This book is a full-length study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902-1971). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenging conventional readings of her as an eccentric. It reveals the careful control with which she managed her public persona, reassesses her allusive poetry in the light of her own conflicted response to written texts, and traces her simultaneous preoccupation with and fear of her reading public. William May considers the influence of artists such as George Grosz and Aubrey Beardsley on her apparently artless illustrations and explores her use of fiction and book reviews as a way of generating contexts for her poetry, offering readers a fascinating in-depth study that not only radically alters our understanding of Smith and her work, but provides new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.

Dr. Brett brings joy into the hearts of many as they experience her collections of poems and proses. She expresses the labyrinth of life as a maze, difficult, challenging, joyous, spiritual and fulfilling with angels.

This book explores Sara Coleridge's critical intelligence and theoretical reach. It shows her in various critical guises: editing works by her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, commenting on her own poetry and prose, and writing diversely brilliant criticism of classical and English literature.

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 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.

ROLAND BLEIKER is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, Australia. His previous books include Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics and Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation. He worked as a Swiss diplomat in the Korean DMZ and held visiting fellowships at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

"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"--

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.

A great deal of excellent poetry was composed in Scotland in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1603, when James Stewart became also king of England and Ireland, several Scottish poets moved to London, and commented on events at Court. Others preferred to remain in their homeland, at a distance from the metropolis; and some who had gone south soon returned home. In addition to the perennial themes of love and religion, attention was given to topics such as national identity, foreign travel, civil society, monarchy, the good life, friendship, retreat, and the nature and language of literature itself. Poets faced the political and cultural challenges inherent in the novel concept of Great Britain in a variety of ways, and the thistle and the rose bloomed together in the Jacobean garden of verses.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

"Temporal Circumstances" provides powerful and detailed interpretations of the most important and challenging of the "Canterbury Tales." Well-informed and clearly written, this book will interest both those familiar with Chaucer's masterpiece and readers new to it.

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 pre-modern Arab poet Ibn al-Hajjaj (941-1001) left an indelible mark on the trajectory of pre-modern Arabic poetry and culture by pioneering and popularizing a new mode of poetry, sukhf - obscene and scatological parody. His outrageously obscene poetry was admired by his contemporaries, as well by poets and critics of later periods. The modern period, however, has not been nearly as kind to Ibn al-Hajjaj. Sinan Antoon argues that the reasons for this oversight are ideological, for the most part, and have to do with modern misconceptions of what constitutes "good poetry." The Poetics of the Obscene in Pre-Modern Arabic Poetry is the first study of this fascinating poet and the genre he popularized, placing it within Arab cultural genealogy. Antoon reinscribes Ibn al-Hajjaj into the literary history from which he has been exiled and offers fascinating close readings of the poems in their social and cultural context.

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