A study of tragedies, comedies, romances, and histories, this book examines the dynamic interplay of three concepts--gender, text, and habitat--as metaphors for cross-cultural definition. The book focuses on the cross-cultural experience, arguing that Shakespeare reinterprets, refashions, and reinscribes stage aliens such as Jews, Moors, Amazons and gypsies and thus interrogates a Eurocentric perspective and the caricatures that cultures create of one another. Writing in an accessible, compelling style, de Sousa recovers a wealth of information on race and gender relations in early modern Europe.

In the midst of an age of prejudice, John Selden's immense, neglected rabbinical works contain magnificent Hebrew scholarship that respects, to an extent remarkable for the times, the self-understanding of Judaism. Scholars celebrated for their own broad and deep learning gladly conceded Selden's superiority and conferred on him titles such as "the glory of the English nation" (Hugo Grotius), "Monarch in letters" (Ben Jonson), "the chief of learned men reputed in this land" (John Milton). Although scholars have examined Selden (1584-1654) as a political theorist, legal and constitutional historian, and parliamentarian, Renaissance England's Chief Rabbi is the first book-length study of his rabbinic and especially talmudic publications, which take up most of the six folio volumes of his complete works and constitute his most mature scholarship. It traces the cultural influence of these works on some early modern British poets and intellectuals, including Jonson, Milton, Andrew Marvell, James Harrington, Henry Stubbe, Nathanael Culverwel, Thomas Hobbes, and Isaac Newton. It also explores some of the post-biblical Hebraic ideas that served as the foundation of Selden's own thought, including his identification of natural law with a set of universal divine laws of perpetual obligation pronounced by God to our first parents in paradise and after the flood to the children of Noah. Selden's discovery in the Talmud and in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah of shared moral rules in the natural, pre-civil state of humankind provides a basis for relationships among human beings anywhere in the world. The history of the religious toleration of Jews in England is incomplete without acknowledgment of theimpact of Selden's uncommonly generous Hebrew scholarship.

In this sequel to his Romantic Consciousness, John Beer discusses further questionings of human consciousness: both the degree to which Dickens's conscious dramatizing differs from the subconscious workings of his psyche and the exploration of subliminal consciousness by nineteenth-century psychical researchers. Discussions of questions of "Being" by thinkers such as Heidegger, Sartre and Havel are accompanied by the assertion that creative writers such as Woolf and Lawrence, followed by Hughes and Plath, showed a deeper debt than philosophical contemporaries to their Romantic predecessors.

This edited collection offers educators at all levels a range of practical and theoretical approaches to teaching poetry in the context of environmental sustainability. The contributors are keenly aware of the urgency facing the planet's ecosystems-ecosystems which include all of us-and this volume makes the case that teaching poetry is not a luxury. Each of the book's three sections works from a specific angle and register. Part I focuses on pragmatic approaches to classroom activities and curricular choices; Part II considers policies and politics, including the role of the UN's Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) program; and Part III takes a widescreen view, exploring the philosophical issues that arise when poems are integrated into sustainability curricula. This book exemplifies how poetry empowers readers to think imaginatively about how to sustain-and why to sustain-our world, its resources, and its beauty.

This volume builds on recent scholarship on contemporary poetry in relation to medieval literature, focusing on postmodern poets who work with the medieval in a variety of ways. Such recent projects invert or "queer" the usual transactional nature of engagements with older forms of literature, in which readers are asked to exchange some small measure of bewilderment at archaic language or forms for a sense of having experienced a medieval text. The poets under consideration in this volume demand that readers grapple with the ways in which we are still "medieval" - in other words, the ways in which the questions posed by their medieval source material still reverberate and hold relevance for today's world. They do so by challenging the primacy of present over past, toppling the categories of old and new, and suggesting new interpretive frameworks for contemporary and medieval poetry alike.

