"Milton, Evil and Literary History" addresses the ways in which we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. Goodness has always been aligned with a life of expansion, creation, production and fruition, while evil is associated with the inert, non-relational, static and stagnant. These associations have also underpinned a distinction between good and evil notions of capitalism, where good exchange enables the agents to enhance their living potential and is contrasted with the evils of a capitalism system that circulates without any reference to life or spirit. Such images of a ghostly and technical economy divorced from animating origin are both central to Milton's theology and poetry and to the theories of literary history through which Milton is read.Regarded as a radical precursor to Romanticism, Milton's poetry supposedly requires the release of his radical spiritual content from the fetters of received orthodoxy. This literary and historical imagery of releasing the radical spirit of a text from the dead weight of received tradition is, this book argues, the dominant doxa of historicism and one which a counter-reading of Milton ought to question.

York Notes offer an exciting and fresh approach to the study of literature. The easy-to-use guides aim to provide a better understanding and appreciation of each text, encouraging students to form their own ideas and opinions. This makes study more enjoyable and leads to exam success. York Notes will also be of interest to the general reader, as they cover the widest range of popular literature titles. Key Features: How to study the text - Author and historical background - General and detailed summaries - Commentary on themes, structure, characters, language and style - Glossaries - Test questions and issues to consider - Essay-writing advice - Cultural connections - Literary terms - Illustrations - Colour design. General Editors: John Polley - Senior GCSE Examiner Head of English, Harrow Way Community School, Andover; Martin Gray - Head of Literary Studies, University of Luton.

In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.

This is a volume of international research on the European reception of P.B. Shelley.The widespread and culturally significant impact of Percy Bysshe Shelley's writings in Europe constitutes a particularly interesting case for a reception study because of the variety of responses they evoked. If radical readers cherished the 'red' Shelley, others favoured the lyrical poet, whose work was, like Byron's, anthologized and set to music. His major dramatic works, "The Cenci" and "Prometheus Unbound", inspired numerous fin-de-siecle and expressionist dramatists and producers from Paris to Moscow. Shelley was read by, and influenced, the novelist Stendhal, the political theorist Engels, the Spanish symbolist Jimenez, and the Russian modernist poet Akhmatova.This exciting collection of essays by an international team of leading scholars considers translations, critical and biographical reviews, fictionalizations of his life, and other creative responses. It probes into transnational cross-currents to demonstrate the depth of Shelley's impact on European culture since his death in 1822. It will be an indispensable research resource for academics, critics, and writers with interests in Romanticism and its legacies.Our knowledge of British and Irish authors is incomplete and inadequate without an understanding of the perspectives of other nations on them. Each volume examines the ways authors have been translated, published, distributed, read, reviewed and discussed in Europe. In doing so, it throws light not only on the specific strands of intellectual and cultural history but also on the processes involved in the dissemination of ideas and texts.

Henri Michaux is widely recognized as a major twentieth-century French poet and painter. Although his fascination with universal languages has attracted the attention of several of his critics, it has up until now been treated as a marginal concern. Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign argues that his ideas on what might constitute a universal language are central to an understanding of his works. It suggests that both his ambivalent articulation of his relationship to the languages and literary traditions of his native Belgium and adoptive France, and his efforts simultaneously to exacerbate and subvert the differences between words and images, are rooted in Enlightenment theories of the relationship of the self to nature and its language
Rigaud-Drayton's study makes a substantial and original contribution to the study of this complex artist, exploring the intricate relationships between word and image in his poetry and paintings, and his quest for a single, unifying language or sign.

