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.

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.

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!

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.

Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions embrace both canonical and the less-studied texts and examine the crisis of suicide - a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications - in European, American and Asian contexts. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy's Reliques and Patricia Highsmith's crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siecle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis in fiction and culture. -- .

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke and sister to Sir Philip Sidney, is the most important woman writer of the Elizabethan era outside the royal family. 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.

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.

"A Manner of Utterance" offers a collection of responses to J.H. Prynne's poetry by his readers: not merely academics, but poets, composers, teachers and a painter (Ian Friend, one of whose works is featured on the cover). The contributors include Ian Brinton (also editor of the volume), David Caddy, Ian Friend, Richard Humphreys, Li Zhi-min, Rod Mengham, Keston Sutherland, John Douglas Templeton and Erik Ulman.

Best remembered today as the author of The Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow continues to be one of the most popular poets in American literary history. This book is a guide to his life and writings. A brief introductory essay overviews Longfellow's life and accomplishments. A chronology then summarizes the chief events in his career. Hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries follow, discussing individual poems, his other writings, his family members and professional associates, and topics related to his life and literary achievements. Entries list works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography. Longfellow has also enjoyed fame worldwide; in England, his poems outsold those of Browning and Tennyson. In addition to being a gifted poet, Longfellow had a brilliant career as a college professor. He wrote numerous critical works and translations, and was also a leading American Dante scholar. He frequently wrote letters, and his admirers often sought his advice on personal and professional matters.

This book attempts to explain the nature of the influence of Platonism on English poetry, exclusive of drama, of the 16th and 17th centuries. The subject is not treated from the standpoint of the individual poet but, rather, the whole body of English poetry of the period is interpreted as an integral output of the spiritual thought and life of the time.

This book stages a series of interventions and inventions of urban space between 1880 and 1930 in key literary texts of the period. Making sharp distinctions between modernity and modernism, the volume reassesses the city as a series of singular sites irreducible to stable identities, concluding with an extended reading of The Waste Land .

American Modernist Poetry and the Chinese Encounteroffers a framework for understanding the variety of imagined encounters by eight different American poets with their imagined 'Chinese' subject. The method is historical and materialist, insofar as the contributors to the volume read the claims of specific poems alongside the actual and tumultuous changes China faced between 1911 and 1979. Even where specific poems are found to be erroneous, the contributors to the volume suggest that each of the poets attempted to engage their 'Chinese' subject with a degree of commitment that presaged imaginatively China's subsequent dominance. The poems stand as unique artifacts, via proxy and in the English language, for the rise of China in the American imagination. The audience of the volume is international, including the growing number of scholars and graduate students in Chinese universities working on American literature and comparative cultural studies, as well as already established commentators and students in the west.

In this gracefully executed book, G. Douglas Atkins continues his explorations of the poetry and prose of T.S. Eliot. In highly original terms, Atkins offers a major new analysis of Eliot's debt to and use of Lancelot Andrewes, the seventeenth-century Anglican churchman, who was one of the greatest sermon-writers in the language, author of the enormously popular Preces Privatae (Private Prayers), and director of one of six 'companies' responsible for the King James translation of the Bible. Focusing on their shared attention to verbal and linguistic detail, Atkins for studies closely Eliot's 1928 collection For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order; demonstrates the poetic use Eliot makes of Andrewes's writing in Journey of the Magi, and presents a fresh and important, full-scale reading of Ash-Wednesday: Six Poems, a work heavily indebted to Andrewes's emphasis on the central Christian dogma of the Incarnation.

An Introduction to the Ilaid and the Odyssey

Constructing Coleridge examines Coleridge's penchant for re-invention and carefully demonstrates how the Coleridge family editors followed his lead in constructing his posthumous reputation. Following his death in 1834, the family editors faced immediate scandals and sought to construct the Coleridge they preferred in these trying circumstances.

"Byron's Romantic Celebrity" offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity. It argues that celebrity is a cultural apparatus that emerged in response to the Romantic industrialization of print and culture and that Lord Byron should be understood as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. Under that rubric, it investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, the material conditions of Byron's publications, and the place of celebrity culture in history of the self.

This book is a historical and theoretical study of some of John Donne's less frequently discussed poetry and prose; it interrogates various trends that have dominated Donne criticism, such as the widely divergent views about his attitudes towards women, the focus on the Songs and Sonets to the exclusion of his other works, and the tendency to separate discussions of his poetry and prose. On a broader scale, it joins a small but growing number of feminist re-readings of Donne's works. Using the cultural criticism of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Meakin explores works throughout Donne's career, from his earliest verse letters to sermons preached while Divinity Reader at Lincoln's Inn and Dean of St. Paul's in London. Donne's articulations of four feminine figures in particular are examined: the Muse, Sappho, Eve as `the mother of mankind', and a young girl who lived and died in Donne's own time, Elizabeth Drury. Meakin's reading of Donne's self-described `masculine perswasive force' asserting itself upon the `incomprehensibleness' of the feminine suggests that the Donne canon needs to be reassessed as even richer and more complex than previously asserted, and that his reputation as a supreme Renaissance poet - revived at the beginning of this century - needs to be carried into the next.