Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

Watkins demonstrates the continuity of poetic formulae in Indo-European languages from Old Hittite to medieval Irish. Using the comparative method, he shows how traditional poetic formulae of considerable complexity can be reconstructed as far back as the original common languages, thus revealing the antiquity and tenacity of the poetic tradition.

A collection of new essays on the remarkable work produced by the poet Geoffrey Hill since the mid-1990s. Hill is widely recognised as the finest living English poet and the quality of his recent publications has been matched by the pace at which he produces quantities of profound and startlingly original verse. This book brings together work on Hill by figures as diverse as Rowan Williams and Christopher Ricks, along with penetrating treatments of these late writings by younger scholars, in order to provide a series of fresh perspectives on some of the finest and most challenging poetry now being written. It explores topics including physicality, death, confession, and recusancy, and also contains a large-scale bibliography of Hill's writings, which will be invaluable to all those seeking to read more widely in the work of this fascinating and exceptional figure.

Ivor Gurney is the first full length study of one of the most important English poets of the Twentieth Century. Drawing on biographical information, letters, reminiscences and anecdotes, John Lucas pieces together Gurney's difficult, indeed tragic life, in order to show that Gurney's wonderful poetry, while undoubtedly affected by his mental problems, his trench experiences in World War One, and his complex relationship to both Gloucester, the Cotswolds and London, is the sane utterance of a deeply radicalised writer. There is no suggestion that Gurney's experiences were unique. On the contrary, they were typical, as he well knew, and as he declares in poems which celebrate the implications of comradeship. What is unique is Gurney's ability to turn these experiences into major poetry. Gurney is the greatest of all those poets who fought in and survived the war and his achievement drastically affects our understanding of twentieth century poetry.

As the figure of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) becomes so entrenched in the Modernist canon that he serves as a major reference point for poets and critics alike, the time has come to investigate poetry and poetics after him. The ambiguity of the preposition is intentional: while after may refer neutrally to chronological sequence, it also implies ways of aesthetically modeling poetry on a predecessor. Likewise, the general heading of poetry and poetics allows the sixteen contributors to this volume to range far and wide in terms of poetics (from postwar formalists to poets associated with various strands of Postmodernism, Language poetry, even Confessional poetry), ethnic identities (with a diverse selection of poets of color), nationalities (including the Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and several English poets), or language (sidestepping into French and Czech poetry). Besides offering a rich harvest of concrete case studies, Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens also reconsiders possibilities for talking about poetic influence. How can we define and refine the ways in which we establish links between earlier and later poems? At what level of abstraction do such links exist? What have we learned from debates about competing poetic eras and traditions? How is our understanding of an older writer reshaped by engaging with later ones? And what are we perhaps not paying attention to-aesthetically, but also politically, historically, thematically-when we relate contemporary poetry to someone as idiosyncratic as Stevens?

The classical period of Arab civilization produced the most extensive and highly developed bacchic tradition in world literature, In this book, the author traces the history of classical Arabic wine poetry from its origins in sixth century Arabia to its heyday in Baghdad at the turn of the ninth century. The focus is on the greatest and perhaps most likeable of Arabic poets, Abu Nuwas. Although wine poetry is only one of the many genres for which he is known, it is the one that has ensured his fame, and the one on which this book concentrates. The wine songs of the poet are analysed and their connections with poetics, ethics, and religion are explored. The author also puts Abu Nuwas in perspective by comparing him with his most important predecessors and contemporaries and by discussing his interaction with other poetic genres such as amatory, invective, ascetic, or gnomic verse.

This superb introduction to the work of the famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1886-1966) begins with an account of her life in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and Stalinist Russia, and focuses principally on her poetry. Incorporating all recent scholarship, the author traces the way in which Akhmatova's work reflects the tumultuous times in which she lived, and her emergence as the spokeswoman of her generation, to provide a long overdue account of her entire career.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an Argentine writer of serious avant-garde poetry and prose, often wrote of the humor in the works of contemporaneous authors such as Franz Kafka. In response to this humor, Borges created a comedic tradition all his own. Humor in Borges studies the humor embedded in the fiction of a serious and metaphysical literary figure.

Rene de Costa shows how Borges was concerned with making the embedded humor in his work more apparent without abandoning the essential story line. De Costa examines the ways in which Borges transformed established modes of writing -- the chronicle, the book review, the obituary, the detective story -- into genre parodies. He looks at Borges's canonical collections, identifying the humor in such simple things as a footnote, a false epigraph, or a postscript. He also considers the Universal History of Infamy and the techniques Borges used to rework serious stories and poems into overt comedy that ridiculed the notion of high and low culture.