Madly after the Muses examines the use of Graeco-Roman samplings in the Bengali works of Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873), the nineteenth-century poet and playwright. His oeuvre, which includes a Bengali play dramatizing a Hindu version of the Judgement of Paris, a retelling of the Sanskrit Ramayana using various Vergilian and Homeric tropes, a Hindu response to Ovid's Heroides, and a Bengali prose version of the first half of Homer's Iliad, utilize the Greek and Roman classics in a surprising and subversive way. Though steeped in contemporary British literary culture, Madhusudan's Bengali works bypassed the literary trends of his British contemporaries and, most strikingly, used the Western classics to defy the hegemonic elite culture of the Hindu pundits. He treated traditional Hindu material with innovations inspired by the literature of the Graeco-Roman world, and provided an Orientalist Indo-European reading of the ancient cultures of India and Europe. By subverting contemporary British constructions of what constituted 'classical', he also highlighted counter-currents within the Western classical discourse. In this volume, Riddiford introduces new texts and contexts to the fields of classical reception and postcolonial scholarship, and includes appendices with translated excerpts from Bengali works not previously translated into English. He also examines the Bengali poet's classical education, drawing on new material from various archives to show that he was given a rigorous British-style classical education, offering a surprising early chapter in the story of the dissemination and reception of the Graeco-Roman classics in India.

JOHN KEATS: BRIGHT STAR: SELECTED POEMS

Edited with an introduction by Miriam Chalk

This book gathers the most potent passages from the poetry of John Keats (1795-1821) together, including the famous 'Odes', the sonnets, the luxuriously sensuous 'Eve of St Agnes', the mysterious and atmospheric 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', and extracts from 'Lamia', 'Endymion' and 'Hyperion'.

This edition has been updated with new poems, new illustrations and a revised text

John Keats is one of the few British poets who is truly ecstatic andwild. Keats is known for his ornate language, memorablephrases ('made sweet moan' in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'), Romantic indulgences, and a tendency to gush and exaggerate. Keats is one of a few poets who write in English in a shamanic manner.

John Keats reaches the pinnacle of British poetry, as W. Jackson Bate, typical among critics, says: 'the language of his greatest poetry has always held an attraction; for there we reach, if only for a brief while, a high plateau where in mastery of phrase he has few equals in English poetry, and only one obvious superior.'

Like Arthur Rimbaud, and like the poet he is most compared with, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats burnt fiercely and died young. He is a poet as martyr and hero, a Vincent van Gogh of poesie. He is famous for his sensual odes - 'Ode to a Grecian Urn', 'Ode to Melancholy', 'To Autumn', 'Ode to Psyche' and 'Ode to a Nightingale' - the poems 'Lamia', 'Endymion' and 'Hyperion', the luxuriant 'The Eve of St Agnes', a group of sonnets, and the strange, haunting fairy tale poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'.

John Keats is a typical Romantic poet: he usedpagan imagery; he employs much ancient Greek mythology; he is a shamanic poet, who writes in feverish bouts; he is a 'poet's poet'; he wrote searing short poems, and attempted long, epic sequences; he revered the right authors (John Milton, William Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks); he died young; and he travelled to Italy, the key destination for the authentic Grand Tour experience.

British Poets Series. Illustrated with portraits and paintings based on John Keats' poetry. Bibliography andnotes. ISBN 9781861713759. 136 pages.

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Until recently, collaborative efforts between formal linguistics and literary studies have been relatively sparse; this book is an attempt to bridge this gap and add to the hitherto small pool of studies that combine the two disciplines. Our study concentrates on Emily Dickinson's poetry, since it displays a highly uncommon and therefore challenging use of language. We argue this to be part of her poetic strategy and consider Dickinson an intuitive linguist: her apparent non-compliance with linguistic rules is a productive exploration of linguistic expression to reveal the flexibility and potential of grammar, leading to complex processes of interpretation. Our study includes a number of in-depth analyses of individual poems, which combine formal linguistic methods and literary scholarship and focus on specific aspects such as ambiguity, reference, and presuppositions. One of our findings concerns the dynamic interpretation of lyrical texts in which the pragmatic step of establishing what a poem means for the reader is postponed to text level. We provide readers with a tool-box of methods for the formal linguistic analysis not just of Emily Dickinson's poetry but of linguistically complex literary texts in general.

