This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world. Based on extensive research and oral testimony, this biography embraces postcolonial realities and promise, and is a major contribution to British cultural history. -- .

Written in an age of revolutions, Lyrical Ballads represents a radical new way of thinking - not only about literature but also about our fundamental perceptions of the world. The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge continues to be among the most appealing and challenging in the rich tradition of English Literature; and Lyrical Ballads, composed at the height of the young authors' creative powers, is now widely acclaimed as a landmark in literary history. In this lively study, detailed analysis of individual poems is closely grounded in the literary, political and historical contexts in which Lyrical Ballads was first conceived, realised and subsequently expanded into two volumes. John Blades examines poetry from both volumes and carefully reassesses the poems in the light of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's revolutionary theories, while Part II of the study broadens the discussion by tracing the critical history of Lyrical Ballads over the two centuries since its first publication. Providing students with the critical and analytical skills with which to approach the poems, and offering guidance on further study, this stimulating book is essential reading.

This broad and original study of the full range of John Clare's work is the first to take seriously his repeated appeals to the judgement of future readers. Restoring the suppressed history of Clare's deep cultural engagement, it teases out, in clear terms, the often unexpected complexities of his varied writings. A series of close readings reveals Clare's sophisticated poetics: his covert quotations, his careful analysis of the history and culture of his own place, and his fascination with literary success and posthumous fame.

From this renowned research-level series, Poems and Contexts: Yeats Annual 16 thrusts Yeats's poems back into the circumstances of their creation and revision, thereby addressing what is very much the coming subject in studies of the Irish Literary Revival and the Modernist Movement: the historicity of Yeats's texts. Essayists and their themes include Wayne Chapman on Yeats's Rebellion Poems, while Joseph M. Hassett and P. S. Sri address Yeats's poetic sequences from fresh viewpoints. Deirdre Toomey illuminates the turning point of 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited', A. Norman Jeffares contributes a major biographical study of Iseult Gonne, and Neil Mann a study of George Yeats and Athanasius Kircher. The volume also features research materials, including a full printing of Richard Ellmann's Notebooks on Yeats.

Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward exemplifies the eighteenth-century transition from classical to Romantic. Claudia Thomas Kairoff's excellent critical study offers fresh readings of Anna Seward's most important writings and firmly establishes the poet as a pivotal figure among late-century British writers.

Reading Seward's writing alongside recent scholarship on gendered conceptions of the poetic career, patriotism, provincial culture, sensibility, and the sonnet revival, Kairoff carefully reconsiders Seward's poetry and critical prose. Written as it was in the last decades of the eighteenth century, Seward's work does not comfortably fit into the dominant models of Enlightenment-era verse or the tropes that characterize Romantic poetry. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle for understanding Seward's writing within a particular literary style, Kairoff argues that this allows readers to see in Seward's works the eighteenth-century roots of Romantic-era poetry.

Arguably the most prominent woman poet of her lifetime, Seward's writings disappeared from popular and scholarly view shortly after her death. After nearly two hundred years of critical neglect, Seward is attracting renewed attention, and with this book Kairoff makes a strong and convincing case for including Anna Seward's remarkable literary achievements among the most important of the late eighteenth century.

After a period of neglect, Ovid's elegiac poem on the Roman calendar has been the focus of much recent scholarship. In her comprehensive and scholarly study of the final book, Joy Littlewood analyzes Ovid's account of the origins of the festivals of June, demonstrating that Book 6 is effectively a commemoration of Roman War, and elegantly provides a framing bracket to balance the opening celebration of Peace in Book 1. She explores the subtle interweaving of pietas and virtus in Roman religion and its relationship to Augustan ideology, the depth and accuracy of Ovid's antiquarianism, and his audacious expansion of generic boundaries.

Eros and Poetry examines the erotics of literary desire at the Stewart court in Scotland during the reigns of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI. Encompassing the period from the early 1560s to the late 1590s, this is the first study to link together Scottish Marian and Jacobean court literatures, presenting a relatively unknown body of writing, newly theorized and contextualized. It argues that in this period erotic poetry can only be considered in relation to the figure of the monarch, and that the formation of elite lyric culture takes place under the shaping influence of desire for, and against, the sovereign, and her or his 'passional' and symbolic powers.

Through close readings of poems covering the span of Georg Trakl's lyric output, this study traces the evolution of his strangely mild and beautiful vision of the end of days. Like much German-language poetry of the years preceding the First World War, the poems of Georg Trakl (1887-1914) are imbued with a sense of historical crisis, but what sets his work apart is the mildness and restraint of his images of universal disintegration. Trakl typically couched his vision of the end of days in images of migrating birds, abandoned houses, and closing eyelids, making his poetry at once apocalyptic, rustic, and intimate. The argument made in this study is that this vision amounts to a unitary worldview with tightly interwoven affective, ethical, social, historical, and cosmological dimensions. Often termed hermetic and obscure, Trakl's poems become more accessible when viewed in relation to the evolution of his methods and concerns across different phases, and the idiosyncrasies of his strangely beautiful later works make sense as elements of a sophisticated system of expression committed to "truth" as a transcendental order. Through close readings of poems covering the span of his lyric output, this study traces the evolution of Trakl's distinctive style and themes while attending closely to biographical and cultural contexts.

