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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
Callimachus was arguably the most important poet of the Hellenistic
age, for two reasons: his engagement with previous theorists of
poetry and his wide-ranging poetic experimentation. Of his poetic
oeuvre, which exceeded what we now have of Theocritus, Aratus,
Posidippus, and Apollonius combined, only his six hymns and around
fifty of his epigrams have survived intact. His enormously
influential Aetia, the collection of Iambi, the Hecale, and all of
his prose output have been reduced to a handful of citations in
later Greek lexica and handbooks or papyrus fragments. In recent
years excellent commentaries and synthetic studies of the Aetia,
the Iambi, and the Hecale have appeared or are about to appear. But
there is no modern study in English of the collection of hymns. And
while there are excellent commentaries in English on three of the
hymns (Apollo, Athena, Demeter), the commentaries on Zeus and on
Delos are limited in scope, and there is no commentary at all on
the Artemis hymn. Synthetic studies in English for the most part
treat only one hymn, not the collection, and tend to focus on
Callimachus' intertextual relationships with his predecessors
and/or his influence on Roman poetry. Yet recent work is requiring
scholars to broaden their perspective and to consider Callimachus'
religious, civic, and geo-political contexts much more
systematically in attempting to understand the hymns. A further
incentive is that apart from the Homeric and Orphic hymns,
Callimachus' are the only other hymns that have survived intact;
those written in earlier periods are now reduced to fragments. For
these reasons a study of the six hymns together is a desideratum.
An additional reason is that Callimachus' collection of six hymns
is very likely to have been an authorially arranged poetry book,
quite possibly the earliest such book that we have intact;
therefore, it allows a unique perspective on the evolution of the
form. This volume offers a text and commentary of all six hymns for
advanced students of classics and classical scholars, as well as
interpretive essays on each hymn that integrate what has been the
dominant paradigm-intertextuality-into a broader focus on
Callimachus' context. Her introduction treats the transmission of
the hymns, the potential for and likelihood of the Homeric hymns as
models, the hymns as a poetry book, their language and meter
(especially in light of recent work done on this topic),
performance practices, and their relationship to cult, court, local
geographies, and panhellenic sanctuaries. For each hymn Stephens
presents the Greek text, a translation, and a brief commentary
containing important information or parallels for interpretation.
Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award,
Robert Lowell has left a prodigious literary legacy that includes
several verse plays as well as numerous volumes of poetry. His
private papers and other unpublished materials provide an
illuminating record of a distinguished career and cast light on
personal and creative issues of interest to both readers and
scholars. The Robert Lowell collection at the Houghton Library at
Harvard University comprises some 2,916 items. These include family
and literary correspondence, poetic notebooks, and manuscripts
covering a period of more than thirty-five years. This annotated
guide to the collection is the product of detailed study of
Lowell's work, both published and unpublished, and benefits from
the poet's own review of some of the papers. Researchers will
appreciate the index to the poems, which offers a key to the
various drafts of each work. This book will be of interest to all
Lowell scholars and to students of twentieth-century American
poetry.
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The Seasons
(Hardcover)
James Thomson; Edited by James Sambrook
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R2,452
Discovery Miles 24 520
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A scholarly edition of a work by James Thomson. The edition
presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction,
commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
A scholarly edition of poetical works by Charles Churchill. The
edition presents an authoritative text, together with an
introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.
This vivid biography is a study of the life and times of the
Italian poet-activist, Lauro de Bosis. Remarkably productive as a
poet, cultural diplomat, and political subversive, de Bosis founded
and lead an underground resistance group, the National Alliance for
Liberty. His actions culminated in a dramatic solo flight over Rome
in October 1931, showering the city with protest leaflets against
the Fascist dictatorship before plunging to his death. This feat
brought world attention to the existence of anti-Fascism, much to
Mussolini's chagrin and rage.
De Bosis's story, told against the backdrop of Rome's politics
in the 1920s, is at once personal, national, and international.
World figures --- from Mussolini, Croce, Ezra Pound, to Walter
Lippmann, Thornton Wilder, and his lover, the actress Ruth Draper
--- were all within de Bosis's compass. Gifted, quirky, original,
and impulsive but principled to the point of giving up both
personal love and family for his cause, his life shows how
Mussolini's regime systematically cleared out the cream of Italy's
young liberal intellectuals. Based on previously untapped archival
resources, this is the first biography of a young, gifted Italian
poet who dared to challenge the power of a totalitarian state with
his practical idealism and fierce determination to protect Italy's
fragile democracy from il Duce.
This volume brings together 29 junior and senior scholars to
discuss aspects of Hesiod's poetry and its milieu and to explore
questions of reception over two and half millennia from shortly
after the poems' conception to Twitter hashtags. Rather than an
exhaustive study of Hesiodic themes, the Handbook is conceived as a
guide through terrain, some familiar, other less charted, examining
both Hesiodic craft and later engagements with Hesiod's stories of
the gods and moralizing proscriptions of just human behavior. The
volume opens with the "Hesiodic Question," to address questions of
authorship, historicity, and the nature of composition of Hesiod's
two major poems, the Theogony and Works and Days. Subsequent
chapters on the archaeology and economic history of archaic
Boiotia, Indo-European poetics, and Hesiodic style offer a critical
picture of the sorts of questions that have been asked rather than
an attempt to resolve debate. Other chapters discuss Hesiod's
particular rendering of the supernatural and the performative
nature of the Works and Days, as well as competing diachronic and
synchronic temporalities and varying portrayals of female in the
two poems. The rich story of reception ranges from Solon to comic
books. These chapters continue to explore the nature of Hesiod's
poetics, as different writers through time single out new aspects
of his art less evident to earlier readers. Long before the advent
of Christianity, classical writers leveled their criticism at
Hesiod's version of polytheism. The relative importance of Hesiod's
two major poems across time also tells us a tale of the age
receiving the poems. In the past two centuries, artists and writers
have come to embrace the Hesiodic stories for themselves for the
insight they offer of the human condition but even as old allegory
looks quaint to modern eyes new forms of allegory take form.
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.
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