This book is about the idea of space in the first half of the nineteenth century. It uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give a new account of nineteenth-century literature's relationship with science. In particular it brings the physical sciences--physics and chemistry--more accessibly and fully into the arena of literary criticism than has been the case until now.
Writers whose work is discussed in this book include many who will be familiar to a literary audience (including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt), some well-known in the history of science (including Faraday, Herschel, and Whewell), and a raft of lesser-known figures. Alice Jenkins draws a new map of the interactions between literature and science in the first half of the nineteenth century, showing how both disciplines were wrestling with the same central political and intellectual concerns--regulating access to knowledge, organizing knowledge in productive ways, and formulating the relationships of old and new knowledges.
Space has become a subject of enormous critical interest in literary and cultural studies. Space and the 'March of Mind' gives a wide-ranging account of how early nineteenth-century writers thought about--and thought with--space. Burgeoning mass access to print culture combined with rapid scientific development to create a crisis in managing knowledge. Contemporary writers tried to solve this crisis by rethinking the nature of space. Writers in all genres and disciplines, from all points on the political spectrum, returned again and again to ideas and images of space when they needed to set up or dismantle boundaries in theintellectual realm, and when they wanted to talk about what kinds of knowledge certain groups of readers wanted, needed, or deserved. This book provides a rich new picture of the early nineteenth century's understanding of its own culture.

A survey of the empowering poetry of politically active women in El Salvador, South Africa, and the United States.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD: A SEASON IN HELL

edited and translated by Andrew Jary

A new translation of Arthur Rimbaud's extraordinary poetic statement, written in 1873. The sensual, violent and anguished emotion in Rimbaud's visionary 'alchemy of the word' remains startling, and continues to inspire poets.

Printed with the French text facing the translation.

For a time, when he was a teenager until he was 19, art was crucial for the psychic well-being of the restless Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). The young would-be rebel Rimbaud escaped from the bland provincial town of Charleville in Northern France to wander the streets of Paris in poverty. After writing his Illuminations and A Season in Hell, some of the most extraordinary poems of all world literature, Rimbaud renounced it all for a hellish and apparently boring life in Aden. 'Mortel, ange ET demon, autant dire Rimbaud, ' as Rimbaud's lover, Paul Verlaine wrote ('Mortal, angel AND demon, that is to say Rimbaud'.)

Arthur Rimbaud is the tornado of world poetry. He out-blasts just about every other poet. For poets, he is more significant than the so-called 'founding fathers' or influential philosophers of modern times: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Einstein. For poets, he is 'everybody's favourite hippy', a Communard, a 'precursor of the current movement of subversion of Western notions of self, society, and discourse', and a savage mystic.

Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most authentically rebellious of modern poets. Other poets have written of rebellion and radical action, but Rimbaud is one of the very few who actually carried it out (and didn't sound like an idiot when he spoke of it). Picture the young poet in his mid-teens, utterly bored by the living deaths of suburban life, aching to run away to Paris. Though he was dragged back a number of times, Rimbaud's life after his early teens was never again centred in his homeland. True, he returned to his mother, family and homeland, but his true heartland, his landscape of the soul, was elsewhere. Rimbaud was ever a poet of elsewhere, the other place, displacement. He was always another person: 'Je est un autre (I is an other).

He rebelled partly for the joy of rebellion. His early poetry is marked by an extraordinary virulence and anger. Illuminations and A Season in Hell, his major works, are also powered by an immense anger - a cosmic anger, a psycho-cultural-spiritual turmoil.

Illustrated, with a newly revised text for this edition. Introduction, bibliography and notes. ISBN 971861713773.

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Plautus' Bacchides is one of the best and most typical of his plays which in its treatment of character, theme and dialogue provides an excellent introduction to Plautus. Since the rediscovery of a passage from its Greek model, Menander's Dis Exapaton, it is now in the fore-front of scholarly discussion as direct comparisons can now be made of style and methods. The line-by-line verse translation aims to reproduce the sense and also to represent Plautus' linguistic liveliness and metrical variety, while the commentary explores the literary and dramatic qualities of the play in the light of modern scholarship. The Dis Exapaton fragment is given in text and translation. Latin text with facing-page translation, introduction and commentary.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. In the course of the nineteenth century, this study argues, increased doubt about the validity of feeling led to the depiction of the literary heart as alienated, distant, outside the control of mind and will. This coincided with a notable rise in medical literature specifically concerned with the pathological heart, and with the development of new techniques and instruments of investigation such as the stethoscope. As poets feared for the health of their own hearts, their poetry embodies concerns about a widespread culture of heartsickness in both form and content. In addition, concerns about the heart's status and actions reflect upon questions of religious faith and doubt, and feed into issues of gender and nationalism. This book argues that it is vital to understand how this wider culture of the heart informed poetry and was in turn influenced by poetic constructs. Individual chapters on Barrett Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson explore the vital presence of the heart in major works by these poets--including, Aurora Leigh, "Empedocles on Etna," In Memoriam, and Maud--while the wide-ranging opening chapters present an argument for the mutual influence of poetry and physiology in the period and trace the development of new theories of rhythm as organic and affective.