The fabled cities of Italy--Florence, Venice, and Rome--have each acquired a distinctive tradition of literary representation involving characteristic, recurrent motifs and symbolic signatures. A wealth of writing on each is examined in fiction and poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mainly by British and American authors. Included are works by Robert Browning on Florence and Rome; George Eliot, W.D. Howells, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence on Florence; Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, L.P. Hartley, and Anthony Hecht on Venice; Arthur Hugh Clough, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, and Aldous Huxley on Rome; and Henry James and Bernard Malamud on Florence, Venice, and Rome.

The analysis points to Florence frequently being depicted in terms of binary oppositions, including Hebraism versus Hellenism, past versus present, stasis versus movement, and light versus darkness. Venetian narratives are commonly infused with motifs relating to dream and unreality, obsession, voyeurism, isolation, melancholia, and death. History is a controlling metaphor for Roman fiction and poetry, combined with the motif of change and, especially, fall from innocence to experience. Ross shows how writers have self-consciously built on the literary conventions set earlier and anticipates that these cities will remain natural loci for continued post-modernist experiment. In a wider theoretical framework, he examines this writing identified with place for the light it sheds on the issue of the importance of setting in literature.

Silius Italicus' Punica, a Latin epic poem on the second Punic war written at the end of the first century CE, is one of the few Roman historical epics to survive from antiquity. This volume represents the first full-length scholarly commentary in any language on Book 2 of the seventeen-book epic and accompanies a recent resurgence in scholarly interest in the Punica. It includes an extensive introduction to the poem's historical and literary contexts, along with the full Latin text and apparatus criticus, English translation, and detailed line-by-line commentary. The introduction situates Silius in historiographical and literary tradition, while the commentary addresses a broad range of textual, linguistic, literary, and cultural topics. Discussion of intertextuality focuses especially on the poem's adaptation of earlier epic tradition, including the poems of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, and Statius. The text and apparatus criticus have been updated since the publication of Josef Delz's Teubner edition of the Punica in 1987 to include a much more comprehensive account of emendation history. The result is a keenly focused and cutting-edge critical edition that will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Silius Italicus and the Punica for years to come.

Composed towards the end of the first century CE, Statius' Thebaid relates the myth of the 'Seven against Thebes': the assault of the seven champions of Argos on the ancient city in a bid to oust Eteocles, son of Oedipus, from his throne in favour of his brother, Polynices. Book 2 presents several key events in the build-up to the Theban war: Eteocles' haunting by the ghost of his grandfather Laius, the ill-omened weddings of Polynices and his ally Tydeus to the princesses of Argos, and Tydeus' failed embassy to Eteocles, leading to his famed victory over a Theban ambush. This volume represents the first full-length scholarly commentary in English on Book 2 of the twelve-book Latin epic, greatly expanding on and updating Mulder's 1954 Latin language commentary. An extensive introduction covers the poem's historical, textual, and literary contexts, with particular attention to Statius' adaptation of prior literary tradition and especially the epics of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, and Silius Italicus. The Latin text, accompanied by a clear translation and apparatus criticus, is newly edited to take advantage of the recent detailed editorial work on the poem by Hall, Ritchie, and Edwards and is supplemented by a comprehensive and incisive line-by-line commentary which addresses a range of textual, linguistic, and literary topics. The result is a keenly focused yet accessible critical edition that will be of interest both to specialist scholars of Latin poetry and to advanced graduate students studying Flavian epic.

