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.

Panegyric poetry, in both Arabic and Persian, was one of the most important genres of literature in the medieval Middle East and Central Asia. Jocelyn Sharlet argues that panegyric poetry is important not only because it provides a commentary on society and culture in the medieval Middle East, but also because panegyric writing was one of the key means for individuals to gain social mobility and standing during this period. This is particularly so within the context of patronage, a central feature of social order during these times. Sharlet places the medieval Arabic and Persian panegyric firmly within its cultural context, and identifies it as a crucial way of gaining entry to and movement within this patronage network. This is an important contribution to the fields of pre-modern Middle Eastern and Central Asian literature and culture.

Across the nineteenth century, meter mattered--in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period's poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms. The ten essays in "Meter Matters "showcase the range of metrical practice of poets from Wordsworth and Byron to Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson; at the same time, the contributors bring into focus some of the metrical theorizing that shaped poetic thinking and responses to it throughout the nineteenth century. Paying close attention to the historical contours of Romantic and Victorian meters, as well as to the minute workings of the verse line, "Meter Matters "presents a fresh perspective on a subject that figured significantly in the century's literature, and in its culture.

Take a walk through this amazing collection of poems and drawings by Birgitta Lindsey. Here, you will meet The Toothpaste Fairy, visit a place where the rule says: "No Grown-Ups Allowed," and meet an unlikely hero named Willy Walton. You will discover how Peanut Butter Soup is made, find out just what happens when you drink Truth Potion, and learn how to turn an Upside Down Frown into a smile. Sure to be loved by children and adults alike, "Peanut Butter Soup" is a magical ride that you won't want to end!

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.

This book investigates the problematical historical location of the term 'religion' and examines how this location has affected the analytical reading of postcolonial fiction and poetry. The adoption of the term 'religion' outside of a Western Enlightenment and Christian context should therefore be treated with caution. Within postcolonial literary criticism, there has been either a silencing of the category as a result of this caution or an uncritical and essentializing adoption of the term 'religion'. It is argued in the present study that a vital aspect of how writers articulate their histories of colonial contact, migration, slavery, and the re-forging of identities in the wake of these histories is illuminated by the classificatory term 'religion'. Aspects of postcolonial theory and Religious Studies theory are combined to provide fresh insights into the literature, thereby expanding the field of postcolonial literary criticism. The way in which writers 'remember' history through writing is central to the way in which 'religion' is theorized and articulated; the act of remembrance can be persuasively interpreted in terms of 'religion'. The title 'Memory and Myth' therefore refers to both the syncretic mythology of Guyana, and the key themes in a new critical understanding of 'religion'. Particular attention is devoted to Wilson Harris's novel "Jonestown," alongside theoretical and historical material on the actual Jonestown tragedy; to the mesmerizing effect of the Anancy tales on contemporary writers, particularly the poet John Agard; and to the work of the Indo-Guyanese writer David Dabydeen and his elusive character Manu.

First published in 1969, this edition collection brings together a series of essays offering a re-evaluation of Victorian poetry in the light of early 20th Century criticism. The essays in this collection concentrate upon the poets whose reputations suffered from the great redirection of energy in English criticism initiated in this century by Eliot, Richards and Leavis. What theses poets wrote about, the values they expressed, the form of the poems, the language they used, all these were examined and found wanting in some radical way. One of the results of this criticism was the renewal of interest in metaphysical and eighteenth-century poetry and corresponding ebb of enthusiasm for Romantic poetry and for Victorian poetry in particular. Most of the essays in this book take as their starting point questions raised by the debate on Victorian poetry, both earlier in this century and in the more recent past. There are essays on the poetry of Tennyson, Browning and Arnold, on that of Clough, who until recently has been neglected, and Hopkins, because of, rather than in spite of, the fact that he is usually considered to be a modern poet. The volume is especially valuable in that it will give a clearer understanding of the nature of Victorian poetry, concentrating as it does on those areas of a poet's work where critical discussion seems most necessary.

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.

In seventeenth-century England the poet George Herbert became known as `Divine Herbert', his poetry a model for those aspiring to the status of inspired Christian poet. This book explores the relationship between the poetry of George Herbert and the concept of divine inspiration rooted in devotional texts of the time.

This book introduces a new way of looking at how poems mean, drawing on the framework first developed in the author's book Critical Stylistics, but applied here to aesthetic more than ideological meaning. The aim is to empower readers of poetry to articulate the features of poetic language that they come across and explain to themselves and others why these features convey the meanings that they do. While this volume focuses on contemporary poets writing in English and mostly based in the UK and Ireland, the framework will work just as well for other eras' poetry, as well as for other cultures and languages.

