To this day, Salem, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the witch trials of 1692. Their unique pace and structure has not only made the infamous town a strong cultural metaphor, but has generated countless novels, short stories, and plays over the past 200 years. This book marks the first comprehensive analysis of literary Salem and its historical as well as contemporary significance, from Nathaniel Hawthorne's literature of the 19th century to Arthur Miller's The Crucible to a growing corpus of contemporary fiction.

This first full-length cognitive poetic study of a single author and her composition process combines cognitive linguistics with genetic and literary criticism. It portrays two minds: the poet creating her poetics and poetry as well as the reader creating her interpretations of this poetry. It focuses on eight poems and their drafts, examining Elizabeth Bishop's poetic conceptualizations. It demonstrates how our awareness of such universal structures of invention as categorization, image schemas, metaphor, conceptual integration, metonymy, idealized cognitive models, licensing stories can assist us in deducing the original movement of writing during genetic analysis or in arriving at a reading of the poem's published version. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is one of the most eminent American poets. Her work has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese, Ph.D. in Linguistics, was a Fulbright scholar at the Vassar College Special Collections, which holds the Elizabeth Bishop archives. She translates contemporary Polish poetry and poetry written in English. She lives in Copenhagen.

It has long been accepted that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected the Unitarianism of his youth and returned to the Church of England, he did so while accepting a general Christian orthodoxy. Christopher Corbin clarifies Coleridge's religious identity and argues that while Coleridge's Christian orthodoxy may have been sui generis, it was closely aligned with moderate Anglican Evangelicalism. Approaching religious identity as a kind of culture that includes distinct forms of language and networks of affiliation in addition to beliefs and practices, this book looks for the distinguishable movements present in Coleridge's Britain to more precisely locate his religious identity than can be done by appeals to traditional denominational divisions. Coleridge's search for unity led him to desire and synthesize the "warmth" of heart religion (symbolized as Methodism) with the "light" of rationalism (symbolized as Socinianism), and the evangelicalism in the Church of England, being the most chastened of the movement, offered a fitting place from which this union of warmth and light could emerge. His religious identity not only included many of the defining Anglican Evangelical beliefs, such as an emphasis on original sin and the New Birth, but he also shared common polemical opponents, appropriated evangelical literary genres, developed a spirituality centered on the common evangelical emphases of prayer and introspection, and joined Evangelicals in rejecting baptismal regeneration. When placed in a chronological context, Coleridge's form of Christian orthodoxy developed in conversation with Anglican Evangelicals; moreover, this relationship with Anglican Evangelicalism likely helped facilitate his return to the Church of England. Corbin not only demonstrates the similarities between Coleridge's relationship to a form of evangelicalism with which most people have little familiarity, but also offers greater insight into the complexities and tensions of religious identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain as a whole.

This anthology is a new reading of the contemporary poetries. The largest challenge facing Liberal Arts and Sciences today is how to deal with the rapidly changing and increasingly complex world that all the phenomena under the label globalization have created. This world is 'multi'- many things: cultural, linguistic, ethnic, racial, etc. Over the last few decades, on a daily basis, some 'we' or another has found itself face to face with not the other but with many others, with not one language practice, but many. Educating for this world is the most pressing challenge we face. The raison d'etre for Poetry and Pedagogy is the belief that poetry is the linguistic laboratory of the times in which one lives. It is the genre in which our habitual language practices are daily stretched, challenged and reconfigured. The collection gathers together the work of a number of scholars, poets, and teachers on the challenges and productive possibilities that arise when teaching contemporary writing.

"Shakespeare, Spencer and the Matter of Britain" examines the work of two of the most important English Renaissance authors in terms of the cultural, social and political contexts of early modern Britain. Andrew Hadfield demonstrates that the poetry of Edmund Spenser and the plays of William Shakespeare demand to be read in terms of an expanding Elizabethan and Jacobean culture in which a dominant English identity had to come to terms with the Irish, Scots and Welsh who were now also subjects of the crown.

The Bible serves Wordsworth as a basis for his poetry and poetics, providing language, images, figures, and importantly, a paradigm of poetic genres. Working from three interrelated critical approaches--intertextuality, poetics, and metaphysics--Deeanne Westbrook first analyzes Wordsworth’s theory and practice as these reflect the New Testament doctrine of the Incarnation. Subsequent chapters consider Wordsworth’s adaptation of biblical narrative forms--etymological tales, parables, and mystical allegories. Closing chapters examine some extraordinary linguistic innovations in Wordsworth’s revisions of biblical apocalypse, techniques that permit the poet to express the ineffable and to reveal nothing.

