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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets
Richard Cardwell was given the Elma Dangerfield Award of the
International Byron Society for the best book on Byron in 2005-06
Byron, arguably, was and remains the most famous and infamous
English poet in the modern period in Continental Europe. From
Portugal in the West to Russia in the East, from Scandinavia in the
North to Spain in the South he inspired and provoked, was adored
and reviled, inspired notions of freedom in subject lands and, with
it, the growth of national idealisms which, soon, would re-draw the
map of Europe. At the same time the Byronic persona, incarnate in
Childe Harold, Manfred, Lara and others, was received with
enthusiasm and fear as experience demonstrated that Byron's
Romantic outlook was two-edged, thrilling and appalling in the same
moment. All the great writers-Goethe, Mickiewicz, Lermontov,
Almeida Garret, Espronceda, Lamartine, among many others-strove to
outdo, imitate, revise, and integrate the sublime Lord into their
own cultures, to create new national voices, and to dissent from
the old order. The volume explores Byron's European reception in
its many guises, bringing new evidence, challenging old
assumptions, and offering fresh perspectives on the protean impact
of Lord Byron on the Continent. This book consistes of two volumes.
Series Editor: Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA, Institute of Germanic &
Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Contributors Richard A. Cardwell, University of Nottingham, UK
Joanne Wilkes, University of Auckland, NZ Peter Cochran, Cambridge,
UK Ernest Giddey, University of Lausanne, Switzerland Edoardo
Zuccato, IULM University, Milan Giovanni Iamartino, University of
Milan, Italy Derek Flitter, University of Birmingham, UK Maria
Leonor Machado de Sousa, University of Lisbon, Portugal Mihaela
Anghelescu Irimia, University of Bucharest, Romania Frank Erik
Pointner, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Achim
Geisenhansluke, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Theo D'haen,
Leiden University, The Netherlands Martin Prochazka, Charles
University, Prague, Czech Republic Miroslawa Modrzewska, University
of Gdansk, Poland Orsolya Rakai, Budapest, Hungary Nina Diakonova,
St. Petersburg, Russia Vitana Kostadinova, Plovdiv University,
Bulgaria Jorgen E. Nielsen, Copenhagen, Denmark Bjorn Tysdahl,
University of Oslo, Norway Ingrid Elam, Sweden Anahit Bekaryan,
Institute of Fine Arts of the National Academy of Sciences of the
Republic of Armenia Innes Merabishvili, State University of
Tbilisi, Georgia Litsa Trayiannoudi, Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki, Greece Massimiliano Demata, Mansfield College,
Oxford, UK
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.
"Modern Poetry and Ethnography: Yeats, Frost, Warren, Heaney, and
the Poet as Anthropologist maps a new approach to the works of W.B.
Yeats, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, and Seamus Heaney. Heuston
analyzes the ways the works of each writer represent and explain a
country or region (Ireland for Yeats, New England for Frost, the
American South for Warren, and Northern Ireland for Heaney) as if
the writers were anthropologists or ethnographers. This project
argues provocatively that literary critics can benefit greatly from
the insights and theories of anthropology and ethnography"--
This book re-conceives Christina Rossetti's poetic identity by
exposing the androcentric bias inherent in the histories of the
Rossetti family and of Pre-Raphaelitism, by turning new attention
to the Rossetti women, and by reconstituting a female and religious
community for Rossetti's writing. Drawing on extensive archival
research, Mary Arseneau investigates how Rossetti's religious faith
sustains her poetic practice and authorizes her cultural and
aesthetic critique; the result is a re-evaluation and
re-contextualization of the whole range of Rossetti's
writing.
This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the
eighteenth century and enlightenment is the first to range widely
over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration
of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the
body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and
patronage, are themes of the collection, which includes discussions
of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Helen
Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and
Lucy Aikin.