Humor in Borges couples elegant scholarship with a comedic edge and is both accessible and enjoyable to read. Scholars and students of twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American literature will delight in this fascinating look at laughter in the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

After piloting an emperor the age of a college student through China's most drastic government reforms before the modern era, Wang Anshi retreated to his Halfway Hill villa at Nanjing, where in late middle age he became one of the Northern Song dynasty's three or four most innovative poets. He redirected the craft of composing high-stakes policy papers into lighter-than-air evocations of clear-eyed grief, sensuous Buddhism, and intricate reactions to rain on the river or donkey-riding up Bell Mountain. Acrimony over his redesigned government, which he lived just long enough to see totally dismantled, remains relevant to Chinese politics and economics. Published during his thousand-year jubilee, this first full English biography since 1937 draws on Wang's essays, poems, and his vivid, seldom-explored throne-room diary.

Over the last ten years, through essays in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other magazines, Adam Kirsch-"one of the most promising young poet-critics in America" (Los Angeles Times)-has established himself among the most controversial and fearless critics writing today. Sure to cause heated debate, this collection of essays surveys the world of contemporary poetry with boldness and insight, whether Kirsch is scrutinizing the reputation of popular poets such as Billy Collins and Sharon Olds or admiring the achievement of writers as different as Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, and Frederick Seidel. For readers who want an introduction to the complex world of contemporary American poetry, from major figures like Jorie Graham to the most promising poets of the younger generation, Kirsch offers close readings and bold judgments. For readers who already know that world, The Modern Element will offer a surprising and thought-provoking new perspective.

This book looks at the stories told by the characters in the Iliad. All these stories are relevant to some aspect of the main narrative of the poem and they help us to understand it. Certain episodes narrated by the poet also reflect on the central issues of the poem, such as the dire consequences of rejecting prayers.

The third volume of Auden Studies presents Auden in maturity, and includes much previously unpublished prose by him, as well as a selection from his letters. The book concentrates on the relatively unexplored area of Auden's post-1940 writings, and the letters, essay, and lectures here demonstrate the scope of his intellect, which ranged easily from psychoanalysis to theology, archaeology to politics. Leading scholars and critics contribute discussions about many important aspects of the later career of this major poet and intellectual.

A panoramic, state-of-the-art handbook destined to chart a course for future work in the field of early modern Hispanic theater studies. It begins in the closet with an essay on Celestina as closet drama and moves out into the court to explore intersections with courtly love. An essay on the comedia and the classics demonstrates this genre's firm grounding in the classical tradition, despite Lope de Vega's famous protestations to the contrary. Distinct but related genres such as the autos sacramentales and the entremeses also make an appearance. The traditional themes of honor and wife-murder share the stage with less familiar topics like the incorporation of animals into performance. This volume covers the urban space of the city in Spain and Portugal as well as uncharted territories in the New World and Japan. Essays on emblems and the picaresque round out this anthology, along with studies of theatrical representations of early modern innovations in science and technology. The book concludes with two different psychoanalytical approaches, focused on melancholy and Lacanian tragedy, respectively. This collection incorporates the work of younger scholars along with established names in the field to synthesize the most exciting recent work on the comedia and related forms of early modern Hispanic theatrical production. Contributors include: Ignacio Arellano, Frederick de Armas, Henry Sullivan, Edward Friedman, A. Robert Lauer, Manuel Delgado, Adrienne Martin, Enrique Garcia Santo Tomas, Matthew Stroud, Teresa Scott Soufas, Enrique Fernandez, Maria Mercedes Carrion, Robert Bayliss, Ted Bergman, Cory Reed, Maryrica Lottman, Christina Lee, and Enrique Duarte.

Taking a cognitive approach, this book asks what poetry, and in particular Holocaust poetry, does to the reader - and to what extent the translation of this poetry can have the same effects. It is informed by current theoretical discussion and features many practical examples. Holocaust poetry differs from other genres of writing about the Holocaust in that it is not so much concerned to document facts as to document feelings and the sense of an experience. It shares the potential of all poetry to have profound effects on the thoughts and feelings of the reader. This book examines how the openness to engagement that Holocaust poetry can engender, achieved through stylistic means, needs to be preserved in translation if the translated poem is to function as a Holocaust poem in any meaningful sense. This is especially true when historical and cultural distance intervenes. The first book of its kind and by a world-renowned scholar and translator, this is required reading.

