The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio is one of the most discussed sources for the Norman Conquest of England. Its authorship and date cannot be established entirely beyond dispute, but the weight of scholarly opinion supports a date of composition of 1068 or earlier, by Guy, bishop of Amiens, thus making it the earliest surviving account. Whatever its date, the Carmen remains a source of intrinsic interest and importance, and one used by some of the great chroniclers of the period, such as Orderic Vitalis. It is an epic poem, concerned with some of the most momentous events of a remarkable year, in which Halley's comet was a disturbing portent of undisclosed disasters. For this second edition, Frank Barlow has written an entirely new and substantial historical introduction, incorporating the scholarly research of a generation. He has also provided a fresh translation and notes, as well as revising the Latin text of the 1972 edition by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz.

This collection of essays reassesses the importance of verse as a medium in the long eighteenth century, and as an invitation for readers to explore many of the less familiar figures dealt with, alongside the received names of the standard criticism of the period.

Due to their popularity with the American counterculture, the poems attributed to Hanshan, Shide and Fenggan have been translated several times in recent decades. However, previous translations have either been broadly popular in nature or have failed to understand fully the colloquial qualities of the originals. This new version provides a complete Chinese/English edition of the poems, aimed at combining readability with scholarly accuracy. It will prove useful to students of Chinese poetry and of Chinese religion, as well as anyone interested in a better understanding of works that have proved so influential in the history of East Asian Buddhism and in world literature.

This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyzes the experiments in Auden's writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that, rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasizes the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly, an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.

This study shows how poets worked within and against the available forms of nature writing to challenge their place within physical, political, and cultural landscapes. Looking at the treatment of different ecosystems, it argues that writing about the environment allowed labouring-class poets to explore important social and aesthetic questions.

How does irony affect the evaluation and perception of the First World War both then and now? "Irony and the Poetry of the First World War "traces one of the major features of war poetry from the author's application as a means of disguise, criticism or psychological therapy to its perception and interpretation by the reader.

"These essays trace the Western poem as it confronts indigenous alterity in Latin America. Rather than extend Western conceptions of writing in search of an alleged Amerindian ethno-literature, Ajens approaches literature as a Western invention. This book discusses a wide range of indigenous American, Hispanic, and European texts, with a focus on language, authorship, genre, and translation"--

Warren's major theme--whether man can live on a purely naturalistic level--is seen as a parallel to the major intellectual currents of American literature in the past 25 years.

This book offers a timely examination of the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary digital media. By focusing upon a variety of 'Shakespearean' individuals, groups and communities and their 'online' presence, the book explores the role of popular internet culture in the ongoing adaptation of Shakespeare's plays and his general cultural standing. The description of certain performers as 'Shakespearean' is a ubiquitous but often throwaway assessment. However, a study of 'Shakespearean' actors within a broader cultural context reveals much, not only about the mutable face of British culture (popular and 'highbrow') but also about national identity and commerce. These performers share an online space with the other major focus of the book: the fans and digital content creators whose engagement with the Shakespearean marks them out as more than just audiences and consumers; they become producers and critics. Ultimately, Digital Shakespeareans moves beyond the theatrical history focus of related works to consider the role of digital culture and technology in shaping Shakespeare's contemporary adaptive legacy and the means by which we engage with it.

Born in 1749, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the giants of world literature and the last European to embody the multi-faceted expertise of the Renaissance personality. Assembled to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death, the essays included here are appropriately written from a variety of perspectives-- literary, humanistic, and scientific. A genuinely interdisciplinary collection, this volume is witness to the powerful influence Goethe's works have had on a wide range of subjects from fiction, drama, and art to physics, psychology, and psychiatry. The collection also demonstrates the extent to which his ideas have transcended national boundaries, as well as historic ones.

Famed and outspoken Russian poet, Maximilian Voloshin's notoriety has grown steadily since his slow release from Soviet censorship. For the first time, Landa showcases his vast poetic contributions, proving his words to be an overlooked solution both to the political and cultural turmoil engulfing the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century.

While glosses on Heaney's verse forms figure more or less in critical accounts of his poetry, this is the first book to take the craft of his art as its focus. Setting out a historically informed approach to poetic form, the book places Heaney's developing versification in the context of mid-century Anglo-American theories of metre and rhythm.

As the essays in this volume reveal, Keats's places could be comforting, familiar, grounding sites, but they were also shifting, uncanny, paradoxical spaces where the geographical comes into tension with the familial, the touristic with the medical, the metropolitan with the archipelagic. Collectively, the chapters in Keats's Places range from the claustrophobic stands of Guy's Hospital operating theatre to the boneshaking interior of the Southampton mail coach; from Highland crags to Hampstead Heath; from crowded city interiors to leafy suburban lanes. Offering new insights into the complex registrations of place and the poetic imagination, the contributors to this book explore how the significant places in John Keats's life helped to shape an authorial identity.

