A Modern Coleridge shows the interrelatedness of the discourses of cultivation, addiction and habit in Coleridge's poetry and prose, and argues that these all revolve around the problematic nexus of a post-Kantian idea of free will, essential to Coleridge's eminently modern idea of the 'human'.

Of all the wide-ranging interests Coleridge showed in his career, religion was the deepest and most long-lasting; and Beer demonstrates in this book that none of his work can be fully understood without taking this into account. Beer reveals how Coleridge was preoccupied by the life of the mind, and how closely this subject was intertwined with religion in his thinking. The insights that emerge in this collection are of absorbing interest, showing the efforts of a pioneer to reconcile traditional wisdom, both inside and outside orthodox Christianity, with the questions that were becoming evident to a sensitive enquirer.

"Comedy Matters" traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind's darkest moments. Demastes argues that comedy has a hard-nosed, pragmatic dimension that can be mobilized against belligerent cultural forces. Drawing from the works of Shakespeare, Stoppard, and a number of other comic masters, "Comedy Matters" demonstrates how comedy continues to work against cultural regimentation by striving to re-calibrate our decision-making processes and challenging the stultifying rigidity of human economy in the broadest sense of the term.

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions between active and passive seers and viewers, optical discourse had social and moral implications for gender difference in late fourteenth-century England. By exploring ocularity's equal dependence on "invisibility," Chaucer offers men and women access to a vision of "manhed," one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity.

In addition to being the leading philosopher of English Romanticism and one of its greatest poets, Coleridge explores the dynamics of consciousness and mental functioning more extensively than any of his contemporaries. This book compares his psychological theories with his diverse exemplifications of Romanticism's self-reflexive quest for transcendence, showing how he continually highlights the circular and mutual influence of ideas and emotions underlying Romantic idealism and the cult of the sublime.

William Blake and the Myths of Britain is the first full-length study of Blake's use of British mythology and history. From Atlantis to the Deists of the Napoleonic Wars, this book addresses why the eighteenth century saw a revival of interest in the legends of the British Isles and how Blake applied these in his extraordinary prophetic histories of the giant Albion, revitalising myths of the Druids and Joseph of Arimathea bringing Christ to Albion.

"At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the contexts of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death" --

Focusing on orally transmitted cultural forms in the Caribbean, this book reaffirms the importance of myth and symbol in folk consciousness as a mode of imaginative conceptualization. Paul A. Griffith cross-references Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates with issues at seminal sites where Caribbean imaginary insurgencies took root. This book demonstrates the ways residually oral forms distilled history, society, and culture to cleverly resist aggressions authored through colonialist presumptions. In an analysis of the archetypal patterns in the oral tradition--both literary and nonliterary, this impressive book gives insight into the way in which people think about the world and represent themselves in it.

Much poetic writing in France in the post-1945 period is set in an elemental landscape and expressed through an impersonal poetic voice. It is therefore often seen as primarily spatial and cut off from human concerns. This study of three poets, Andre du Bouchet, Philippe Jaccottet and Bernard Noel, who have not been compared before, argues that space is inseparable from time in their work, which is always in transition. The different ways in which the provisional operates in their writing show the wide range of forms that modern poetry can take: an insistence on the figure of the interval, hesitant movement, or exuberant impulse. As well as examining the imaginative universes of the poets through close attention to the texts, this book considers the important contribution they have made in their prose writing to our understanding of the visual arts and poetry translation, in themselves transitional activities. It argues that these writers have, in different ways, succeeded in creating poetic worlds that attest to close and constantly changing contact with the real. Emma Wagstaff teaches French literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

OurCommonDwelling explores why America's first literary circle turned to nature in the 1830s and '40s. When the New England Transcendentalists spiritualized nature, they were reacting to intense class conflict in the region's industrializing cities. Their goal was to find a secular foundation for their social authority as an intellectual elite. New England Transcendentalism engages with works by William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. The works of these great authors, interpreted in historical context, show that both environmental exploitation and conscious love of nature co-evolved as part of the historical development of American capitalism.

Chuvash-born poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is considered the father of late-Soviet avant-garde Russian poetry. This first full-length critical study of his work and poetics in any language brings a new voice into the critical conversation of twentieth-century poetry of witness. It charts the development of Aygi's poetics from his Mayakovsky-inspired verses as a student under the tutelage of Boris Pasternak, to those of a full-fledged poet's poet, drawing equally on the Russian poetic and religious tradition, European literature and philosophy, and Chuvash literature, folk culture, and cosmology. Writing from 1955 until his death in 2006, Aygi bridges the Soviet and post-Soviet, lyrical and avant-garde, personal and political. The transcultural roots and global reach of his work bring together Chuvash, Russian, European, and Volga Tatar languages and traditions to form a truly unique transnational poetics and a model for a new category of Russophone literature.

These volumes present the works of eleven poets writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Volume 1 contains work by Mary E. Tucker Lambert and the notorious Adah Isaacs Menken. The other three volumes contain works by nine other poets. Surprisingly, only one of them (Lizelia Moorer) protests at the treatment of her race during this period of social upheaval and injustice. The other poets treat the traditional themes - love, nature, death, Christian idealism and morality, family - in conventional forms and language. As interesting for the themes that they address as for those that they ignore, these selections offer a unique sampling of poetic voices that until now have gone largely unheard.

