Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is the most important Elizabethan woman writer and patron outside the royal family. By astute use of the genres permitted to women, she supported the Protestant cause, introduced continental literary genres, expanded opportunities for later women writers, and influenced seventeenth-century lyric and drama by such writers as John Donne, George Herbert, Mary Wroth, and William Shakespeare. This scholarly edition in two volumes is the first to include all her extant works: Volume I prints her three original poems, the disputed `Dolefull Lay of Clorinda', her translations from Petrarch, Mornay, and Garnier, and all her known letters. Volume II contains her metrical paraphrases of Psalms 44-150. The edition also provides a biographical introduction, discussion of her sources and methods of composition, textual annotation, and a detailed commentary.

A groundbreaking contribution to the critical literature, this volume represents the most extensive study of the fantastic in poetry published to date. Designed to serve both as an introduction to and a historical overview of fantastic poetry in the Anglo-American tradition, the authors closely analyze specific periods and poems in order to illuminate more clearly the relationships among fantasty, the fantastic, science fiction, and poetry. The scope of the study is unusually broad and encompasses material from Spenser through the work of a wide range of contemporary American and British poets. Although the contributors focus primarily on English-language authors, their essays provide theoretical and practical criticism relevant to the study of the fantastic in poetry in any language. Among the innovative approaches developed are a feminist-fantastic revisionary reading of Keat's Lamia and a conceptualization of the role of fantasy in the writing of holocaust poetry. In addition, the contributors analyze such works as C.S. Lewis's Dymer, Ed Dorn's Slinger, Victorian women's fantasies, the poetry of Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Ursula K. Le Guin, and many others. Taken together, these essays should not only spark critical debate on the intersection of fantasy and poetry but also become the essential starting point for any new criticism of fantastic poems.

This book considers Baudelaire's prose poetry as an exploration of the duality of the genre. It considers the ironic and parodic aspects of the work and, in the light of Baudelaire's own theories of the comic, argues that his prose poetry is best understood as a form of literary caricature.

The life and work of C.S. Lewis after his conversion in 1931 is well known and his reputation shows no signs of diminishing. His earlier years have not been so well studied, particularly between the ages of 16 and 22 when he studied privately and at Oxford, served in the British army, was wounded in France, entered into his affair with Janie Moore, and wrote and published his first book of poems. To correct and augment the limited accounts of this period, Lewis s life is presented with the general and specific background which makes it more meaningful, particularly as it throws light on his character. The romantic myth of him as a "soldier-poet" is dispelled, largely through an extensive review of the poems in "Spirits in Bondage" and the self-centered life that produced them. A valuable comparison not to the advantage of Lewis is drawn with two undoubted soldier-poets, Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. The purpose is not to disparage or belittle Lewis but to show what had to be overcome in his limited and unpleasant early moral character in order to produce the devoted Christian of later years."

After a distinguished career as a teacher, scholar, bibliographer and literary critic, Stanley Brian Greenfield, Professor of English at the University of Oregon, one of the founders of the annual Anglo-Saxon England and of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, died in 1987. He wrote primarily on Anglo-Saxon topics as well as later English poetry. He deeply explored the Old English poetic corpus, pointing out important meanings and qualities in insightful and sensitive readings. Hero and Exile brings together some of his most important essays, divided into three sections - Beowulfian Studies, The Old English Elegies and The Theme of Exile - attesting to his long and fruitful engagement with Old English literature.

Offering essays from some of the leading academic writers and younger scholars in the field of American studies from both the United States and Europe, this volume constitutes a rich and varied reconsideration of Modernist American poetry. Its contributions fall into two general categories: new and original discussions of many of the principal figures of the movement (Frost, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Cummings and Stevens) and reflections on the phenomenon of Modernism within a broader cultural context (the influence of Haiku, parallels and connections with Surrealism, responses to the Modernist accomplishment by later American poets). Because of its mixture of European and American perspectives, "Modernism Revisited" will be of vital interest to students and scholars of American literature and Modernism in general and of twentieth-century comparative literature and art.

York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students. Written by established literature experts, York Notes Advanced intorduce students to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contexts.

