In this study, the author looks at the role the warrior-hero plays within a set of predetermined political and social constraints. The hero if not a sword-wielding barbarian, bent only upon establishing his own fame; such fame-seekers (including some famous medieval literary figures) might even fall outside the definition of the Germanic hero, the real value of whose deeds are given meaning only within the political construct. Individual prowess is not enough. The hero must conquer the blows of fate because he is committed to the conquest of chaos, and over all to the need for social stability. Even the warrior-hero's concern with his reputation is usually expressed negatively: that the wrong songs are not sung about him. The author discusses works in Old English, Old and Middle High German, Old Norse, Latin and Old French, deliberately going beyond what is normally thought of as "heroic poetry" to include the German so-called "minstrel epic" and a work by a writer who is normally classified as a late medieval chivalric poet, Konrad von Wurzburg, the comparison of which with "Beowulf" allows us to span half a millennium.

Connecting multiple academic areas, this book addresses three aspects of the poetry of Jose Watanabe: 1) the construction of "Japaneseness" in the poetic works and public figure of the poet, 2) the skillful manipulation of literary devices characteristic of his poetry, 3) the unique sensibilities and moods of ephemerality and ineffableness prevalent in his poetic works. The trans/interdisciplinary nature of the book intends to promote a dialogue and exchange of ideas across academic fields neglected in most studies on the Peruvian poet. Written by researchers based in Japan, it offers a unique perspective of Japanese cultural phenomenon unavailable in previous studies. The goal of the book is to shed light on how Japan continues to be seen by the West through essentialist notions and stereotypical representations, as well as to highlight the fact that the literary quality of Watanabe's poetic artistry does not reside in it being "Japanese" and can be appreciated without resorting to essentialist categorizations based on positive Japanese stereotypes.

A unique collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth-century and late enlightenment, the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of the formal experiments, aesthetics, and politics 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.

"Taking a fresh approach to Byron, this book argues that he should be understood as a poet whose major works develop a carefully reasoned philosophy. Situating him with reference to the thought of the period, it argues for Byron as an active thinker, whose final philosophical stance - reader-centred scepticism - has extensive practical implications"--

"This book offers an exciting new approach to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets as it shows why it should be read both closely and in relation to Eliot's other works, notably the poems The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men," and Ash-Wednesday. In Four Quartets, Incarnation is the universal, timeless pattern, the paradigmatic instance of which occurs in and as the Incarnation"--

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.

Given that the Surrealists were initially met with widespread incomprehension, mercilessly ridiculed, and treated as madmen, it is remarkable that more than one hundred years on we still feel the vitality and continued popularity of the movement today. As Willard Bohn demonstrates, Surrealism was not just a French phenomenon but one that eventually encompassed much of the world. Concentrating on the movement's theory and practice, this extraordinarily broad-ranging book documents the spread of Surrealism throughout the western hemisphere and examines keys texts, critical responses, and significant writers. The latter include three extraordinarily talented individuals who were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Andre Breton, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz). Like their Surrealist colleagues, they strove to free human beings from their unconscious chains so that they could realize their true potential. One Hundred Years of Surrealist Poetry explores not only the birth but also the ongoing life of a major literary movement.

Macpherson's Ossian caused a sensation on its first appearance in the early 1760s. Contrary to the impression often conveyed in literary histories, enthusiasm for the Ossianic poetry cannot be dismissed as a short-lived fad, for its appeal lasted a century or more, both in Britain and Continental Europe. There is hardly a major Romantic poet on whom it failed to make a significant impact. And as may be seen from the contributions to this volume, its influence was ubiquitous, from Poland to Portugal, from Paris to Prague. The essays brought together here consider the reception of Ossian in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as well as in a wide range of European countries. In some the focus is on an individual writer (for instance, Goethe, Schiller, Chateaubriand), in others there is a broader sweep and a survey of reception in a national literary culture is offered (for instance, Hungary, Russia, Sweden). One of the two essays on Ossian in Italy at last gives Macpherson's influential epigone, John Smith, his due. Consideration is also given to Ossian's significance for the rise of historicism, and to nonliterary forms of reception in music and art.

Sarah Broom provides an engaging, challenging and lively introduction to contemporary British and Irish poetry. The book covers work by poets from a wide range of ethnic and regional backgrounds and covers a broad range of poetic styles, including mainstream names like Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy alongside more marginal and experimental poets like Tom Raworth and Geraldine Monk. Contemporary British and Irish Poetry tackles the most compelling and contentious issues facing poetry today.

Long overshadowed by fellow confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton seldom features in literary criticism, despite being one of America's most influential women writers. Now in this much-needed volume Sexton and her poetry are reassessed for the first time in two decades. With new access to her archives, the scholars and poets featured here consider Sexton's wide range of literary production: how it shaped her creative process, informs readings of her work, and reveals her efforts to build a successful career without a university education. Notable in presenting Sexton the educator and public figure, This Business of Words also considers her relationships with peers and various media and interprets her strategies for teaching, critiquing poems, and delivering readings. As they revisit their initial encounters with Sexton as readers, writers, and teachers, the contributors to this volume map the influence of her craft on twenty-first-century culture.

What is "Wordsworthian" Romanticism and how did it evolve? This book argues that only by reading Charlotte Smith's poetry in tandem with William Wordsworth's can this question be answered, demonstrating their mutual contribution to the creation of the "Wordsworthian," through literary analysis and historical contextualizing of their writings.