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's "lines on virtue" written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's "Asolando" (1889). This Chronology seeks to guide readers through this mass of material in three main sections: youth, contrasting early backgrounds and careers, and growing interest in each other's work to 1845; followed by courtship, marriage, Italy, and work including "Aurora Leigh" and "Men and Women" (1845-61); and concluding with Browning's later life of relentless socializing and prolific writing from his return to London to his death in Venice in 1889. This book provides not only precise dating but also in-depth information on such topics as the Brownings' extensive reading in English, French and classical literature, their friendships, and their sometimes conflicting political beliefs.

Criticism has largely emphasized the private meaning of "Romantic Satanism", treating it as the celebration of subjectivity through allusions to Paradise Lost that voice Satan's solitary defiance. The first full-length treatment of its subject, Romantic Satanism explores this literary phenomenon as a socially produced myth exhibiting the response of writers to their milieu. Through contextualized readings of the major works of Blake, Shelley, and Byron, this book demonstrates that Satanism enabled Romantic writers to interpret their tempestuous age: it provided them a mythic medium for articulating the hopes and fears their age aroused, for prophesying and inducing change.

The Other Virgil tells the story of how a classic like the Aeneid can say different things to different people. As a school text it was generally taught to support the values and ideals of a succession of postclassical societies, but between 1500 and 1800 a number of unusually sensitive readers responded to cues in the text that call into question what the poem appears to be supporting. This book focuses on the literary works written by these readers, to show how they used the Aeneid as a model for poems that probed and challenged the dominant values of their society, just as Virgil had done centuries before. Some of these poems are not as well known today as they should be, but others, like Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's The Tempest, are; in the latter case, the poems can be understood in new ways once their relationship to the 'other Virgil' is made clear.

This is a reprint of the authoritative six-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Superbly edited by Earl Leslie Griggs, each volume contains illustrations, appendices, and an index.

This is the first book to consistently read English Modernist literature as testimony to trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Focusing upon T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, it examines the impact of war upon their lives and their strategies to resist it through literary innovation.

Introduces Skelton and his work to readers unfamiliar with the poet, gathers together the vibrant strands of existing research, and opens up new avenues for future studies. John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences. This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Groningen; JOHN SCATTERGOOD is Professor (Emeritus) of Medieval and Renaissance English at Trinity College, Dublin. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton,A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite

"Chaucerian Aesthetics" examines "The Canterbury Tale" and "Troilus and Criseyde" from both medieval and post-Kantian vantage points. These sometimes congruent, sometimes divergent perspectives illuminate both the immediate pleasure of encountering beauty and its haunting promise of intelligibility. Although aesthetic reflection has sometimes seemed out of sync with modern approaches to mind and language, Knapp defends its value in general and demonstrates its importance for the analysis of Chaucer's narrative art. Focusing on language games, persons, women, humor, and community, this book ponders what makes art beautiful.

This work attempts a psychoanalytic listening to the 'oral' Homeric epics in an effort to extract, as it were, from the ancient text certain elements of psychoanalytic understanding that are of relevance to contemporary psychoanalysis. There is, in addition, a consideration of related philosophical and linguistic issues that are linked to the basic psychoanalytic concepts that emerge from such a listening.

Hardy was a poet of ghosts. In his poetry he describes himself as posthumous; as rekindling the cinders of passion; as the guardian of the dead forgotten by history; and as haunted by ghosts, particularly the specter of the lost child (as in the rumor that he fathered a child in the 1860s). Using Derrida, Abraham, and Torok and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism, this book investigates ghostliness, historicity, and memory in Hardy's poetry.

Pindar-the 'Theban eagle', as Thomas Gray famously called him-has often been taken as the archetype of the sublime poet: soaring into the heavens on wings of language and inspired by visions of eternity. In this much-anticipated new study, Robert Fowler asks in what ways the concept of the sublime can still guide a reading of the greatest of the Greek lyric poets. Working with ancient and modern treatments of the topic, especially the poetry and writings of Friedrich Hoelderlin (1770-1843), arguably Pindar's greatest modern reader, he develops the case for an aesthetic appreciation of Pindar's odes as literature. Building on recent trends in criticism, he shifts the focus away from the first performance and the orality of Greek culture to reception and the experience of Pindar's odes as text. This change of emphasis yields a fresh discussion of many facets of Pindar's astonishing art, including the relation of the poems to their occasions, performativity, the poet's persona, his imagery, and his myths. Consideration of Pindar's views on divinity, transcendence, time, and the limits of language reveals him to be not only a great writer but a great thinker.

Many eighteenth-century people wrote verse epistles, but no study has addressed their full variety and significance. This is the first book to cover the whole range of epistolary verse in the period, including not only the discursive type favoured by Pope and others, but also familiar and dramatic epistles. It advances a new model for defining the form, demonstrates the form's importance in the period, and pays special attention to non-canonical epistles, including those by women, occasional and labouring-class writers.