The Petrarchan revival in Romantic England was a unique phenomenon which involved an impressive number of scholars, translators and poets. This book analyses the way Petrarch was read and re-written by Romantic figures. The result is a history of the Romantic-era sonnet and a new lens for understanding English Romantic poetry.

A guidebook to the allusions of T.S. Eliot's notorious poem, The Waste Land , Reading The Waste Land from the Bottom Up utilizes the footnotes as a starting point, opening up the poem in unexpected ways. Organized according to Eliot's line numbers and designed for both scholars and students, chapters are free-standing and can be read in any order.

"Volume II" covers the poems of Dryden from 1682 to 1685. Together with volume one, the work forms the first part of the most informative and accessible edition of Dryden's poetry, providing an invaluable resource for students of Restoration culture.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) needs little introduction as the central figure in Romantic poetry and a crucial influence in the development of poetry generally. This broad-ranging survey redefines the variety of his writing by showing how it incorporates contemporary concepts of language difference and the ways in which popular and serious literature were compared and distinguished during this period. It discusses many of Wordsworth's later poems, comparing his work with that of his regional contemporaries as well as major writers such as Scott. The key theme of relationship, both between characters within poems and between poet and reader, is explored through Wordsworth's construction of community and his use of power relationships. A serious discussion of the place of sexual feeling in his writing is also included.

This books presents the first extended study of the relationship between British modernist poetry and the environment. Challenging reductive associations of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, the book's central argument is that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world which has yet to receive adequate critical attention. Whilst modernist studies continues to emphasize the plurality of the movement and the breadth of voices and concerns within it, the environmental consciousness of modernist literature and its response to changes to human/nature relations following the experience of war and modernity remain largely unexamined. Exploring British modernist poetry from an ecocritical perspective offers a fresh approach to the movement and its context, and produces original readings of both canonical and more marginalized modernist voices. This book opens by discussing the relationship between modernism and ecocriticism and the benefits of creating a dialogue between the two. It then presents new readings of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Charlotte Mew that reveal a shared preoccupation with environmental issues and a common desire to find new ways of achieving physical, psychological, and artistic reconnection with nature. Building on the continuing growth of ecocriticism, this book demonstrates how green approaches to modernist studies can produce new insights into both individual poets and the modernist movement as a whole, making it an essential resource for students of modernism, ecocriticism, and early-twentieth-century literature.

Rehder's study examines the use of metaphor in three of America's greatest poets. Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane are looked at in turn, their views on metaphor discussed and their use of metaphor in their poems analyzed. Considering Aristotle and Derrida, and taking account of recent theoretical work, Rehder offers an interpretation of why metaphor is fundamental to our thinking and to poetry.

In this book, Judith Thompson restores a powerful but long-suppressed voice to our understanding of British Romanticism. Drawing on newly discovered archives, this book offers the first full-length study of the poetry of John Thelwallas well as his partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

This collection of essays by leading Byronists explores the development of the myth of Byron and the Byronic from the poet's self-representations to his various appearances in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and in drama, film and portraiture. Byromania (as Annabella Milbanke named the frenzied reaction to Byron's poetry and personality) looks at the phenomena of Byronism through a variety of critical perspectives, and it is designed to appeal to both an academic and a popular readership alike.

The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell is the most comprehensive and informative collection of essays ever assembled dealing with the life and writings of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell (1621-78). Like his friend and colleague John Milton, Marvell is now seen as a dominant figure in the literary landscape of the mid-seventeenth century, producing a stunning oeuvre of poetry and prose either side of the Restoration. In the 1640s and 1650s he was the author of hypercanonical lyrics like 'To His Coy Mistress' and 'The Garden' as well as three epoch-defining poems about Oliver Cromwell. After 1660 he virtually invented the verse genre of state satire as well as becoming the most influential prose satirist of the day-in the process forging a long-lived reputation as an incorruptible patriot. Although Marvell himself was an intensely private and self-contained character, whose literary, religious, and political commitments are notoriously difficult to discern, the interdisciplinary contributions by an array of experts in the fields of seventeenth-century literature, history, and politics gathered together in the Handbook constitute a decisive step forward in our understanding of him. They offer a fully-rounded account of his life and writings, individual readings of his key works, considerations of his relations with his major contemporaries, and surveys of his rich and varied afterlives. Informed by the wealth of editorial and biographical work on Marvell that has been produced in the last twenty years, the volume is both a conspectus of the state of the art in Marvell studies and the springboard for future research.