The English poet John Gower (ca. 1340-1408) wrote important Latin poems witnessing the two crucial political events of his day: the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and in 1399 the deposition of Richard II, in the Visio Anglie (A Vision of England) and Cronica tripertita (A Chronicle in Three Parts), respectively. Both poems, usually transmitted with Gower's major Latin work, Vox clamantis, are key primary sources for the historical record, as well as marking culminating points in the development of English literature. The earlier Visio Anglie is verbally derivative of numerous, varied sources, by way of its literary allusions, but is also highly original in its invention and disposition. On the other hand, the Cronica tripertita's organization, even in details, is highly derivative, and from a single source, but its verbal texture is all invented. This volume includes Latin texts of these poems of Gower, newly established from the manuscripts, with commentary on Gower's relation with the rest of the contemporary historical record and with his literary forebears and contemporaries, including Ovid, Virgil, Peter Riga, Nigel Witeker, and Godfrey of Viterbo. This volume also includes Modern English verse translations of the two poems, which are at once critically accurate and enjoyably accessible.

Poet, critic, biographer and Catholic intellectual, Paul Mariani delivers huge armfuls of experience and knowledge in this wide-ranging collection of twenty-four essays. As a man of faith in a secular world, Mariani brings to light issues surrounding spirituality and poetry through discussions of the Gnostics, Roman history, the Bible, John of the Cross, Rilke, Robert Pack, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, and the poets he most admires - Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell. Charged with spiritual and intellectual awe, Mariani fully engages with his subjects, from their lives to their works to their grand impact on Mariani's own life as a poet. His prose flows easily from anecdote to analysis, from Paterson, the setting of Williams's great tribute poem, to Manhattan, where Mariani haunts old neighborhoods and the Brooklyn Bridge, searching for traces of Hart Crane. By infusing scholarly criticism with a personal voice, Mariani allows us to see the relationship between poetry and a sublime presence in the universe. Serious reading for anyone interested in modern and contemporary poetry, God and the Imagination offers elegant and original insights into a wide variety of poetic concerns. But it is most extraordinary for its celebration of the lives of the poets, which allow us, in Mariani's words, ""to recover what would otherwise be lost to time and silence.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. The Medicamina Faciei Femineae is a didactic elegy which showcases an early example of Ovid's trademark combination of a moralistic, instructive form and trivial subject and meter. Exploring female beauty and cosmetics, with particular emphasis on the concept of 'cultus', the poem also presents five practical recipes for cosmetic treatments used by Roman women. Covering both didactic parody and pharmacological reality, this deceptively complex poem possesses wit, vivacity and importance. The first full study devoted to this little-researched but multi-faceted poem, Ovid on Cosmetics includes an in-depth introduction which situates the poem within its literary heritage of didactic and elegiac poetry, its place in Ovid's oeuvre and its relevance to social values, personal aesthetics and attitudes to female beauty in Roman society. The Latin text is presented on parallel pages alongside a new literal and quality translation, and all Latin phrases are translated for the non-specialist reader. Detailed commentary notes elucidate the text and individual phrases still further.The volume also contains related passages with translations and commentaries from Ovid's Ars Amatoria 3.101-250, on dress, appearance and make-up, and Amores 1.114, on hair dye and resulting baldness.Ovid on Cosmetics presents and explicates this witty, subversive yet significant poem, as well as contextualises its importance for gender and sexuality studies, women's life in antiquity, eroticism, aesthetics and social attitudes to women and beauty in Ancient Rome.

This is a pioneering scholarly collection of essays outlining W.B. Yeats' reception and influence in Europe. The intellectual and cultural impact of British and Irish writers cannot be assessed without reference to their reception in European countries. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which W. B. Yeats has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of continental Europe. There is a remarkable split between the often politicized reception in Eastern European countries and Spain on the one hand, and the more sober scholarly response in Western Europe. Yeats's Irishness and the pre-eminence of his lyrical work have posed continuous challenges. Three further essays describe the widely divergent reactions to Yeats in his native Ireland, during his lifetime and up to the most recent years. Our knowledge of British and Irish authors is incomplete and inadequate without an understanding of the perspectives of other nations, traditions and individuals on them. This series profiles literary and political figures as well as philosophers, historians and scientists. Each volume examines how 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.