Controversial poetry played a crucial role in dealing with religious, political, and scholarly conflicts from 1400 until 1625. This volume analyses roles and functions of Latin, Italian, Dutch, German, Scots, and Hungarian poetry in specific historical controversies. A media theory of poetical impact is proposed by Franz-Josef Holznagel and Dieuwke van der Poel. Levente Selaf, Philipp Steinkamp, and Guillaume van Gemert examine the genres sung in wars, and in rulers' controversies. Judith Kessler, Dirk Coigneau, Juliette Groenland, and Regina Toepfer analyse how female and male rhetoricians and humanists use verse in religious, municipal, and educational conflicts. Signe Rotter-Broman, Samuel Pakucs Willcocks, and Alasdair A. MacDonald explain how reception strategies can shape cultural and political identities. Controversial Poetry 1400-1625 diskutiert den entscheidenden Einfluss von Controversial Poetry, Kontrovers-Dichtung, in Konflikten zwischen 1400 und 1625. Dafur werden die Rollen und Funktionen lateinischer, italienischer, niederlandischer, deutscher, schottischer und ungarischer Dichtung in konkreten historischen Kontroversen analysiert. Eine Medientheorie der Beeinflussung durch Dichtung entwerfen Franz-Josef Holznagel and Dieuwke van der Poel. Levente Selaf, Philipp Steinkamp, and Guillaume van Gemert untersuchen verschiedene Gattungen gesungener Politik in Kriegen und Auseinandersetzungen von Herrschern. Judith Kessler, Dirk Coigneau, Juliette Groenland und Regina Toepfer analysieren, wie weibliche und mannliche rederijkers und Humanisten Verse in konfessionellen, stadtischen und Bildungs-Konflikten verwenden. Signe Rotter-Broman, Samuel Pakucs Willcocks und Alasdair MacDonald erklaren, wie Rezeptions-Strategien kulturelle und politische Identitaten gestalten koennen.

The Sugata Saurabha is an epic poem that retells the story of the Buddha's life. It was published in 1947 in the Nepalese language, Newari, by Chittadhar Hridaya, one of the greatest literary figures of 20th-century Nepal. The text is remarkable for its comprehensiveness, artistry, and nuance. It covers the Buddha's life from birth to death and conveys his basic teachings with simple clarity. It is also of interest because, where the classical sources are silent, Hridaya inserts details of personal life and cultural context that are Nepalese. The effect is to humanize the founder and add the texture of real life. A third point of interest is the modernist perspective that underlies the author's manner of retelling this great spiritual narrative. This rendering, in a long line of accounts of the Buddha's life dating back almost 2,000 years, may be the last ever to be produced that conforms to the traditions of Indic classic poetry. It will not only appeal to scholars of Buddhism but will find use in courses that introduce students to the life of the Buddha.

Including applied readings, this book explores the divide between practical criticism and theory in 20th century criticism to propose a new way of reading poetry. The history of poetry criticism in the 20th Century is often told as the story of two opposing sides. On the one hand, practical criticism emphasized close reading and a concern with authorial intention and technique; by contrast, the 'theory revolution' reacted against this in favour of a concern with the anonymous ideological forces at play in the text. Critically exploring this history of 20th Century literary criticism, "On Modern Poetry" draws on the insights of both traditions to offer a new way of reading poetry. Taking students through the work of such critics as T.S. Eliot, William Empson, Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, the book considers such topics as rhyme, poetic 'voice' and language. The second part of the book then goes on to apply these critical insights through close readings of poems by such writers as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alfred Lord Tennyson. A new exploration of poetry criticism in the last hundred years, "On Modern Poetry" is an essential guide for readers and students at all levels.

