What shall we make of medieval English lyrics? They have no fixed line or meter, no consistent point of view, and their content may seem misaligned with the other texts in manuscripts in which they are found. Yet in Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues that the lyric poetry of later medieval England is a distinct genre defined not by its poetic features-rhyme, meter, and stanza forms-but by its modes of writing and performance, which are ad hoc, improvisatory, and situational. Nelson looks at anonymous devotional and love poems that circulated in manuscripts of practical, religious, and literary material or were embedded in popular, courtly, and liturgical works. For her, the poems' abilities to participate in multiple modes of transmission are "lyric tactics," responsive and contingent modes of practice that emerge in opposition to institutional or poetic norms. Working across the three languages of medieval England (English, French, and Latin), Nelson examines the tactics of poetic voice in the trilingual texts of British Library MS Harley 2253, which contains the well-known English "Harley lyrics." In a study of the English hymns and French lyrics of the commonplace book of William Herebert, she unearths the moral implications of lyric tactics for the friars who produced and disseminated them. And last, she examines the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and shows how his introduction of Continental poetic forms such as the balade and the rondeau suggests continuity with rather than a break from earlier English lyric. Combining literary analysis, manuscript studies, and cultural history with modern social theory, Ingrid Nelson demonstrates that medieval lyric poetry formed a crucial part of the fabric of later medieval English society.

Whilst T.S. Eliot's status as a canonical modernist poet is secure, his legacy remains the subject of much critical debate. Gott examines Eliot's 'The Waste Land' (1922) in conjunction with Gustave Flaubert's 'La Tentation de Saint Antoine' (1874). He provides a highly original reading of both texts and argues that a stylistic affinity exists between the two works, which derives from the authors' shared fascination for the ascetic saint.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

This is Volume XI of thirteen the Oriental series looking at Persia. The Shahnama of Firdausi Vol VIII, includes the Sasanian dynasty, and the Shah's last years, Hurmuzd son of Nushirwan, Khusrau Parwiz, including the story of Shirin.

First Published in 2000. This is Volume XII of thirteen the Oriental series looking at Persia. The Shahnama of Firdausi Vol IX, includes the Sasanian Dynasty, Kubad, Ardshir, Guraz, Purandukht, Azarmdukht, Farrukhzad, and Yazdagird.

It is impossible to appreciate poetry fully without some knowledge of the various aspects of poetic technique. First published in 1953, with a second edition in 1982, this title explains all the usual technical terms in an accessible manner. Marjorie Boulton shows that it is possible to approach a poem from a business-like perspective without losing enjoyment. This reissue will be of particular value to students as well as those with a general interest in the specifics of poetry.

The Bridge of Dreams is a brilliant reading of The Tale of Genji that succeeds both as a sophisticated work of literary criticism and as an introduction this world masterpiece. Taking account of current literary theory and a long tradition of Japanese commentary, the author guides both the general reader and the specialist to a new appreciation of the structure and poetics of this complex and often seemingly baffling work. The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century by a court lady, Murasaki Shikibu, is Japan's most outstanding work of prose fiction. Though bearing a striking resemblance to the modern psychological novel, the Genji was not conceived and written as a single work and then published and distributed to a mass audience as novels are today. Instead, it was issued in limited installments, sequence by sequence, to an extremely circumscribed, aristocratic audience. This study discusses the growth and evolution of the Genji and the manner in which recurrent concerns-political, social, and religious-are developed, subverted, and otherwise transformed as the work evolves from one stage to another. Throughout, the author analyzes the Genji in the context of those literary works and conventions that Murasaki explicitly or implicitly presupposed her contemporary audience to know, and reveals how the Genji works both within and against the larger literary and sociopolitical tradition. The book contains a color frontispiece by a seventeenth-century artist and eight pages of black-and-white illustrations from a twelfth-century scroll. Two appendixes present an analysis of biographical and textual problems and a detailed index of principal characters.