This is a study of allusions to Alfred Tennyson's poetry in works
of fiction from the Victorian period to the present day. Until now,
the study of literary allusion has focused on allusions made by
poets to other poets. In "Tennyson Among the Novelists", John
Morton presents the first book-length account of the presence of a
poet's work in works of prose fiction. As well as shedding new
light on the poems of Tennyson and their reception history, Morton
covers a wide variety of novelists including Thomas Hardy, James
Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, and Andrew O'Hagan, offering a fresh look at
their approach to writing. Morton shows how Tennyson's poetry,
despite its frequent depreciation by critics, has survived as a
vivifying presence in the novel from the Victorian period to the
present day.
In a world awash in awesome, sensual technological experiences,
wonder has diverse powers, including awakening us to unexpected
ecological intimacies and entanglements. Yet this deeply felt
experience-at once cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical-has been
dangerously neglected in our cultural education. In order to
cultivate the imaginative empathy and caution this feeling evokes,
we need to teach ourselves and others to read for wonder. This book
begins by unfolding the nature and artifice of wonder as a human
capacity and as a fabricated experience. Ranging across poetry,
foodstuffs, movies, tropical islands, wonder cabinets, apes,
abstract painting, penguins and more, Reading for Wonder offers an
anatomy of wonder in transmedia poetics, then explores its ethical
power and political risks from early modern times to the present
day. To save ourselves and the teeming life of our planet, indeed
to flourish, we must liberate wonder from ideologies of enchantment
and disenchantment, understand its workings and their ethical
ambivalence, and give it a clear language and voice.
Peter McDonald offers a controversial reading of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry centred on six figures, all of whom are critics as well as poets: W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. Serious Poetry provocatively returns these writers to the elements of difficulty and cultural disagreement where they belong.
This book analyses Black Consciousness poetry and theatre from the
1970s through to the present. South Africa's literature, like its
history, has been beset by disagreement and contradiction, and has
been consistently difficult to pin down as one, united entity. Much
existing criticism on South Africa's national literature has
attempted to overcome these divisions by discussing material
written from a variety of different subject positions together.
This book argues that Black Consciousness desired a new South
Africa where African and European cultures were valued equally, and
writers could represent both as they wished. Thus, a body of
literature was created that addressed a range of audiences and
imagined the South African nation in different ways. This book
explores Black Consciousness in order to demonstrate how South
African writers have responded in various ways to the changing
history and politics of their country.
Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.
This book explores the urban, cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu
poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries in Lucknow, which was the center of a flourishing
Indo-Islamic culture. Ruth Vanita analyzes Rekhti, a type of Urdu
poetry distinguished by a female speaker and a focus on women's
lives, and shows how it became a catalyst for the transformation of
the ghazal.
This title proposes a fundamental revaluation of the central poet
of British Romanticism. By looking at the later Wordsworth's
ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of
the printed dimension of his work, and by relating these
innovations to Wordsworth's sense that he was writing for
posterity, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting
about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates
traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called
Great Decade.
The advent of relatively cheap editions in the mid-16th century produced an explosion of verse, much of which represented the first person speaker as a version of the author. This book examines ways in which writers, often seeking advancement in their careers, harnessed verse for self-promotional purposes. Texts studied include a manuscript autobiography by Thomas Whythorne, printed verse by a woman, Isabella Whitney, travel and war narratives, as well as canonical texts by Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare.
Ted Hughes is one of the major twentieth-century English poets.
Including a previously unpublished poem written by Ted Hughes, Ted
Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected offers new insights into
neglected but essential aspects of his work. New essays by his
friends and fellow poets Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage lead a
collection of largely new voices in Hughes studies offering fresh
readings and newly available archive research. Beyond the poetry
and stories, these contributors draw upon recordings, notebooks,
letters, writing for children, prose essays and translations.
Several contributors have conducted new interviews and
correspondence for this book. For the first time, this book
challenges established views about Hughes's speaking voice, poetic
rhythms, study at Cambridge, influence of other poets, engagement
with Christianity, farming, fishing and healing. Close readings of
popular texts are accompanied by new arguments and contexts that
show the importance of works hitherto overlooked.