Faithful Labourers surveys and evaluates existing criticism of John Milton's epic Paradise Lost, tracing the major debates as they have unfolded over the past three centuries. Eleven chapters split over two volumes consider the key debates in Milton criticism, including discussion of Milton's style, his use of the epic genre, and his references to Satan, God, innocence, the fall, sex, nakedness, and astronomy. Volume one attends to questions of style and genre. The first three chapters examine the longstanding debate about Milton's grand style and the question of whether it forfeits the native resources of English. Early critics saw Milton as the pre-eminent poet of 'apt Numbers' and 'fit quantity', whose verse is 'apt' in the specific sense of achieving harmony between sound and sense; twentieth-century anti-Miltonists faulted Milton for divorcing sound from sense; late twentieth-century theorists have denied the possibility that sound can 'enact' sense. These are extreme changes of critical perception, and yet the story of how they came about has never been told. These chronological chapters explain the roots of these changes and, in doing so, engage with the enduring theoretical question of whether it is possible for sound to enact sense. Volume two considers interpretative issues, and each of the six chapters traces a key debate in the interpretation of Paradise Lost. They engage with such questions as whether Paradise Lost is an epic or an anti-epic, whether Satan runs away with the poem (and whether it is good that he does so), what it means to be innocent (or fallen), and whether Milton's poetry is hostile to women. A final chapter on the universe of Paradise Lost makes the provocative argument that almost every commentator since the middle of the eighteenth century has led readers astray by presenting Milton's universe as the medieval model of Ptolemaic spheres. This assumption, which has fostered the notion that Milton was backward-looking or anti-intellectual, rests upon a misreading of three satirical lines. Milton's earliest critics recognized that he unequivocally embraces the new astronomy of Kepler and Bruno.

David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as 'public interiorities') without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection presents the first general theory that links poetry in environmental thought to poetry as an environment. James Sherry accomplishes this task with a network model of connectivity that scales from the individual to social to environmental practices. Selfie demonstrates how parts of speech, metaphor, and syntax extend bidirectionally from the writer to the world and from the writer inward to identities that promote sustainable practices. Selfie shows how connections in the biosphere scale up from operating within the body, to social structures, to the networks that science has identified for all life. The book urges readers to construct plural identifications rather than essential claims of identity in support of environmental diversity.

Embracing the entire history of jazz poetry, the work defines this inspired literary genre as poetry necessarily informed by jazz music. It discusses the major figures and various movements from the racist poems of the 1920s to contemporary times when the tone of jazz poetry experienced a dramatic change from elegy to celebration. The jazz music of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane transliterated into poetry by the likes of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown is but a part of this vital work. This unusual volume will be of interest to scholars and students of literature, music, American and African Studies, and popular culture as well as anyone who enjoys jazz and poetry.

Emphasis is given to a call and response between white and African American writers. The earliest jazz poems by white writers from the 1920s, for example, reflected the general anxieties evoked by jazz, particularly regarding race and sexuality, and jazz did not fully become embraced in American verse until Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown published their first books in 1926 and 1932, respectively. By the 1950s, jazz poetry had become a fad, featuring jazz and poetry in performance, and this book spends considerable time addressing the energetic but often wildly unsuccessful work by dominantly white, West coast writers who turned to Charlie Parker as their hero. African American poets from the 1960s, however, focused more on John Coltrane and interpreted his music as a representation of the Black Civil Rights movement. Jazz poetry from the 1970s to the present has had less to do with this call and response between races, and the final two chapters discuss contemporary jazz poetry in terms of its dramatic change in tone from elegy to joy.

Since its first appearance in 1962, M. L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory.

Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.

The Funambulists brings together the diverse poetry collections of six contemporary Arab diasporic women poets. Spanning multiple languages and regions, this volume illuminates the distinct artistic voice of each poet, yet also highlights the aesthetic and political relevance that unites their work. Marchi explores the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, a celebrated American poet of Palestinian descent; Iman Mersal, an Egyptian poet living in Edmonton, Canada, who writes in Arabic; Nadine Ltaif, a Lebanese poet who lives in Quebec and has adopted French as her language; Maram al-Massri, a Syrian poet writing in Arabic and living in France; Suheir Hammad, an American poet of Palestinian origin; and Mina Boulhanna, a Moroccan poet living in Italy and writing in Italian. Despite their varying geographical and political backgrounds, these poets find common ground in themes of injustice, spirituality, gender, race, and class. Drawing upon the concept of tension, Marchi examines both the breaking points and the creative energies that traverse the poetic works of these writers. These celebrated funambulists use their art of balance and flexibility bolstered by their courage and transgression to walk a tightrope stretched out across cultures, faiths, and nations.