In this insightful and provocative volume, Rameyreveals spirituals and slave songs to be a crucial element in American literature. This book shows slave songs'intrinsic value as lyric poetry, sheds light on their roots and originality, anddraws new conclusions on anart form long considereda touchstone of cultural imagination.

Packed full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel. You'll learn all about the historical context of the piece; find detailed discussions of key passages and characters; learn interesting facts about the text; and discover structures, patterns and themes that you may never have known existed. In the Advanced Notes, specific sections on critical thinking, and advice on how to read critically yourself, enable you to engage with the text in new and different ways. Full glossaries, self-test questions and suggested reading lists will help you fully prepare for your exam, while internet links and references to film, TV, theatre and the arts combine to fully immerse you in your chosen text. York Notes offer an exciting and accessible key to your text, enabling you to develop your ideas and transform your studies!

This book details the intersections between the personal life and exceptional writing of Louise Erdrich, perhaps the most critically and economically successful American Indian author ever. Known for her engrossing explorations of Native American themes, Louise Erdrich has created award-winning novels, poetry, stories, and more for three decades. Tracks on a Page: Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works examines Erdrich's oeuvre in light of her experiences, her gender, and her heritage as the daughter of a Chippewa mother and German-American father. The book covers Erdrich from her birth to the present, offering fresh information and perspectives based on original research. By interweaving biography and literary analysis, the author, who is herself Native American, gives readers a complete and nuanced understanding of the ways in which Erdrich's identity as a woman and an American Indian have influenced her life and her writing. Tracks on a Page is the first, book-length work to approach Erdrich and her works from a non-Euro-Western perspective. It contextualizes both life and writing through the lenses of American Indian history, politics, economics, and culture, offering readers new and intriguing ways to appreciate this outstanding author. Chronological organization takes the reader from Erdrich's childhood, through her years at Dartmouth College, her personal life, and her career as a writer

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money is a groundbreaking contribution to scholarship, well-suited to classroom use in that it combines rigorous analysis with a lively style. Covering the period from the 1980s to the present, it is organized around the notions of text, context and metatext, meaning poetry, its socio-political and cultural surroundings, and critical discourse in the broadest sense. Authors and issues studied include Han Dong, Haizi, Xi Chuan, Yu Jian, Sun Wenbo, Yang Lian, Wang Jiaxin, Bei Dao, Yin Lichuan, Shen Haobo and Yan Jun, and everything from the subtleties of poetic rhythm to exile-bashing in domestic media. This book has room for all that poetry is: cultural heritage, symbolic capital, intellectual endeavor, social commentary, emotional expression, music and the materiality of language - art, in a word.

For many readers in the English-speaking world, Goethe is somehow separate from the European intellectual and literary tradition. In this unique and wide-ranging study, Matthew Bell aims to correct this view by showing how Goethe portrayed human beings as part of a natural continuum, very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Dr Bell's fresh readings of Goethe's major and lesser-known texts are set against the background of the science and philosophy of the age, and the writer's debts to other thinkers are analysed. The development of Goethe as a writer and thinker is traced from his sentimental epistolary novel Werther - read in the context of the rise of psychological theory in the Enlightenment - to the emergence of his own theory of 'empirical psychology' in the great roman a clef of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In a major new interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Matthew Bell follows the ideal of organic growth from the novel's origins in Enlightenment optimism to its revision in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary scepticism. Placing Goethe in an anthropological context, Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology demonstrates that eighteenth-century anthropological thought provides an essential, hitherto overlooked context for the understanding of Goethe's literary enterprise from Werther to Die Wahlverwandtschaften.

Surprisingly, there are few book-length studies available that approach the poems in Charles Baudelaire?'s collection on an individual basis. Understanding "Les Fleurs du Mal" fills this gap by providing students and serious readers with clear, scholarly "explications" to many of the most widely read of Baudelaire's poems.

This book is the first collection of essays dedicated to the work of C. H. Sisson (1915-2003), a major English poet, critic and translator. The collection aims to offer an overall guide to his work for new readers, while also encouraging established readers of one aspect (such as his well-known classical translations) to explore others. It champions in particular the quality of his original poetry. The book brings together contributions from scholars and critics working in a wide range of fields, including classical reception, translation studies and early modern literature as well as modern English poetry, and concludes with a more personal essay on Sisson's work by Michael Schmidt, his publisher.