This book assesses the importance of poetry for the Old Icelandic literary flowering of c. 1150-1350. It addresses the apparent paradox that an extremely conservative form of literature, namely skaldic poetry, was at the core of the most innovative literary and intellectual experiments in the period. The book argues that this cannot simply be explained as a result of strong local traditions, as in most previous scholarship. Thus, for instance, the author demonstrates that the mix of prose and poetry found in kings' sagas and sagas of Icelanders is roughly contemporary to the written sagas. Similarly, he argues that treatises on poetics and mythology, including Snorri's Edda, are new to the period, not only in their textual form, but also in their systematic mode of analysis. The book contends that what is truly new in these texts is the method of the authors, derived from Latin learning, but applied to traditional forms and motifs as encapsulated in the skaldic tradition. In this way, Christian Latin learning allowed for its perceived opposite, vernacular oral literature of pagan extraction, to reach full fruition and to largely replace the very literature which had made this process possible in the first place.

'All serious lovers of poetry will want this book.' A. N. Wilson All good poetry has the power to transport and transform us, to inspire and challenge us, to comfort and heal us, and to hold up a mirror to the world around us. In A Century of Poetry, Rowan Williams invites you to reflect with him on 100 poems from the past 100 years - poems with an originality and depth that can impel you to search your heart, and to explore your own experience and emotions at a deeper level. Featuring the work of both famous and lesser-known poets, from different faiths, languages and cultures, A Century of Poetry gives you a fresh perspective on works you may be familiar with, as well as introducing you to poems you'll be pleased to discover for the first time - or perhaps discover again. These meditations, by a writer who is both a poet and a theologian, will open new doors into the experience of reading and absorbing great poetry, highlighting the ways in which their language and imagery can touch unfamiliar places in the heart and enliven the lifelong adventure of spiritual growth and exploration.

Comprising more than 30 substantial essays written by leading scholars, this companion constitutes an exceptionally broad-ranging and in-depth guide to one of America's greatest poets. It makes the best and most up-to-date thinking on Whitman available to students. It is designed to make readers more aware of the social and cultural contexts of Whitman's work, and of the experimental nature of his writing. It includes contributions devoted to specific poetry and prose works, a compact biography of the poet, and a bibliography.

Delmira Agustini (1886-1914) has been acclaimed as one of the foremost modernistas and the first major woman poet of twentieth-century Spanish America. Critics and the reading public alike were immediately taken by the originality and power of her verse, especially her daring eroticism, her inventive appropriation of vampirism, and her morbid embrace of death and pain. No work until now, however, has shown how her poetry reflects a search for an alternative, feminized discourse, a discourse that engages in an imaginative dialogue with Ruben Dario's recourse to literary paternity and undertakes an audacious rewriting of social, sexual, and poetic conventions.

In the first major exploration of Agustini's life and work, Cathy L. Jrade examines her energizing appropriation and reinvention of modernista verse and the dynamics of her breakthrough poetics, a poetics that became a model for later women writers.

Arguing that the consecrated body in the Eucharist is one of the central metaphors structuring The Divine Comedy, this book is the first comprehensive exploration of the theme of transubstantiation across Dante's epic poem. Drawing attention first to the historical and theological tensions inherent in ideas of transubstantiation that rippled through Western culture up to the early fourteenth century, Sheila Nayar engages in a Eucharistic reading of both the "flesh" allusions and "metamorphosis" motifs that thread through the entirety of Dante's poem. From the cannibalistic resonances of the Ugolino episode in the Inferno to the Corpus Christi-like procession seminal to Purgatory, Nayar demonstrates how these sacrifice- and Host-related metaphors, allusions, and tropes lead directly and intentionally to the Comedy's final vision, that of the Eucharist itself. Arguing that the final revelation in Paradise is analogically "the Bread of Life," Nayar brings to the fore Christ's centrality (as sacrament) to The Divine Comedy-a reading that is certain to alter current-day thinking about Dante's poem.