"King Lear" is believed by many feminists to be irretrievably sexist. Through detailed line readings supported by a wealth of critical commentary, "Re-Visioning Lear's Daughters" reconceives Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia as full characters, not stereotypes of good and evil. These new feminist interpretations are tested with specific renderings, placing the reader in precise theatrical moments. Through multiple representations, this unique approach demonstrates the elasticity of Shakespeare's text.

This book offers fresh critical interpretation of two of the central tenets of Irish culture - migration and memory. From its starting point with the 'New Irish' generation of poets in the United States during the 1980s and concluding with the technological innovations of 21st-century poetry, this study spans continents, generations, genders and sexualities to reconsider the role of memory and of migration in the work of a range of contemporary Irish poets. Combining sensitive close readings and textual analysis with thorough theoretical application, it sets out the formal, thematic, socio-cultural and literary contexts of migration as an essential aspect of Irish literature. This book is essential reading for literary critics, academics, cultural commentators and students with an interest in contemporary poetry, Irish studies, diaspora studies and memory studies.

Die bundel, wat in P.J. Philander se nege-en-tagtigste jaar verskyn het, is geskryf terwyl hy in New York gewoon het. Ten spyte van die afstand tussen die digter en sy geboorteland, spreek die gedigte in die bundel steeds van 'n intieme verbintenis tussen hom en sy land van herkoms. In die middel van die winter word Miem Fischer saam met haar enigste seun en ander familielede weggevoer van hulle plaas naby Ermelo: eers na die konsentrasiekamp by Standerton en daarna na die kamp by Merebank naby Durban. In haar dagboekinskrywings ontvou dag na dag die aangrypende verhaal van hoe sy die haglike realiteit van lewe in ’n konsentrasiekamp moet verduur. Tant Miem Fischer se kampdagboek is een van maar ’n handjievol dagboeke wat die lyding van Boerevroue en -kinders van dag tot dag weergee en wat na die oorlog behoue gebly het.

This volume addresses the global reception of "untranslatable" concrete poetry. Featuring contributions from an international group of literary and translation scholars and practitioners, working across a variety of languages, the book views the development of the international concrete poetry movement through the lens of "transcreation", that is, the informed, creative response to the translation of playful, enigmatic, visual texts. Contributions range in subject matter from ancient Greek and Chinese pattern poems to modernist concrete poems from the Americas, Europe and Asia. This challenging body of experimental work offers creative challenges and opportunities to literary translators and unique pleasures to the sympathetic reader. Highlighting the ways in which literary influence is mapped across languages and borders, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of experimental poetry, translation studies and comparative literature.

The presentation of Tennyson's personal and poetic development is supplemented by an introduction, brief biographical sketches of more than 30 of his friends, and maps of relevant areas in Lincolnshire and the Isle of Wight.

Robert Herrick has long been one of the best loved of English lyric poets. Known through the centuries as the author of 'Gather ye rosebuds', he also wrote, as this new edition shows, hundreds of songs, epigrams and longer poems equally worthy of attention. Volume I of this new edition of Herrick's work contains Hesperides, Herrick's only published collection. As well as the commentary on Hesperides, volume II contains the fifty-nine surviving manuscript poems which can be firmly attributed to Herrick, and on which his reputation was based before 1648. It is an ambitious and original attempt to recover for the first time the history of Herrick's corpus of manuscript poetry, and to identify how his poems circulated, and who his copyists and readers were. By establishing the type of sources to which they had access and the nature and quality of the poems these sources contained, and through the histories of transmission that accompany every poem, this volume offers a significant body of evidence that deepens our critical understanding not only of Herrick's poetry, but of the mechanics of scribal publication and the culture of reading, writing and performing poetry and music in early modern England. Where, as is often the case, a musical setting survives this is also printed, along with a commentary on the setting, in a form which is designed to encourage the performance of the lyrics.

This lively student compendium presents a comprehensive selection of the key critical views of Chaucer in the twentieth century. Stimulating introductions and editorial comment enable students to enter into dialogue with critical opinion, and thereby with Chaucer's writings, whilst the juxtaposition of past and present criticism equips them with a sense of historical perspective.

A preliminary chapter addresses the growth of Chaucer criticism over the centuries, and the main developments of the twentieth century, incorporating a range of brief extracts. The structure of the volume then reflects the three major divisions of Chaucer's writing:
The Dream Vision poetry
Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales

Linking discussions introduce the main themes and critical issues of these works. Each section then presents different seminal approaches. For the "Canterbury Tales," for example, students can chart their paths through early allegorical readings, iconographic studies, New Historical approaches, and gender theory. In this way, the volume furnishes the reader with a broader critical repertoire and encourages independence of thought, but also offers a unified discussion of Chaucer's work.

