This book reads Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a poem that seeks to educate its readers by narrating the education of its main characters. Many of Milton's characters enter the action in late adolescence, newly independent and eager to test themselves, to discover who they are and their place in the world. The poem charts their progress into moral adulthood. Taking as its premise that attention to the moral development of the poem's main characters will open the poem to most undergraduate readers, this book explores both the pedagogical activity within "Paradise Lost" and the pedagogical activity that the poem encourages.

Juan Ruiz's "Libro de Buen Amor" (1330/1343) is a lively and challenging medieval classic that ranks alongside the works of Dante and Chaucer. This volume is the first to systematically approach the role of humor in the "Libro de Buen Amor "through the treatment of the body, the visual, and the representation of first-person protagonist as lover. Haywood examines the place of the bawdy and the grotesque in the "Libro de Buen Amor" in relation to secular and sacred culture. This innovative study will be of interest to scholars and students interested in humor, cultural domains, medieval studies, and Spanish studies.

Occasioned by the spirit of celebrating Keats's 200th birthday (31 October 1995), Jeffrey C. Robinson's Reception and Poetics in Keats offers at once a history and readings of the many praise and commemorative poems to or about Keats (collected in an appendix) from the time of his early death up to the present day and a consequent rethinking of Keats's own poems and poetics. Keats emerges as a poet uniquely available and useful to the experimental poets of our own time.

This is the first full-length psychoanalytic study of Shelley's poetry, approaching it from the viewpoint of contemporary Jungian analytical psychology that incorporates the theories of Melanie Klein and D.W.Winnicott. The author uses materials that relate to the earliest stages of the ego's development, going back beyond the Oedipal to pre-Oedipal situation. The book is designed to be of interest to lovers of Shelley as well as feminist readers who want to know how pre-Oedipal images of the mother can profoundly affect literature. Christine Gallant is editor of "Coleridge's Theory of Imagination Today" (AMS Press 1988) and "Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos" (Princeton UP, 1978).

Ted Hughes's South Yorkshire tells the untold story of Hughes's Mexborough period (1938-1951) and demonstrates conclusively that Hughes's experiences in South Yorkshire in town and country, educationally, in literature and love were decisive in forming him as the poet of his subsequent fame.

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.

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.

What have we learned from the first experiments performed at the reconstructed Globe on Bankside? What light have recent productions shed on the way Shakespeare intended his plays to be seen? Written by the Leverhulme Fellow appointed to study and record actor use of this new-old playhouse, here is the first analytical account of the discoveries that have been made in its important first years, in workshops, rehearsals and performances. It shows how actors, directors and playgoers have responded to the demands of 'historical' constraints (and unexpected freedoms) to provide valuable new insights into the dynamics of Elizabethan theatre.

Destabilizing Milton challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty. In Paradise Lost , Milton confronts the failure of the Revolution by creating a poem that refuses to grant the reader any interpretive stability or certainty. Doubts can no longer be contained and concepts once marked by a 'fundamental immobility' now seem unstable at best. Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes equally reflect Milton's deep ambivalences after the collapse of the Republic. Far from confirming his earlier ideals, in his later poetry, Milton subjects his culture's most cherished beliefs, such as the goodness of God, to withering scrutiny, while refusing the comfort of orthodox answers.

Drawing from a broad range of contemporary British poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Kathleen Jamie, and Alice Oswald, this study examines the inherently spatial and affective nature of our engagement with poetry. Adding to the expanding field of geocritical studies, Yeung specifically discusses ideas of space and constructions of voice in poetry.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the divergence or convergence of freedom and terror in a range of Byron's works. Challenging the binary opposition of historicism and critical theory, it combines topical debates in a manner that is sensitive both to the circumstances of their emergence and to their relevance for the twenty-first century.

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.

On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosts what he refers to in his diaries and autobiography as the immortal dinner. He wants to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate with his friends his progress on his most important historical painting so far, Christ s Entry into Jerusalem, in which Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb, also a guest at the party, appear. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolves into a lively, raucous evening. This legendary event will prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals.

A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening takes this dinner as a lens through which to understand their lives and work and to contemplate the immortality of genius."

Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative is a study of the varying relationships between verse and prose in a series of Old Norse-Icelandic saga narratives. It shows how the interplay of skaldic verse, with its metrical intricacy and cryptic diction, and saga prose, with its habitual spare clarity, can be used to achieve a wide variety of sophisticated stylistic and psychological effects. In sagas, there is a fundamental distinction between verses which are ostensibly quoted to corroborate what is stated in the narrative, and verses which are presented as the speech of characters in the saga. Corroborative verses are typical of, but not confined to, historical writings, the verses acting as a footnote to the narrative. Dialogue verses, with their illusion that saga characters break into verse at crucial points in the story, belong to the realm of fiction. This study, which focuses on historical writings such as Agrip and Heimskringla, and three of the major family sagas, Eyrbyggja saga, Gisla saga and Grettis saga, shows that a close reading of the prosimetrum in the narrative can be used to chart the complex and delicate boundaries between history and fiction in the sagas. When skaldic stanzas are presented as the dialogue of saga characters, the characteristic naturalism of these narratives is breached. But some saga authors, as this book shows, extend still further the expressiveness of saga narrative, presenting skaldic stanzas as the soliloquies of saga characters. This technique enables the direct articulation of emotion, and hence dramatic focalization of the narrative and the creation of psychological climaxes. As an epilogue, Heather O'Donoghue considers the absence ofsuch effects in Hrafnkels saga--a highly literary narrative without verses.