With over forty original essays, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures offers an in-depth engagement with the current analytical methodologies and critical practices that are shaping the field in the twenty-first century. Divided into three sections-Structure, Taxonomy, Methodology-the volume carefully moves across approaches, genres, and forms to address a rich range topics that include popular culture in Late Qing China; Zhang Guangyu's Journey to the West in Cartoons; writings of Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan; the Chinese Anglophone Novel; and depictions of HIV/AIDS in Chu T'ien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man.

<I>John Clare, Politics and Poetry</I> challenges the traditional portrait of "poor John Clare", the helpless victim of personal and professional circumstance. Clare's career has been presented as a disaster of editorial heavy-handedness, condescension, a poor market, and conservative patronage. Yet Clare was not a passive victim. This study explores the sources of the "poor Clare"' tradition, and recovers Clare's agency, revealing a writer fully engaged in his own professional life and in the social and political questions of the day.

Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between is an interdisciplinary study of the major lyric poems of seventeenth-century British metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The poet and his work have generally proven enigmatic to scholars because both refuse to fit into normal categories and expectations. This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of his representative lyrics in the context of the anthropological concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner and enriched by Arnold Van Gennep, Jacques Lacan, and other observers of the in-between aspects of experience. The approach differs from previous attempts to "explain" Marvell in that it allows multidisciplinary and multi-media contexts in a broad matrix of the areas of experience and representation that defy boundaries, that blur the line at which entrance becomes exit. This study acknowledges that the poems discussed, and, by implication, the entire corpus of Marvell's work and the life that produced it, derive from a refusal to draw a definite divide. In analyzing a small selection of Marvell's life and lyrics as explorations of various realms of liminality in word and image, readers can see a passageway to the poet's works that never really reaches a destination; instead, the unlimited possibilities of the journey remain. Thus, the in-between aspects of the poet and his poetry actually define his technique as well as his brilliance.

The "kissing-poem" genre was wide-spread in Renaissance literature; this book surveys its form and development. There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-formed, lively and popular genre of Neo-Latin "kissing-poems". Beginning with the imitation of Catullus in fifteenth-century Italy, this specialised form was securely established in the next century by the Dutch poet Janus Secundus, whose elegant Basia ("Kisses") were an extraordinary international success. Secundus stimulated a long-lived tradition of Latin and vernacular "kisses", willfully repetitious and yet meticulously varied, which can tell us much about humanist poetics. This book offers a critical account of the Renaissance kiss-poem, using an abundance of vivid and often racy examples, many of them drawn from authors who are all but forgotten today. It shows that the genre had a sophisticated rationale and clear but flexible conventions. These include habits of irony, mood and structure that proved widely influential, and some slippery, self-conscious ways of dealing with masculine sexuality. Presenting new readings of English writers including Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne, the study also reminds us how important Neo-Latin writing was to the literary culture of early modern Britain. A number of well known texts are thus placed in a context unfamiliar to most modern scholars, in order to show how deftly their kisses engage with an international tradition of humanist poetry. Alex Wong is currently a Research Fellow in English literature at St John's College, University of Cambridge.