This is the first edition for fifty years of one of the greatest of English lyric poets. Volume I concentrates on Herrick's large printed collection, Hesperides, published in 1648, and the product of nearly four decades of writing. The text is based on a collation of all fifty-seven known surviving copies of Hesperides. In addition it includes a much needed new biography, covering the suicide of his father, his apprenticeship as a goldsmith-banker, and his subsequent career in Cambridge, London, and Devon. It provides a survey of Herrick's fluctuating critical reputation-from 'the first in rank and station of English song-writers' to 'trivially charming'-and a detailed reconstruction of the original printing and publishing, just after the first Civil War, of a book which was the first 'Complete Works' to be published by an English poet. There is also a newly ordered sequence of Herrick's letters from Cambridge, his only surviving prose. An extensive commentary on Hesperides is placed in Volume II so that readers can use it side by side with the poems if they wish. The commentary gives new translations of Herrick's hundreds of classical allusions, and quotes his equally numerous Biblical ones, both of them far more extensive, and frequently far more playful, than has hitherto been realised. It also notes many parallels between Herrick's work and that of contemporaries, especially Jonson, Shakespeare, Burton, and John Fletcher, and his habit of echoing or quoting himself, a tendency which reinforces the strong sense of Herrick's persona dominating the collection. Full explanations are given of contemporary personal, political, and cultural references.

Walter of Chatillon was one of the leading Medieval Latin poets, who flourished at the high point of Medieval Latin literature - the later twelfth century. This volume presents the Latin text and facing English translation of Walter's shorter poems, including love poems, satires, and (largely Christmas) hymns. His satirical poems, often written in Goliardic hexameters, of which he was an accomplished master, are fine examples of the form. The allusiveness of his hymns makes them often notoriously difficult, but they provide a fascinating insight into the mindset of the clergy of the time and the prevalence of allegorical interpretation of the Bible. This volume provides an outline of the author's life, and adds a further fifteen poems to the previously accepted canon of fifty-two poems which appear in earlier editions of Walter of Chatillon's poetry. The introduction discusses the attribution of the additional poems, Walter's use of rhythmical and metrical verse in these poems, the relevant manuscripts, the recurring themes of the Feast of Fools, and avarice and largesse, and the arrangement of the poems. This volume makes available in English for the first time the shorter poems of an important medieval poet together with an improved Latin text. Scholars of the twelfth century will find a great deal of primary evidence on a wide variety of social and religious issues now accessible to them.

Tomasz Garbol's book reconstructs Czeslaw Milosz's poetic vision of the world after the Fall. The entry point to this approach is the conviction about the ambivalence of previous interpretations of Milosz's works, especially about his bipolar poetic worldview (his intellectual and existential division between pessimism and ecstasy) and his understanding of the consequences of the Fall (reversible or fatalistic). The book is a literary studies take on the relationship between literature and religion. The main direction is that Milosz's main need in art comes from his yearning for contact with the meaning of reality, which he seeks in the activity of poetic imagination.

Few poets have captured the imagination of the world like Seamus Heaney. Recognized as one of the truly outstanding poets of our time, Heaney's work is both critically acclaimed and popular with the general reader. It is taught in classrooms across the globe and has been translated into more than twenty-seven languages. Presenting original research from an international field of scholars, Seamus Heaney in Context offers new pathways to explore the places, times and influences that made Heaney a poet. Drawing on newly available archival and print sources, these essays situate Heaney in a multitude of contexts that help readers navigate received ideas about his life and work. In mapping intersecting themes in the current terrain of Heaney criticism, this study also signposts new directions for understanding Heaney's poetry in future contexts.

An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. What's in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czeslaw Milosz, Wislawa Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Bialoszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz Rozewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. Kremer's is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experiments-from poetic "sound postcards," to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.

In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? This book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them - in particular, on Pound's Italian years and Pasolini's use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.

The dithyramb, a choral song associated mostly with the god Dionysos, is the longest-surviving form of collective performance in Greek culture, lasting in its shifting shapes from the seventh century BC into late antiquity. Yet it has always stood in the shadow of its more glamorous relations - tragedy, comedy, and the satyr-play. This volume, with contributions from international experts in the field, is the first to look at dithyramb in its entirety, understanding it as an important social and cultural phenomenon of Greek antiquity.
Dithyramb in Context explores the idea that the dithyramb is much more than a complex poetic form: the history of the dithyramb is a history of changing performance cultures which form part of a continuous social process. How the dithyramb functions as a marker, as well as a carrier, of social change throughout Greek antiquity is expressed in themes as various as performance and ritual, poetics and intertextuality, music and dance, and history and politics. Drawing together literary critics, historians of religion, archaeologists, epigraphers, and historians, this volume applies a wide historical and geographical framework, scrutinizing the poetry and, for the first time, giving due weight to the evidence of epigraphy and the visual arts.