In this methodologically innovative study, Eskin construes Levinas's ethical philosophy in conjunction with Bakhtin's philosophy of the act and metalinguistics, as an interpretative framework for making sense of Celan's dialogue with Mandel'shtam. In so doing, he develops a sophisticated mode of reading poetry--poethics--which takes into account both the ethical significance of poetry and the poetic significance of ethical philosophy, and opens new vistas on to the workings of European modernist and post-World War II poetry.

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) is one of the great undiscovered geniuses of Victorian literature. His poetry expresses the religious doubt of the age as well as exposing its sexual hypocrisy. His life is packed full of relationships and encounters with some of the great names of the 19th century; Florence Nightingale, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cardinal Newman, Tennyson, the Arnolds and so on. Clough's early death at the age of 42, worn down, it is said, by working as a factotum for Nightingale, was widely seen as a personal tragedy of unfulfilled promise. Now Kenny, the distinguished philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford, proposes to write three first major biography of Clough in thirty years. It is a task that has attracted others- Claire Tomalin for example- but Kenny is supremely qualified to do so. Not only is he already the editor of Clough's diaries, he has unrivalled insights into the world that contributed to Clough's tortured existence and has a lifelong knowledge of Clough's work. Additionally, Kenny has access to letters and other papers at Balliol, which have never been used by any biographer. In Kenny's biography, Clough will be re-established as one of the great Victorian poets (a judgement shared by Christopher Ricks in his 1987 Oxford Book of Victorian Verse) and also a significant personality of the Victorian stage.

The poetry of the Great War is among the most powerful ever written in the English language. Unique for its immediacy and searing honesty, it has made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of and response to war and the suffering it creates. Widely acclaimed as an indispensable guide to the Great War poets and their work, Out of Battle explores in depth the variety of responses from Rupert Brook, Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Issac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas to the events they witnessed. Other poets discussed are Hardy, Kipling, Charles Sorely, Ivor Gurney, Herbert Read, Richard Aldington and David Jones. For the second edition of Out of Battle , a substantial new preface has been added together with an appendix on the unresolved problems concerning the Owen manuscripts. An updated bibliography provides useful guidance for further reading.

The Lucid Veil is conceived as a sequel to The Mirror and the Lamp by M.H. Abrams. It gives a comprehensive account of the philosophic background of Victorian poetics. It is the first study to attempt to relate the theory and practice of poetry in the Victorian period to changing axioms of knowledge and perception. it will become a major work of reference and a new point of departure in the study of Victorian thought, philosophy, language and poetry. The author is Professor of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto.

South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain is the first book to provide a historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary market place, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the twentieth century. Ranasinha shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the postcolonial writer of South Asian origin.
The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) with Tambimuttu (1915-83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V.S Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.

Feted by his contemporaries, Federico Garcia Lorca's status has only grown since his death in 1936. This book shows just why his fame has endured, through an exploration of his most popular works: Romancero Gitano, Poeta en Nueva York and the trilogy of tragic plays - Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba.

Multiplying Worlds argues that modern forms of virtual reality first appear in the urban/commercial milieu of London in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (1780-1830). It develops a revisionary account of relations between romanticism and popular entertainments, 'high' and 'low' literature, and verbal and visual virtual realities during this period. The argument is divided into three parts. The first, 'From the Actual to the Virtual', focuses on developments during the period from 1780 to 1795, as represented by Robert Barker's Panorama, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and James Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen. The second part, 'From Representation to Poiesis', extends the study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century virtual realities to include textual media. It considers the relation between textual and visual virtual-realities, while also introducing the Palace of Pandemonium and Satan/Prometheus as key figures in late eighteenth-century explorations of the implications of virtual reality. There are chapters on Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Beckford's Fonthill Abbey, the Phantasmagoria, and Romantic representations of Satan. The book's third part, 'Actuvirtuality and Virtuactuality', provides an introduction to the Romantics' remarkably diverse (and to this point rarely studied) engagements with the virtual. It focuses on attempts to describe or indirectly present the cultural, material, or psychological apparatuses that project the perceptual world; reflections on the epistemological, ethical and political paradoxes that arise in a world of actuvirtuality and virtuactuality; and experiments in the construction of virtual worlds that, like those of Shakespeare (according to Coleridge) are not bound by 'the iron compulsion of [everyday] space and time'.

