He talks about divine love in vivid human terms. As a religious teacher of the Dervish order, he expounds the mystical doctrines of Sufism which focus on the notion of union with the Beloved to whom many of the poems are addressed. Persian poetry of this period is not easy to translate. In order to give the greatest possible access to a wonderful poet this selection draws on avariety of translations from the early 20th century to the present, ranging from scholarly renderings to free interpretations.

The empirical/evangelical dialectic of Romantic Anglo-America culminates in the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-86). For example, just as her poems of science and technology reflect her faith in experience, and just as her lyrics about natural history build on this empiricism and develop her commitment to natural religion, so too do her poems of revealed religion constitute her experience of faith. Thus, for an American audience, Dickinson recasts British-Romantic themes of natural and spiritual perception. This double perspective, this counterintuitive combination of natural models with spiritual metaphors, parallels the androgynous ideal of her nineteenth-century feminism and champions her belief in immortality. The experience/faith paradox of her Late-Romantic imagination forms the mind and soul, as well as the heart, of her legacy.

Using the 180-year history of Keats's Eve of St. Agnes as a basis for theorizing about the reading process, Stillinger's book explores the nature and whereabouts of `meaning' in complex works. A proponent of authorial intent, Stillinger argues a theoretical compromise between author and reader, applying a theory of interpretive democracy tha includes the endlessly multifarious reader's response as well as Keats's guessed-at intent. Stillinger also ruminates on the process of constructing meaning, and posits an answer to why Keats's work is considered canonical, and why it is still being read and admired.

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1674 text of Paradise Lost, with emendations and adoptions from the first edition and from the scribal manuscript. Spelling and punctuation have been modernised for student readers. An illuminating introduction and abundant explanatory annotations by Gordon Teskey. Source and background materials, including Milton's greatest prose work, Areopagitica, in its entirety and key selections from the Bible. Topically arranged commentaries and interpretations-seventy-eight in all, thirty-nine of them new to the Second Edition-from classic assessments to current scholarship. A glossary of names and suggestions for further reading.

Unruly women constantly speak out in lyric poetry, their voices brought to life in the bodies of female singers, dancers, and instrumentalists. Performing Women is the first book-length study of female performers in Galician-Portuguese and Castilian comic-satiric poetry. Filios reconstructs medieval women's oral performances by bringing modern ethnographic work and performance theory to bear on literary and historical evidence. Filios explores how women's performances (and men's impersonations of women) contributed to the construction of the court, the marketplace, and the countryside as cultural spaces defined by certain acts, discourses, and conflicts. She argues that poetic portraits of sexually aggressive courtesans, bread sellers, and mountain women allowed elite men to portray their own sexuality as transgressive and to adopt temporarily a female identity, enabling them to speak and act as a degraded other. While these portraits may be misogynistic, they also demonstrate that poets appreciated marginalized women's characters, placing speeches overtly critical of dominant power structures in their mouths and constructing imaginary communities around them. Men wrote these characters, women appropriated them, ironically performing as themselves. By situating medieval lyric poems in their dialogic performance context, this study demonstrates the centrality female performers in poetic spectacles.

Responses from the nineteenth century onwards to the medieval French poet. Medieval Paris' paradigmatic poet, Francois Villon, has long captured the imaginations of creative writers. Attracted by his beguilingly pseudo-autobiographical literary persona and a body of work that moves seamlessly between bawdy humour, bitterness, devotion, and regret, Villon's heirs have been many and varied. A veritable "poet's poet", his oeuvre has appealed to fellow versifiers in particular, providing a rich source for translation and imitation. This book explores creative responses to Villon by British and North American poets, focusing on translations and imitations of his work by Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, and Robert Lowell. They are presented as exemplary of the greater trend of rendering Villon into English, transporting the reader from the first verse translations of his work in the nineteenth century, to post-modern adaptations and parodies ofVillon in the twentieth. By concentrating on the manner in which individual poets have reacted to Villon, and to one another, the study unravels multiple layers of poetic relations. It argues that the relationships that exist between the translated or imitated texts are collaborative as much as they are competitive, establishing a canon of Villon in English poetry whose allusions are not only to the French source, but to the parallel corpus of English translations and imitations. CLAIRE PASCOLINI-CAMPBELL holds degrees in medieval and comparative literatures from the University of St Andrews and University College London.