Matthew Arnold was one of the nineteenth century's greatest spokesmen for the saving power of culture, especially of poetry, to substitute for a vanishing religion. Yet he was persistently troubled throughout his career by the difficulty of finding adequate authority in language. Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language explores Arnold's attempts to find an authoritative language, and argues that his occasional claims for such a language reveal more uneasiness than confidence in the value of ""letters."" It examines Arnold's poetry within this context and demonstrates that his various experiments - to speak in oracular voice, to use classic forms, to achieve a grand style - and their failures, reflect the inevitable difficulties facing any poet in an age of intellectual and cultural upheaval. Riede argues that Arnold's determined efforts to write with authority, combined with his deep-seated suspicion of his medium, result in an exciting if often agonized tension in his poetic language - a language that strains against its inevitable but generally unacknowledged limitations.

This is an imaginative work of literary criticism. Thirteen scholars have selected a wide variety of Joseph Brodsky's poems written between 1970 and 1994 for detailed discussion in the context of his whole output. The choice of poems reflects Brodsky's diversity of themes and devices. Together they offer a perspective on one of the most original and profound modern poets. This collection should fulfil the often-expressed need for a comprehensive approach to the study of Brodsky's poetry, which is linguistically as well as intellectually demanding.

This collection gives sustained attention to the literary dimensions of children's poetry from the eighteenth century to the present. While reasserting the importance of well-known voices, such as those of Isaac Watts, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, A. A. Milne, and Carol Ann Duffy, the contributors also reflect on the aesthetic significance of landmark works by less frequently celebrated figures such as Richard Johnson, Ann and Jane Taylor, Cecil Frances Alexander and Michael Rosen. Scholarly treatment of children's poetry has tended to focus on its publication history rather than to explore what comprises - and why we delight in - its idiosyncratic pleasures. And yet arguments about how and why poetic language might appeal to the child are embroiled in the history of children's poetry, whether in Isaac Watts emphasising the didactic efficacy of "like sounds," William Blake and the Taylor sisters revelling in the beauty of semantic ambiguity, or the authors of nonsense verse jettisoning sense to thrill their readers with the sheer music of poetry. Alive to the ways in which recent debates both echo and repudiate those conducted in earlier periods, The Aesthetics of Children's Poetry investigates the stylistic and formal means through which children's poetry, in theory and in practice, negotiates the complicated demands we have made of it through the ages.

In its rigorously researched analysis of Anglo-Jewish women writing the Holocaust, this book highlights the necessity of their inclusion in the evolving canon of modern British literature. Addressing the question of why the Holocaust is still being written, this study brings together Kindertransport writers, those of the Second Generation and those writers who have no personal or communal connection to the Holocaust but who have felt compelled to testify to the painful adaptations or betrayals of refugees by the nation which rescued so many.
In her significant critical interpretations of memoirs, plays, poetry and novels, Lassner shows how these writers complicate theories of trauma and memory by using fantasy and the Gothic as a response to silence as well as to the historical and narrative relationship between endangered European Jews and Britain's cultural and political responses to them.

This book presents a cutting-edge critical analysis of the trope of miscegenation and its biopolitical implications in contemporary Palestinian and Israeli literature, poetry, and discourse. The relationship between nationalism and demographics are examined through the narrative and poetic intrigue of intimacy between Arabs and Jews, drawing from a range of theoretical perspectives, including public sphere theory, orientalism, and critical race studies. Revisiting the controversial Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre, who championed miscegenation in his revisionary history of Brazil, the book deploys a comparative investigation of Palestinian and Israeli writers' preoccupation with the mixed romance. Author Hella Bloom Cohen offers new interpretations of works by Mahmoud Darwish, A.B. Yehoshua, Orly Castel-Bloom, Nathalie Handal, and Rula Jebreal, among others.

Written by internationally established scholars of Thomas Moore's music, poetry, and prose writing, Thomas Moore and Romantic Inspiration is a collection of twelve essays and a timely response to significant new biographical, historiographical and editorial work on Moore. This collection reflects the rich variety of cutting-edge work being done on this significant and prolific figure. Sarah McCleave and Brian Caraher have contributed an introduction that positions Moore in his own time (1800-1850), addresses subsequent neglect in the twentieth century, and contextualises the contemporary re-evaluation of Thomas Moore as a figure of considerable interdisciplinary artistic and cultural significance. The contributions to this collection establish Moore's importance in the fields of Neoclassical and Romantic lyricism, musical performance, song-writing, postcolonial criticism, Orientalism and biographical writing- as well as defining the significance of his voice as an engaged social and political commentator of a strongly cosmopolitan and pluralistic inclination.