This Pivot book provides a wide-ranging and diverse commentary on issues of legibility (and illegibility) around poetry, antifascist pacifist activism, environmentalism and the language of protest. A timely meditation from poet John Kinsella, the book focuses on participation in protest, demonstration and intervention on behalf of human rights activism, and writing and acting peacefully but persistently against tyranny. The book also examines how we make records and what we do with them, how we might use poetry to act or enact and/or to discuss such necessities and events. A book about community, human and animal rights and the way poetry can be used as a peaceful and decisive means of intervention in moment of public social and environmental crisis. Ultimately, it is a poetics against fascism with a focus on the well-being of the biosphere and all it contains.

In their practice of aemulatio, the mimicry of older models of writing, the Augustan poets often looked to the Greeks: Horace drew inspiration from the lyric poets, Virgil from Homer, and Ovid from Hesiod, Callimachus, and others. But by the time of the great Roman tragedian Seneca, the Augustan poets had supplanted the Greeks as the "classics" to which Seneca and his contemporaries referred. Indeed, Augustan poetry is a reservoir of language, motif, and thought for Seneca's writing. Strangely, however, there has not yet been a comprehensive study revealing the relationship between Seneca and his Augustan predecessors. Christopher Trinacty's Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry is the long-awaited answer to the call for such a study. Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry uniquely places Senecan tragedy in its Roman literary context, offering a further dimension to the motivations and meaning behind Seneca's writings. By reading Senecan tragedy through an intertextual lens, Trinacty reveals Seneca's awareness of his historical moment, in which the Augustan period was eroding steadily around him. Seneca, looking back to the poetry of Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, acts as a critical interpreter of both their work and their era. He deconstructs the language of the Augustan poets, refiguring it through the perspective of his tragic protagonists. In doing so, he positions himself as a critic of the Augustan tradition and reveals a poetic voice that often subverts the classical ethos of that tradition. Through this process of reappropriation Seneca reveals much about himself as a playwright and as a man: In the inventive manner in which he re-employs the Augustan poets' language, thought, and poetics within the tragic framework, Seneca gives his model works new-and uniquely Senecan-life. Trinacty's analysis sheds new light both on Seneca and on his Augustan predecessors. As such, Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry promises to be a groundbreaking contribution to the study of both Senecan tragedy and Augustan poetry.

Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's 'lines on virtue' written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's Asolando (1889). The Chronology seeks to guide readers through this mass of material in three main sections: youth, contrasting early backgrounds and careers, and growing interest in each other's work to 1845; courtship, marriage, Italy, and work including Aurora Leigh and Men and Women (1845-61); Browning's later life of relentless socializing and prolific writing from his return to London to his death in Venice in 1889. The book provides not only precise dating but much matter on such topics as the Brownings' extensive reading in English, French and classical literature, their many friendships, and their sometimes conflicting political beliefs.

Ornamental Aesthetics offers a theory of ornamentation as a manner of marking out objects for notice, attention, praise, and a means of exploring qualities of mental engagement other than interpretation and representation. Although Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman were hostile to the overdecorated rooms and poems of nineteenth-century culture, their writings are full of references to chandeliers, butterflies, diamonds, and banners which indicate their primary investment in ornamentation as a form of attending. Theo Davis argues that this essential quality of ornamentation has been obscured by the enduring emphasis of literary studies on the structure of representation, and on how meaning is embodied in material form. Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's sense of ornamentation as a manner of attending is grounded in an understanding of poetry as an adornment to the world, and thus as a way of relating to what is present rather than of representing it. Ornamental Aesthetics investigates the aesthetic practices of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman through readings of the writings of Martin Heidegger, which also presents the human mind as an agitated, responsive, and ornamental presence. Drawing together work in poetics, rhetoric, philosophy, and nineteenth-century American literature, Ornamental Aesthetics ultimately argues that the kinds of immediate experience of attending which concerns ornamentation should retain a central place in the study of literature and the humanities more broadly.

Davies examines the work of four of the most important twentieth-century poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem. The study undertakes extensive close readings of Hart Cranes The Bridge (1930), Allen Ginsbergs Howl (1956) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-71 (1972), James Merrills The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), and John Ashberys Flow Chart (1991). Although not primarily an account of a Whitmanian lineage, this book considers Whitmans renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic, arguing for the existence of a genealogy of epic poems that rethink the relationship between these two spheres. If, as Bakhtin suggests, the job of epic is to accomplish the task of cultural, national, and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world, the idea of the homosexual epic fundamentally problematizes the traditional aims of the genre.

At the Violet Hour argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. At the Violet Hour offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names "enchanted and disenchanted violence." In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of "violet hour," the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.