Troubled by his complex sexuality, Monro was a tormented soul whose aim was to serve the cause of poetry. Hibberd's revealing and beautifully-written biography will help rescue Monro from the graveyard of literary history and claim for him the recognition he deserves. Poet and businessman, ascetic and alcoholic, socialist and reluctant soldier, twice-married yet homosexual, Harold Monro probably did more than anyone for poetry and poets in the period before and after the Great War, and yet his reward has been near oblivion. Aiming to encourage the poets of the future, he befriended, among many others, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Imagists; Rupert Brooke and the Georgians; Marinetti the Futurist; Wilfred Owen and other war poets; and the noted women poets, Charlotte Mew and Amma Wickham.

Wilfred Owen's poetry is now very widely known as the finest that came out of the First World War. But much about the poet and his work has not been fully understood. This book, based on unrivalled research, is the first to study of Owen's complete poetic achievement, revealing the uniqueness, strangeness and unity of what he called his 'poethood'. His war poems are shown to be a consistent development from his prewar verse and his unswerving allegiance to Romanticism; they grew out of a pattern of mythologised secret experience that took shape in some of his least-known manuscripts before he knew anything of the trenches. Owen lived for poetry; many unfamiliar aspects of that life are brought into focus, including his early discovery of Georgianism, his battle wirh Revivalist religion, his debt to the French Decadence, his alleged cowardice, the torment of his shellshock and the remarkable 'sociological' treatment he received for it, his sexual nature and his friendship with Oscar Wilde's beleaguered disciples in 1918, and his supreme courage in making poetry out of inner horrors deliberately 'recollected in tranquility'. Learning from Wordsworth and Shelley, Aesthetes and Decadents, Sassoon and the Georgians, Hardy, Barbusse, Russell, Edward Carpenter and many others, Owen realised his life's ambition and became a profoundly origianal poet. Owen the Poet ends with chapters on two of his richest works: 'Strange Meeting', his worst shellshock nightmare, and 'Spring Offensive', the epilogue to all he wrote. Notes, appendixes and bibliography complete what is likely to be the most authoritative book on its subject for many years to come.

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth-century and Enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage are themes of the collection, which includes discussion of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearslep, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

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.

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.

First published in 1971. This collection of essays discusses some of the central works and areas of literature in the Renaissance period of cultural history. Contents include: Spenser and the Allegorists; The Faerie Queene, I and V; The Cave of Mammon; The Banquet of Sense; John Donne; The Patience of Shakespeare; Survival fo the Classic; Shakespeare's Learning; The Mature Comedies; The Final Plays.

***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.

This volume of essays offers innovations in teaching Chaucer in higher education. The projects explored in this study focus on a student-centred, active learning designed to enhance independent research skills and critical thinking. These studies also seek to establish conversations - between teachers and learners, and students and their texts.

"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.

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.

In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts distinguished critics from Canada, Japan, the US, and the UK, offer fresh and challenging readings of Hardy's works. They also raise far wider and far-reaching questions about Hardy's attitude to his art, his relation to such contemporary forms as melodrama, and his response to the ongoing scientific debates, from Darwin to Einstein, about sexuality; personal identity; the meaning of suicide; and the nature of time.

Edward Thomas 1878-1917, published author, critic, and essayist, died at 39, a casualty of World War I. At the suggestion of his friend Robert Frost, Thomas began to write poetry and six months after his death his first book of poems was published. As the prose writer died, the poet was born, and it is on the poems that his reputation still rests. This new biography--based on some 1,800 of Thomas's letters--tells the story of his courtship, his restless marriage, and his tormented need to choose between happiness with his wife and children and the need to find his way as a writer alone. With delicacy and understanding the book describes Thomas's complex character and his pilgrimage on the road to self-discovery, and reveals how the emergence of Thomas the poet became inevitable.

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.

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.