This is the first book-length study of the classicism of Tony Harrison, one of the most important contemporary poets in England and the world. It argues that his unique and politically radical classicism is inextricable from his core notion that poetry should be a public property in which communal problems are shared and crystallised, and that the poet has a responsibility to speak in a public voice about collective and political concerns. Enriched by Edith Hall's longstanding friendship with Harrison and involvement with his most recent drama, inspired by Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, it also asserts that his greatest innovations in both form and style have been direct results of his intense engagements with individual works of ancient literature and his belief that the ancient Greek poetic imagination was inherently radical. Tony Harrison's large body of work, for which he has won several major and international prizes, and which features on the UK National Curriculum, ranges widely across long and short poems, plays, translations and film poems. Having studied Classics at Grammar School and University and having translated ancient poets from Aeschylus to Martial and Palladas, Harrison has been immersed in the myths, history, literary forms and authorial voices of Mediterranean antiquity for his entire working life and his classical interests are reflected in every poetic genre he has essayed, from epigrams and sonnets to original stage plays, translations of Greek drama and Racine, to his experimental and harrowing film poems, where he has pioneered the welding of tightly cut video materials to tightly phrased verse forms. This volume explores the full breadth of his oeuvre, offering an insightful new perspective on a writer who has played an important part in shaping our contemporary literary landscape.

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.

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.

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.

Close Listening and the Performed Word brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sounds of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer brilliant and wide-ranging elucidations of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The contributors--including Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe--cover topics that range from the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems, but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word. With readings and "spoken word" events gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for understanding the importance of language in--and as--performance.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

Winner of the Ezra Pound Society Book Prize 2014 Ezra Pound's sustained use of ancient and medieval philosophical sources, particularly those within the Neoplatonic tradition, is well known. Yet the specific influence of the ninth-century theologian Johannes Scottus Eriugena on Pound's poetry and prose has received limited scholarly attention. Pound developed detailed plans to publish a commentary on Eriugena alongside his translations of two of the books of Confucianism, plans that ultimately went unrealised. Drawing on unpublished notes, drafts and manuscripts amongst the Ezra Pound papers held at Yale University, this book investigates the pivotal role of Eriugena in Pound's thought and, perhaps surprisingly, in his deployment of non-Western philosophical traditions.

This book features a collection of essays on some of the key poets of post-war America, written by leading scholars in the field. All the essays have been newly commissioned to take account of the diverse movements in American poetry since 1945, and also to reflect, retrospectively, on some of the major talents that have shaped its development. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American poets took stock of their own tumultuous past but faced the future with radically new artistic ideals and commitments. More than ever before, American poetry spoke with its own distinctive accents and declared its own dreams and desires. This is the era of confessionalism, beat poetry, protest poetry, and avant-garde postmodernism. This book explores the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary African American poets and new poetic voices emerging in the 21st century. This New Casebook introduces the major American poets of the post-war generation, evaluates their achievements in the light of changing critical opinion, and offers lively, incisive readings of some of the most challenging and enthralling poetry of the modern era.

Victorian Poetry in Context offers a lively and accessible introduction to the diverse range of poetry written in the Victorian period. Considering such issues as reform and protest, gender, science and belief this book sets out the social and cultural contexts for the poetry of a fast-changing era. Sections on Victorian poetics, form and Victorian voices introduce the key literary contexts of poetry's production, and poetic innovations of the period such as the dramatic monologue are highlighted . At the heart of the book is a focus on the importance of attentive close reading, with original readings offered of well-known texts alongside those that have recently received renewed attention within scholarship. The book also offers an overview of critical approaches to several key texts and discussion of how Victorian poetry has remained influential in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Introducing texts, contexts and criticism, this is a lively and up-to-date resource for anyone studying Victorian poetry.

This thematic guide offers interpretations of 415 poems, representing the work of over 110 poets spanning seven centuries of British poetry. Educators teaching thematic units will find relevant essays appropriate for background presentation, discussion ideas, or student assignments. This book is clearly organized for easy access to information, whatever the users' individual purposes.

The main section of the guide contains narrative essays on 29 alphabetically arranged themes that recur throughout the history of British poetry. Explications of individual poems are arranged chronologically to trace the evolution of a particular theme over time. Following each entry, the poems are listed with information about the anthologies where the works can be found. Additional suggested readings make this the perfect resource for research and classroom use, and as an indispensable tool for librarians assisting readers to identify poets, access their works, and better understand the thematic meanings of poetry.

Nicolas Guillen and Aime Cesaire are considered by many critics and literary historians to be the foremost Caribbean poets of the 20th century, yet they are rarely treated together. This work deals with the two writers within a comparative framework, exploring their poetry as the exemplification of Negritude art and writing from the Caribbean. Josaphat Kubayanda uses non-canonical theories of literary and cultural analysis to discuss the relationships between creative writing, the idea of Africa, and the rediscovery of African values in the Caribbean, and to propose and demonstrate an original Caribbean poetics, anchored in Africa's cultural systems and linked to Afro-American protest thought. Each of the book's chapters focuses on an aspect of the literary development of the African heritage and of the black condition illustrated by Guillen and Cesaire. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to the genesis of Caribbean rhetorical interest in Africa, from the 1920s onward, and places Guillen and Cesaire in the context of Negritude. Chapter 2 addresses the European othering of Africa, and the Negritude critique of this within the non-African traditions. Guillen's and Cesaire's response to the European concept of the universal is discussed in chapter 3, while chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which blackness is caught between racial otherness and trying to integrate into the Caribbean social order. The final two chapters provide an analysis of the polyrhythmic unity of the African cultural system that allows Guillen and Cesaire to make technical innovations, and a conclusion acknowledges the writers' place in Caribbean creative writing. The volume also contains an updated bibliography on Caribbean literature and the African element. This work will be a valuable reference source for courses in Caribbean and African literary studies, Latin American literature, and Afro-American and African culture, and an important addition to both public and academic libraries.