From the artistic practice of improvisation to the politics of nationalism, the essays in this volume break new ground and significantly extend our understanding of the relations between British and Italian culture in its analysis of the reception of Dante and Italian literature in British Romanticism.

This book presents a theoretical and historicized reading of the production of the 'autonomous' subject in Milton's prose and in Paradise Lost. It rejects the current orthodoxy that liberal humanism is just a form of domination, and reads Milton's texts as revolutionary. Although Milton participates in the formation of discourses of sexuality, labour and the nature of reason which come to be normative, neither Milton's texts nor modernity more generally can be understood without also accepting the dynamism inherent in the belief in individual freedom.

This five-volume series, British Women's Writing From Bronte to Bloomsbury, 1840-1940, historically contextualizes and traces developments in women's fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessing both canonical and lesser-known British women's writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscape of women's authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each of its volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 1: 1840s and 1850s inaugurates the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorian women's writing distinctly within the 1840s and 1850s. Using a range of critical perspectives including political and literary history, feminist approaches, disability studies, and the history of reading, the volume's 16 original essays consider such developments as the construction of a post-Romantic tradition, the politicization of the domestic sphere, and the development of crime and sensation writing. Centrally, it reassesses key mid-nineteenth-century female authors in the context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helped to shape the literary landscape of the 1840s and 1850s.

Prepared in light of recent discoveries in the field, this is the first volume of a modern, four-volume edition of the Greek lyric fragments. The book presents fragments from Alcman, Stesichorus, and Ibycus, along with a preface, a brief exegetical commentary, and ancient testimonia relating to the poets' art and life. All of the text is in Latin or Greek.

This Reader's Guide provides a timely critical overview that allows readers to orient themselves authoritatively in the rapidly-evolving field of contemporary British poetry. Focusing on key themes and issues, and a wide range of poets, the Guide captures the intersection between the historical and cultural contexts of critical debate today.

Through its recovery of the metrical principles underlying the work of some of the century's major poets, this study highlights the intricacy of the relation between the "music" of verse and its meaning, and helping us to understand the way in which the ferment of metrical experiment eventually led to the emergence of free verse.

First published in 1964, this volume remains the standard introduction to Pindar.

Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648-1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women's and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.

Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation spans the boundaries between literary studies and history. It looks at the impact of tyrannical government on the work of poets, playwrights, and prose writers of the early English Renaissance. It shows the profound effects that political oppression had on the literary production of the years from 1528 to 1547, and how English writers in turn strove to mitigate, redirect, and finally resist that oppression. The result was the destruction of a number of forms that had dominated the literary production of late-medieval England, but also the creation of new forms that were to dominate the writing of the following centuries. Paradoxically, the tyranny of Henry VIII gave birth to many modes of writing now seen to be characteristic of the English literary Renaissance.

This collection of essays explores certain neglected aspects of this haikai master's literary and philosophical contributions. Haikai is an art that parodies and often subverts its linguistic, generic, and personal predecessors, and its intersections include imaginative links to the rest of Japanese literature and culture, to Chinese prose and poetry, and to the social, intellectual, and everyday realities of seventeenth century Tokugawa life.

Exploring the diverse factors that persuaded Christopher Columbus that he could reach the fabled "East" by sailing west, Dante, Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition considers, first, the impact of Dante's Divine Comedy and the apocalyptic prophetic tradition that it reflects, on Columbus's perception both of the cosmos and the eschatological meaning of his journey to what he called an 'other world.' In so doing, the book considers how affinities between himself and the exiled poet might have led Columbus to see himself as a divinely appointed agent of the apocalypse and his enterprise as the realization of the spiritual journey chronicled in the Comedy. As part of this study, the book necessarily examines the cultural space that Dante's poem, its geography, cosmography and eschatology, enjoyed in late fifteenth century Spain as well as Columbus's own exposure to it. As it considers how Italian writers and artists of the late Renaissance and Counter Reformation received the news of Columbus' 'discovery' and appropriated the figure of Dante and the pseudo-prophecy of the Comedy to interpret its significance, the book examines how Tasso, Ariosto, Stradano and Stigliani, in particular, forge a link between Dante and Columbus to present the latter as an inheritor of an apostolic tradition that traces back to the Aeneid. It further highlights the extent to which Italian writers working in the context of the Counter Reformation, use a Dantean filter to propagate the notion of Columbus as a new Paul, that is, a divinely appointed apostle to the New World, and the Roman Church as the rightful emperor of the souls encountered there.

A search for roots and identity has rarely been captured with such illegible], unusual insight, and surprising humor as in this memoir of heartbreak and hope. Today a distinguished American poet; Colette Inez first came to the United States when she was eight years old, as an illegible] Belgian orphan illegible] by two complete strangers. Growing up in post World War II America, a stranger to her own past, she survived a illegible] adolescence and an increasingly illegible] abusive adoptive family by learning to define her single solace, a developing passion for literature. illegible] possible illegible] in the 1950s, Inez set out to prove her claim to U.S. citizenship. The result, as she recounts in this eloquent, wrenching memoir, would span two illegible], a trail of discovery, and a buried secret, one that ultimately allowed Inez to reconcile her past and present and finally come of age as an artist.

William Wordsworth: Interviews and Recollections collects and reprints, on a generous scale, selections from the texts of both immediately recorded opinions and characterizations that were written down in later years. Represented in this anthology are 22 of Wordsworth's most important contemporaries. With the exception of Shelley, they all knew Wordsworth personally. It was difficult, and perhaps impossible, for any of them to write neutrally or objectively about the impression that Wordsworth made on them. Their comments make for lively reading.