Canidia is one of the most well-attested witches in Latin literature. She appears in no fewer than six of Horace's poems, three of which she has a prominent role in. Throughout Horace's Epodes and Satires she perpetrates acts of grave desecration, kidnapping, murder, magical torture and poisoning. She invades the gardens of Horace's literary patron Maecenas, rips apart a lamb with her teeth, starves a Roman child to death, and threatens to unnaturally prolong Horace's life to keep him in a state of perpetual torment. She can be seen as an anti-muse: Horace repeatedly sets her in opposition to his literary patron, casts her as the personification of his iambic poetry, and gives her the surprising honor of concluding not only his Epodes but also his second book of Satires. This volume is the first comprehensive treatment of Canidia. It offers translations of each of the three poems which feature Canidia as a main character as well as the relevant portions from the other three poems in which Canidia plays a minor role. These translations are accompanied by extensive analysis of Canidia's part in each piece that takes into account not only the poems' literary contexts but their magico-religious details.

In Poet of Jordan, William Tamplin presents two decades' worth of the political poetry of Muhammad Fanatil al-Hajaya, a Bedouin poet from Jordan and a public figure whose voice channels a popular strain of popular Arab political thought. Tamplin's footnoted translations are supplemented with a biography, interviews, and pictures in order to contextualize the man behind the poetry. The aesthetics and politics of vernacular Arabic poetry have long gone undervalued. By offering a close study of the life and work of Hajaya, Tamplin demonstrates the impact that one poet's voice can have on the people and leaders of the contemporary Middle East.

Through the variety of its scholarly perspectives, Brill Companion to Theocritus offers a tool for the study of one of antiquity's foremost poets. Offering a thorough examination of textual transmission, ancient commentaries, literary dialect, and poetic forms, the present volume considers Theocritus' work from novel theoretical perspectives, such as gender and emotions. It expands the usual field of inquiry to include religion, and the poet's reception in Late Antiquity and early modern times. The various chapters promote Theocritus' profile as an erudite poet, who both responds to and inaugurates a rich and variegated tradition. The combination of these various perspectives places Theocritus at the crossroads of Ptolemaic patronage, contemporary society, and art.

In the context of a diversified and pluralistic arena of contemporary literature embodying previously marginalized voices of region, ethnicity, gender, and class, black poets living in Britain developed a distinct branch of contemporary poetry. Having emerged from a struggle to give voice to marginalized groups in Britain, the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, and Fred D'Aguiar helped define national identity and explored racial oppression. Motivated by a sense of responsibility towards their communities, these poets undertook the task of transmitting black history to young blacks who risked losing ties to their roots. They also emphasized the necessity of fighting racism by constructing an awareness of Afro-Caribbean national identity while establishing black cultural heritage in contemporary British poetry. In this book, Turkish literary scholar Dilek Bulut Sar?kaya examines their works. Linton Kwesi Johnson's Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), Inglan is a Bitch (1980), and Tings an Times (1991) open the study, followed by David Dabydeen's Slave Song (1984), Coolie Odyssey (1988), and Turner (1994) and, finally, Fred D'Aguiar's Mama Dot (1985), Airy Hall (1989) and British Subjects (1993).

This book is the winner of the 2020 Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard analyzes images of women in painting and poetry of China's middle imperial period, focusing on works that represent female figures as preoccupied with romance. She discusses examples of visual and literary culture in regard to their authorship and audience, examining the role of interiority in constructions of gender, exploring the rhetorical functions of romantic images, and considering connections between subjectivity and representation. The paintings in particular have sometimes been interpreted as simple representations of the daily lives of women, or as straightforward artifacts of heteroerotic desire; Blanchard proposes that such works could additionally be interpreted as political allegories, representations of the artist's or patron's interiorities, or models of idealized femininity.

Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca is the first extensive study of speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca (5th century AD). It presents an in-depth analysis of the narrative functions of direct speech and their implications for the presentation of the epic story. The digital appendix to this book (Database of Direct Speech in Greek Epic Poetry) can be consulted online at www.dsgep.ugent.be.