In a provocative take on Germanic heroic poetry, Taranu reads texts like Beowulf, Maldon, and the Waltharius as participating in alternative modes of history-writing that functioned in a larger ecology of narrative forms, including Latinate Christian history and the biblical epic. These modes employed the conceit of their participating in a tradition of oral verse for a variety of purposes: from political propaganda to constructing origin myths for early medieval nationhood or heroic masculinity, and sometimes for challenging these paradigms. The more complex of these historical visions actively meditated on their own relationship to truthfulness and fictionality while also performing sophisticated (and often subversive) cultural and socio-emotional work for its audiences. By rethinking canonical categories of historiographical discourse from within medieval textual productions, Vernacular Verse Histories in Early Medieval England and Francia: The Bard and the Rag-Picker aims to recover a part of the wide array of narrative poetic forms through which medieval communities made sense of their past and structured their socio-emotional experience.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature. Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty . . . -- Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

@text: This collection of applies significant critical approaches to the mythological poetry of the Poetic Edda, a principal source for Old Norse cosmography and the legends of Odin, Loki, and Thor. It also provides useful introductions that sketch the critical history of the Eddas. By applying new theoretical approaches (feminist, structuralist, post-structuralist) to each of the major poems, this book yields a variety of powerful and convincing readings. An essential collection of scholarship for any Old Norse course, The Poetic Edda will also be of interest to scholars of Indo-European myth, as well as those who study the theory of myth

This is Volume IX of thirteen the Oriental series looking at Persia. The Shahnama of Firdausi Vol VI, includes the genealogical table of the Sasanians, the conclusion of the Kaianian dynasty, the Eaianian dynasty, the Ashkanian dynasty and the Sasanian dynasty, concluding iwth Yazdagird, son of Shapur.

First Published in 2000. This is Volume IX of fourteen of a series on India- its language and literature. Written in 1926, The Spirit of Oriental Poetry includes the author's account of his journeys in search of 'His Footprints'.

First Published in 2000. This is Volume VI of thirteen the Oriental series looking at Persia. The Shahnama of Firdausi Vol III, includes the Kaianian Dynasty, The Story of Farud, of Kamus of Kashan, of Rustam, and finally Bizhan and Manizha.

First published in 2000. This is Volume I of fourteen of a series on India- its language and literature. Collated in 1886, this is a collection of Indian and Oriental poems, songs and two books from the 'Iliad of India'.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the past century, scholars have observed a veritable full cast of characters from Roman comedy in the poetry of Catullus. Despite this growing recognition of comedy's allusive presence in Catullus' work, there has never been an extended analysis of how he engaged with this foundational Roman genre. This book sketches a more coherent picture of Catullus' use of Roman comedy and shows that individual points of contact with the theatre in his corpus are part of a larger, more sustained poetic program than has been recognized. Roman comedy, it argues, offered Catullus a common cultural vocabulary, drawn from the public stage and shared with his audience, with which to explore and convey private ideas about love, friendship, and social rivalry. It also demonstrates that Roman comedy continued to present writers after the second century BCE with a meaningful source of social, cultural, and artistic value.

First published in 1991, Romantic Ecology reassesses the poetry of William Wordsworth in the context of the abiding pastoral tradition in English Literature. Jonathan Bate explores the politics of poetry and argues that contrary to critics who suggest that the Wordsworth was a reactionary who failed to represent the harsh economic reality of his native Lake District, the poet's politics were fundamentally 'green'. As our first truly ecological poet, Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature which exercised a formative influence on later conservation movements and is of immediate relevance to great environmental issues today. Challenging the orthodoxies of new historicist criticism, Jonathan Bate sets a new agenda for the study of Romanticism in the 1990s.

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author's ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes's poetic process. Hughes's extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book's unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes's techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes's changing ideas about how poetry 'ought' to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes's major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes's poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century's most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. EAch volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

The essays in this edited collection look at the role of poetry in the development of enlightenment ideas. As scholarly disciplines began to emerge - anthropology, linguistics, psychology - the ancient and innate art of poetry was invoked to create new ways of communicating this philosophy of human science.