Current norms of literary criticism tend to ignore ways in which literary experiences relate to life experience, and some ways in which literary experiences can be intensified and deepened. In this vibrant and controversial book, David Fuller seeks to recover the life in Shakespeare's sonnets, arguing that feeling and emotion, often ignored in criticism, should be central. He offers two ways of attempting this - first engaging with the poems through kinds of feeling fundamental to the young man sequence as presented in other kinds of writing and art - philosophy (Plato), poetry and visual art (Michelangelo), fiction (Mann), music (Britten), and film (Jarman). He then discusses reading the poems aloud, showing that dwelling in the words without translating them into other terms brings out their beauty and expressivity, and leads to fuller understanding of their form, structure, and meaning.

The Virgilian centos anticipate the avant-garde and smash the image of a staid, sober, and centered classical world. This book examines the twelve mythological and secular Virgilian centos that survive from antiquity. The centos, in which authors take non-consecutive lines or segments of lines from the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid and reconnect them to produce new poems, have received limited attention. No other book-length study exists of all the centos, which date from ca. 200 to ca. 530.
The centos are literary games, and they have a playful shock value that feels very modern. Yet the texts also demand to be taken seriously for what they disclose about late antique literary culture, Virgil's reception, and several important topics in Latin literature and literary studies generally. As radically intertextual works, the centos are particularly valuable sites for pursuing inquiry into allusion. Scrutinizing the peculiarities of the texts' allusive engagements with Virgil requires clarification of the roles of the author and the reader in allusion, the criteria for determining what constitutes an allusion, and the different functions allusion can have. By investigating the centos from these different perspectives and asking what they reveal about a wide range of weighty subjects, this book comes into dialogue with major topics and studies in Latin literature.

Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social, and religious critic.

This is a monograph offering new analysis of the philosophical connection between Hopkins and Heidegger which has been repeatedly mentioned but not fleshed out in the literature of either literary criticism or philosophy. "Hopkins & Heidegger" is a new exploration of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetics through the work of Martin Heidegger. More radically, Brian Willems argues that the work of Hopkins does no less than propose solutions to a number of hitherto unresolved questions regarding Heidegger's later writings, vitalizing the concepts of both writers beyond their local contexts. Willems examines a number of cross-sections between the poetry and thought of Hopkins and the philosophy of Heidegger. While neither writer ever directly addressed the other's work - Hopkins died the year Heidegger was born, 1899, and Heidegger never turns his thoughts on poetry to the Victorians - a number of similarities between the two have been noted but never fleshed out. Willems' readings of these cross-sections are centred on Hopkins' concepts of 'inscape' and 'instress' and around Heidegger's reading of both appropriation (Ereignis) and the fourfold (das Geviert). This study will be of interest to scholars and postgraduates in both Victorian literature and Continental philosophy.

In searching for a definitive concept of black theatre, Euba delves deeply into the Yoruba culture and gods, specifically the attributes and ritual of Esu-Elegbara. The resulting vision goes beyond the standard interpretations to place Esu, the fate god, squarely at the center of Yoruba ritual and drama, and by extension, at the center of the black writer's concept of character, actor, and audience as victims of fate and satire. The first section of the book explores the essence of man in the black world of survival. The second, and main section, seeks to develop a concept of drama in black theatre (in African and the New World experience) from the point of view of Esu-Elegbara. The text is highlighted by various illustrations. Three tables outline the Agents of Satire: Imprecator; Imprecator/Satirist; and Satirist/Agent. A bibliography, notes, and an index will help the scholar who wishes to further explore this rich and complex subject. The book is a sophisticated study that will be of great interest to students seeking to understand African influences on black culture today. Potential markets for the book include university-level black history, literature, or culture studies. A broader market might be found among theatre practitioners and students of modern drama.

Defending Poetry studies the tradition of poetic defence, or apologia, as it has been pursued and developed by three of the twentieth century's leading poet-critics: Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. It begins with an extended introduction to philosophical debates over the ethical value of literature from Plato to Levinas and continues by situating these three poets as in one sense historically continuous with the defences of Horace, Sidney, Coleridge, and Shelley, but also as drastically other. This otherness is bounded on one side by the example of T. S. Eliot's career-long contemplation of the ideal of poetic 'integrity', and on the other by a collective recognition of the twentieth century's great horrors, which seem to corrode all associations of art and the good. Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning challenges the critical tendency to see Plath's writing in `confessional' terms, and draws attention to its self-reflexivity. The book argues that Plath developed a theatrical conception of the speaking subject. In her closely sustained study, Britzolakis relates the texts both to their historical moment and to contemporary debates about language, gender, and subjectivity.