Until quite recently, anthologies of English poetry contained very few poems by women, and histories of English poetry gave little space to women poets. How should poetry lovers respond? The book begins by suggesting four possible responses: the conservative, which claims that women have not written many good poems; individual recuperation, which salvages some fine poems by women but without altering the general view of English poetry; alternative canon, which claims that women do not write the same kind of poetry as men, so that their work should be judged by different standards; and cultural recuperation, which claims that women's poetry is a significant cultural phenomenon, and should be read and studied without subjecting it to any tests. All these positions can be defended, and this book has elements of them all. As the title indicates, this book is about reading women's poems, rather than forming theories about them: it explores the experience of reading Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson and many others. Beginning with Katherine Philips, the first Englishwoman to achieve fame as a poet, it covers three centuries to the work of Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith, but does not include the many living women poets who deserve a volume to themselves. In order to discuss adequately the work of those included, it was necessary to omit many other women poets: the selection has been made on merit, and to readers who miss some of their favourite poets the only answer can be that the book does nothing to discourage reading other poets. Indeed, it is hoped that the form of discussion of the selected poems will be helpful in engaging further with women poets of all calibres. Do women write differently from men? The author assumes no predetermined answer but is very willing to ask the question; and in order to do so he frequently compares poems by women with poems by men, not so much to ask who writes better as to explore similarities and differences: thus Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is discussed along with Alexander Pope, Emily Dickinson along with Gerard Manly Hopkins and Elizabeth Browning along with her husband. Poems by women should be read, enjoyed, and argued about. They can be related to the time they were written and first admired, or to our views on women's history, or to our expectations of what poetry can offer -- but above all they should be enjoyed. And that is the faith in which this book is written.

The instalments of Ezra Pound's life-project, The Cantos, composed during his incarceration in Washington after the Second World War were to have served as a "Paradiso" for his epic. Beautiful and tormented, enigmatic and irascible by turns, they express the poet's struggle to reconcile his striving for justice with his extreme Right politics. In heavily coded language, Pound was writing activist political poetry. Through an in-depth reading of the "Washington Cantos" this book reveals the ways in which Pound integrated into his verse themes and ideas that remain central to American far-right ideology to this day: States' Rights, White-supremacy and racial segregation, the usurpation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, and history as racial struggle. Pound's struggle was also personal. These poems also celebrate his passion for his muse and lover, Sheri Martinelli, as he tries to teach her his politics and, in the final poems, mount his legal defence against the unresolved treason charges hanging over his head. Reading the poetry alongside correspondence and unpublished archival writings, Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light is an important new work on a poet who stands at the heart of 20th-century Modernism. Building on his previous book John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (Bloomsbury, 2015), Alec Marsh explores the way the political ideas revealed in Pound's correspondence manifested themselves in his later poetry.

Hua Yan (1682-1756) and the Making of the Artist in Early Modern China explores the relationships between the artist, local society, and artistic practice during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Arranged as an investigation of the artist Hua Yan's work at a pivotal moment in eighteenth-century society, this book considers his paintings and poetry in early eighteenth-century Hangzhou, mid-eighteenth-century Yangzhou, and finally their nineteenth-century afterlife in Shanghai. By investigating Hua Yan's struggle as a marginalized artist-both at his time and in the canon of Chinese art-this study draws attention to the implications of seeing and being seen as an artist in early modern China.

Traditional accounts of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, have depicted John Clare as a peripheral figure, an 'original genius' whose talents set him apart from the mainstream of contemporary literary culture. But in recent years there has been a major shift of direction in Clare studies. Jonathan Bate, Zachary Leader and others have helped to show that Clare, far from being an isolated genius, was deeply involved in the rich cultural life both of his village and the metropolis. This study takes impetus from this new critical direction, offering an account of his poems as they relate to the literary culture of his day, and to literary history as it was being constructed in the early nineteenth century. Gorji defines a literary historical context in which Clare's poetry can best be understood, paying particular attention to questions of language and style. Rather than situating Clare in relation to Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, John Clare and the Place of Poetry considers his poetry in relation to eighteenth-century traditions as they persisted and developed in the Romantic period. This timely book is for scholars and students of Clare and eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry, but it should also appeal to the expanding audience for John Clare's work in the UK and USA.