An exploration of the legacy of The Waste Land on the centenary of its original publication, looking at the impact it had had upon criticism and new poetries across one hundred years. T. S. Eliot first published his long poem The Waste Land in 1922. The revolutionary nature of the work was immediately recognised, and it has subsequently been acknowledged as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, and as crucial for the understanding of modernism. The essays in this collection variously reflect on The Waste Land one hundred years after its original publication. At this centenary moment, the contributors both celebrate the richness of the work, its sounds and rare use of language, and also consider the poem's legacy in Britain, Ireland, and India. The work here, by an international team of writers from the UK, North America, and India, deploys a range of approaches. Some contributors seek to re-read the poem itself in fresh and original ways; others resist the established drift of previous scholarship on the poem, and present new understandings of the process of its development through its drafts, or as an orchestration on the page. Several contributors question received wisdom about the poem's immediate legacy in the decade after publication, and about the impact that it has had upon criticism and new poetries across the first century of its existence. An Introduction to the volume contextualises the poem itself, and the background to the essays. All pieces set out to review the nature of our understanding of the poem, and to bring fresh eyes to its brilliance, one hundred years on. Contributors: Rebecca Beasley, Rosinka Chaudhuri, William Davies, Hugh Haughton, Marjorie Perloff, Andrew Michael Roberts, Peter Robinson, Michael Wood.

The poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631) was one of the most influential authors of early modern England. Donne's Augustine examines his response to an iconic figure in the history of Western religious thought: Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Katrin Ettenhuber argues that Renaissance culture saw not only a revival of the classics, but was equally indebted to the intellectual and literary legacy of the Church Fathers. The study recovers an Augustinian tradition of interpretation which permeated the religious world of the period, but which has until now been largely overlooked. She presents a comprehensive re-evaluation of Donne's writings, ranging from the poems to less familiar prose works, situates him carefully in the poetic, intellectual, and political contexts which frame his works, and engages with recent developments in both literary and historical studies.
Donne's Augustine is the first sustained study of Donne's reading practices, and of the theological sources which shaped his thought. It discovers a range of medieval and early modern texts which transformed the imagination of literary writers in the period but which have been neglected so far: devotional manuals, Scripture commentaries, and religious commonplace books (often in Latin). The study pays close attention to the intellectual and political conditions which informed the reception of Augustine's works, and offers detailed readings of Donne's texts which illuminate the literary aspects of his patristic heritage. Donne's Augustine makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the larger reading and writing culture of Renaissance England, and of the religious debates and controversies in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

The essays in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, written by renowned international scholars, open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical and political: affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. Individual essays explore modernism's complex geographies, focusing on Anglo-European modernisms while also engaging with the debates engendered by recent models of world literatures and global modernisms. From questions of space and place, the volume moves to a focus on movement and motion, with topics ranging from modernity and bodily energies to issues of scale and quantity. The final chapters in the volume examine modernist film and the moving image, and travel and transport in the modern metropolis. 'Movement is reality itself', the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: the original and illuminating essays in Moving Modernisms point in new ways to the realities, and the fantasies, of movement in modernist culture.

Poetry, Rosenthal argues, focuses the imagination of a culture as no other written form can. In each chapter of her book, she considers the world's poets as Shelley's 'unacknowledged legislators' - creators who dreamed or destroyed visions of Jesus which shaped the spiritual climate of their times and nations. The book, though wide-ranging in its coverage and impeccably researched, is written extremely accessibly, as though for the general reader, hence it should appeal to the literature and poetry market more broadly as well as scholars of both poetry and Christianity.

This book presents a cognitive stylistic analysis of the writing of Siegfried Sassoon, a First World War poet who has typically been perceived as a poet of protest and irony, but whose work is in fact multi-faceted and complex in theme and shifted in style considerably throughout his lifetime. The author starts from the premise that a more systematic account of Sassoon's style is possible using the methodology of contemporary stylistics, in particular Cognitive Grammar. Using this as a starting point, he revisits common ideas from Sassoon scholarship and reconfigures them through the lens of cognitive stylistics to provide a fresh perspective on Sassoon's style. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of stylistics, war poetry, twentieth-century literature, and cognitive linguistics.

Words from a mysterious land of age erupts into poetry with no reservation in print. These verses represent a life experience buried some sixty-five years, depicting the beauty of Southern nature and history, of death and love in waning years.