The tenth-century Old English lament and twentieth-century blues song each speak the language of a distinct poetic tradition, yet the voices are remarkably similar in their emotive expression of loneliness. This innovative study juxtaposes the texts of each corpus to explore the features that characterize their vocal poetics. McGeachy examines how the texts evoke the dynamic of performance and explores the role of recording--in manuscript and on 78 rpm record--in establishing the distinctive formulas of each genre. Featured are a study of blues artist Robert Johnson's work and a comparison of two anthologies: the Exeter Book and the Folkways "Anthology of American Folk Music."

This monograph takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to 20th and 21st -century Canadian Daoist poetry, fiction and criticism in comparative, innovative and engaging ways. Of particular interest are the authors' refreshing insights into such holistic and topical issues as the globalization of concepts of the Dao, the Yin/Yang, the Heaven-Earth-Humanity triad, the Four Greats, Five Phases, Non-action and so on, as expressed in Canadian literature and criticism - which produces Canadian-constructed Daoist poetics, ethics and aesthetics. Readers will come to understand and appreciate the social and ecological significance of, formal innovations, moral sensitivity, aesthetic principles and ideological complexity in Canadian-Daoist works.

Approaching the writings of Mary Wroth through a fresh 21st-century lens, this volume accounts for and re-invents the literary scholarship of one of the first "canonized" women writers of the English Renaissance. Essays present different practices that emerge around "reading" Wroth, including editing, curating, and digital reproduction.

Book 4 of Lucan's epic contrasts Europe with Africa. At the battle of Lerida (Spain), a violent storm causes the local rivers to flood the plain between the two hills where the opposing armies are camped. Asso's commentary traces Lucan's reminiscences of early Greek tales of creation, when Chaos held the elements in indistinct confusion. This primordial broth sets the tone for the whole book. After the battle, the scene switches to the Adriatic shore of Illyricum (Albania), and finally to Africa, where the proto-mythical water of the beginning of the book cedes to the dryness of the desert. The narrative unfolds against the background of the War of the Elements. The Spanish deluge is replaced by the desiccated desolation of Africa. The commentary contrasts the representations of Rome with Africa and explores the significance of Africa as a space contaminated by evil, but which remains an integral part of Rome. Along with Lucan's other geographic and natural-scientific discussions, Africa's position as a part of the Roman world is painstakingly supported by astronomic and geographic erudition in Lucan's blending of scientific and mythological discourse. The poet is a visionary who supports his truth claims by means of scientific discourse.

The thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose was a major bestseller - largely due to its robust treatment of 'natural' sexuality. Alastair Minnis's innovative study considers the ways in which Jean de Meun, in imitation of Ovid as understood within medieval scholarship, assumed the mock-mastership of love. The reception of the Rose is placed within the European history of literary criticism.

Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian are the three most influential poets from Northern Ireland who have composed poems with a link to pre- and post-revolutionary Russia. Their attraction to the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union reflects the increasing fascination with Eastern European literature among western writers. Russian authors finding their way into the poetry are, among others, Alexander Pushkin, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky. By incorporating intertextual links into their work, Heaney, Paulin and McGuckian establish parallels between Russia and Northern Ireland in terms of history, politics, literature and culture. They attempt to reconsider the Northern Irish conflict through a Russian framework in order to subvert the established discourse of the Troubles based on British Unionism and Irish Nationalism. Their references to Russia allow the three poets to achieve a geographical and mental detachment in order to turn a fresh eye on the Northern Irish situation.

"A Sense of Regard," says Laura McCullough, "is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases."
The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyrical to the critical, are organized into four broad groupings: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself. To read them is to listen in as the contributors speak what they know, discover what they do not, and in the process often find something new in themselves and their topic. As a reader you are invited, says McCullough, "to be moved from one sense of regard to another: to be provoked and to linger in that state. . . . To query, quarrel, and consider."
"A Sense of Regard" grew out of a recent gathering of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where a poet's comments on the work of another sparked impassioned and contentious conversations in person, in print, and online. Though race is often thought of as an age-old topic in poetry, McCullough saw clearly that there is still much to discuss, study, and tease apart. Moving the conversation beyond the specificity of those initial AWP encounters, with their mostly black/white focus on race, these essays provide a context and a safe starting place for some urgently needed discussions we too rarely have.

Epic Negation examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review's totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war's onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.'s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud's Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such.

The present volume, which contains miscellaneous English and Latin verse, written throughout his career, shows Smart as he appeared to his contemporaries: a brilliant but wayward scholar, who threw away a life of distinction at Cambridge to engage in the raffish world of the London theaters and pleasure gardens. By presenting the poems in chronological order, it also reveals the pattern of his evolution from both academic and popular roles into a poet dedicated to Christian service. Over thirty pieces in this volume have not appeared in any previous collection, and several are reprinted for the first time since the 18th century. Translations are provided for all Latin poems.