The Silvae by Statius dethroned Virgil from the Studio in Naples, fostered the creation of a new genre, offered a model for court poetry, and seduced the most prestigious Humanists in the most vibrant centres of Renaissance Italy and the Netherlands. The collection preserves magnificent buildings otherwise lost; speaks of stones otherwise unknown; and memorializes people, rituals, and social relationships that would have passed into oblivion in silence. This volume offers a fresh look into approaches to the Silvae by editors and commentators, both at the time of the rediscovery of the poems and today.

In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Rgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetic form, and how they change over time.

As the University of Erfurt collapsed in the early 1520s, Hessus faced losing his livelihood. To cope, he imagined himself a shape-changing Proteus. Transforming first into a lawyer, then a physician, he finally became a teacher at the Nuremberg academy organized by Philip Melanchthon. Volume 5 traces this story via Hessus's poems of 1524-1528: "Some Rules for Preserving Good Health" (1524; 1531), with attached "Praise of Medicine" and two sets of epigrams; "Three Elegies" (1526), two praising the Nuremberg school and one attacking a criticaster; "Venus Triumphant" (1527), with poems on Joachim Camerarius's wedding; "Against the Hypocrisy of the Monastic Habit" (1527), with four Psalm paraphrases; and "Seventeen Bucolic Idyls" (1528), updating the "Bucolicon" of 1509 and adding five idyls.

While the legacy of Black urban rebellions during the turbulent 1960s continues to permeate throughout US histories and discourses, scholars seldom explore within scholarship examining Black Cultural Production, artist-writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) that addressed civil unrest, specifically riots, in their artistic writings. Start a Riot! Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement Drama, Fiction, and Poetry analyzes riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Ben Caldwell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Henry Dumas challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings. Representations of riots became more pronounced in the 1960s as pivotal leaders shaping Black consciousness, such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., were assassinated. BAM artist-writers sought to override the public's interpretation in their literary exposes that a riot's disjointed and disorderly methods led to more chaos than reparative justice. Start a Riot! uncovers how BAM artist-writers expose anti-Black racism and, by extension, the United States' inability to compromise with Black America on matters related to citizenship rights, housing (in)security, economic inequality, and education-tenets emphasized during the Black Power Movement. Abdul-Ghani argues that BAM artist-writers did not merely write literature that reflected a spirit of protest; in many cases, they understood their texts, themselves, as acts of protest.

Written in the late-twelfth century, the Old French Romance of Tristran by Beroul is one of the earliest surviving versions of the story of Tristran and Iseut. Preserved in only one manuscript, the poem records the tragic tale that became one of the most popular themes of medieval literature, in several languages. This volume is a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of the story, including the first ever diplomatic edition of the text, replicating the exact state of the original manuscript. It also contains a new critical edition, complemented by extensive notes and a brief analytic preface. Edited by noted medievalist Barbara N. Sargent-Baur, The Romance of Tristran by Beroul and Beroul II: A Diplomatic Edition and a Critical Edition will be an essential resource for specialists interested in the study of this important text. An English translation of the Old French text appears in The Romance of Tristran by Beroul and Beroul II: Student Edition and English Translation.

In ancient didactic poetry, poets frequently make use of imagery - similes, metaphors, acoustic images, models, exempla, fables, allegory, personifications, and other tropes - as a means to elucidate and convey their didactic message. In this volume, which arose from an international conference held at the University of Heidelberg in 2016, we investigate such phenomena and explore how they make the unseen visible, the unheard audible, and the unknown comprehensible. By exploring didactic poets from Hesiod to pseudo-Oppian and from Vergil and Lucretius to Grattius and Ovid, the authors in this collective volume show how imagery can clarify and illuminate, but also complicate and even undermine or obfuscate the overt didactic message. The presence of a real or implied addressee invites our engagement and ultimately our scrutiny of language and meaning.