Considered by many to be the most innovative British Marxist writer
of the twentieth century, Christopher Caudwell was killed in the
Spanish Civil War at the age of 29. Although already a published
writer of aeronautic texts and crime fiction, he was practically
unknown to the public until reviews appeared of Illusion and
Reality, which was published just after his death. A strikingly
original study of poetry's role, it explained in clear language how
the organising of emotion in society plays a part in social change
and development. Caudwell had a powerful interest in how things
worked - aeronautics, physics, human psychology, language and
society. In the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s he saw that
capitalism was a system that could not work properly and distorted
the thinking of the age. Self-educated from the age of 15, he wrote
with a directness that is quite alien to most cultural theory.
Culture as Politics introduces Caudwell's work through his most
accessible and relevant writing. Material will be drawn from
Illusion and Reality, Studies in a Dying Culture and his essay
'Heredity and Development'.
This is an innovative and original exploration of the connections
between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the most well-known
works of medieval English literature, and the tradition of French
Arthurian romance, best-known through the works of Chretien de
Troyes two centuries earlier. The book compares Gawain with a wide
range of French Arthurian romances, exploring their recurrent
structural patterns ad motifs, their ethical orientation and the
social context in which they were produced. It presents a wealth of
new sources and analogues, which provide illuminating points of
comparison for analysis of the self-consciousness with which the
Gawain-poet handled the staple ingredients of Arthurian romance.
Throughout, Ad Putter plays close attention to the ways in which
the modes of representation of Arthurian romance are related to
social and historical context. By revealing in the course of their
romances the importance of conscience, courtliness, and
self-restraint, literati such as the Gawain-poet and Chretien de
Troyes helped a feudal society with an obsolete chivalric ideology
adapt to the changing times.
This work provides a comprehensive account of the life and writings
of Andrew Marvell (1621-78), as well as the reception of his work
in the century after his death. A much-loved poet, a compelling
controversialist, and once famous as a member of Parliament,
Marvell's intersecting careers are here explored in detail. His
biography is transformed with wide reference to print and
manuscript sources, many of which are described for the first time
in this useful resource for any student, historian, literary
scholar or general reader interested in the life and works of this
great writer.
This is the second instalment of Browning's great murder-story set in the Italy of the 1690s, The Ring and the Book, a poem which Henry James called a 'monstrous magnificence'. Here Browning lets the central characters of his poem - the corrupt aristocrat and murderer Franceschini, his victim, and her rescuer - tell the story in their own words.
This accessible, informed, and engaging book offers fresh, new
avenues into Keats's poems and letters, including a valuable
introduction to "the responsible poet." Focusing on Keats's sense
of responsibility to truth, poetry, and the reader, G. Douglas
Atkins, a noted T.S. Eliot critic, writes as an ama-teur. He reads
the letters as literary texts, essayistic and dramatic; the Odes in
comparison with Eliot's treatment of similar subjects; "The Eve of
St. Agnes" by adding to his respected earlier article on the poem
an addendum outlining a bold new reading; "Lamia" by focusing on
its complex and perplexing treatment of philosophy and imagination
and revealing how Keats literally represents philosophy as
functioning within poetry. Comparing Keats with Eliot,
poet-philosopher, this book generates valuable insight into Keats's
successful and often sophisticated poetic treatment of ideas,
accentuating the image of him as "the responsible poet."
This is an exploration of new aspects of Blake's work using the
concept of incarnation and drawing on theories of contemporary
digital media. Drawing on recent theories of digital media and on
the materiality of words and images, this fascinating study makes
three original claims about the work of William Blake. First, Blake
offers a critique of digital media. His poetry and method of
illuminated printing is directed towards uncovering an analogical
language. Second, Blake's work can be read as a performative.
Finally, Blake's work is at one and the same time immanent and
transcendent, aiming to return all forms of divinity and the sacred
to the human imagination, stressing that 'all deities reside in the
human breast,' but it also stresses that the human has powers or
potentials that transcend experience and judgement: deities reside
in the human breast. These three claims are explored through the
concept of incarnation: the incarnation of ideas in words and
images, the incarnation of words in material books and their
copies, the incarnation of human actions and events in bodies, and
the incarnation of spirit in matter.
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