From the publication of his first major volume in 1946, "Lord Weary's Castle, " to a few years before his death in 1977, Robert Lowell held sway as the premier English-language poet of his time. "Lord Weary's Castle" seemed to push poetic language and cultural critique in exciting new directions, yet they were directions sanctioned by the New Criticism of his time. In 1959, Lowell's "Life Studies" dramatically broke the very traditions he had previously revitalized. During the 1960s, his works elaborated his new poetic mode and engaged with personal, political, and historical issues. But with the 1973 publication of his poetic trilogy, "History, For Lizzie and Harriet, " and "The Dolphin, " his reputation suffered. Though his final work, the autobiographical "Day by Day"--published shortly before his death in 1977--was favorably received, critics continued to attack him in the decades that followed.

Thus Lowell's reputation, as this volume makes clear, has fluctuated, and at the close of the twentieth century, there is still no critical consensus about any aspect of his work. This book provides a representative sample of the critical discourse concerning Lowell's poetry, drama, and prose, and shows that discourse at its most varied and vital. An introductory essay surveys the response to Lowell's writings. The first three sections then track Lowell's volumes chronologically. Most of his books receive one or two reviews followed by several scholarly essays, arranged in the order of their publication. Along with the reprinted articles are two essays written specifically for this volume. The fourth section presents several broad overviews of Lowell and his works, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources concludes the book. The volume also contains an essay by Lowell himself, in which he reflects on his career.

This classic edition of Donne's Divine Poems contains an extensive and invaluable critical apparatus by Helen Gardner.

This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius. Simpson highlights the centrality of the minstrel to many important literary developments from the Romantic era through to the 1840s.

Taking as its starting point Delmore Schwartz's self-appointment as both a 'poet of the Hudson River' and 'laureate of the Atlantic, ' this book comprehensively reassesses the poetic achievement of a critically neglected writer. Runchman reads Schwartz's poetry in relation to its national and international perspectives

Like Paris in the '20s, Berlin in the early thirties was one of the most exciting cities in the world. As the Weimar Republic sputtered to a close and war loomed on the horizon, the city was a magnet for talented writers and artists. It was in this now-vanished time and place that W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood lived, wrote and slept together. Norman Page tells the story of how these years shaped these important writers and, in doing so, illuminates a bygone era.

This is the first full-length study of the extraordinary period of intense poetic activity in Belfast known as the Ulster Renaissance - a time when young Northern Irish poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, and Paul Muldoon began crafting their art, and tuning their voices through each other. Drawing extensively upon new archival material, as well as personal interviews and correspondence, The Ulster Renaissance argues that these poets' friendships and rivalries were crucial to their autonomous artistic development. The book also sheds new light on the idea of a collaborative Belfast coterie - often treated derisively by critics - and shows that the poets frequently engaged in efforts to promote a cohesive 'Northern' literary community, distinct from that which existed in London and Dublin. It suggests that it was this cohesion - at turns inclusive and confining - which ultimately challenged the Belfast poets to find their individual voices.

Frances Harper was renowned in her lifetime not only as an activist who rallied on behalf of blacks, women, and the poor, but as a pioneer of the tradition of 'protest' literature, whose immense popularity did much to develop an audience for poetry in America. This collection of her poems is drawn from ten volumes published between 1854 and 1901. Their main issues are oppression, Christianity, and social and moral reform. Consolidating the oral tradition and the ballad form, and merging dramatic details and imagery with a strong political and racial awareness, Harper's poetry represented a distinctly Afro-American discourse that was to inspire generations of black writers.

In her provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin discovers the connection between the language of love poetry and the rhetoric of hate speech that culminated in the genocides of World War II. The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, and Adrienne Rich) to the mid-century catastrophes that reveal unexpected links between poetry and war. Through close readings of individual poems, Estrin counters the presupposition that the lyric remains apolitical. She explores the prevalent influence of the traditional forms that all three poets simultaneously use and revise as they render the love lyric responsive to the cultural agonies of the postwar era.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) has often been considered a particularly British writer in part as his official post as Poet Laureate inevitably committed him to a certain amount of patriotic writing. This volume focuses on his impact on the continent, presenting a major scholarly analysis of Tennyson's wider reception in different areas of Europe. It considers reader and critical responses and explores the effect of his poetry upon his contemporaries and later writers, as well as his influence upon illustrators, painters and musicians. The leading international contributors raise questions of translation and publication and of the choices made for this purpose along with the way in which his ideas and style influenced European writing and culture. Tennyson's reputation in Anglophone countries is now assured, following a decline in the years after his death. This volume enables us to chart the changes in Tennyson's European reputation during the later 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

This revised and updated edition of a Ted Hughes annotated, descriptive bibliography includes a new section recording over 1000 of his manuscripts.