Marvell and Liberty is a collection of original essays by leading scholars which treats this major poet in an entirely new light. Uniquely, it gives equal attention to the full range of Marvell's writings. Marvell is a writer deeply implicated in the history of his time, and as the essays in this volume show, also exercised a potent political influence after his death. Marvell and Liberty constitutes a major reassessment of a figure who lived much of his life close to the epicentre of the revolutionary upheavals of the seventeenth century.

"Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason" examines Coleridge's understanding of the Pantheism Controversy - the crisis of reason in German philosophy - and reveals the context informing Coleridge's understanding of German thinkers. It challenges previous accounts of Coleridge's philosophical engagements, forcing a reconsideration of his reading of figures such as Schelling, Jacobi and Spinoza. This exciting new study establishes the central importance of the contested status of reason for Coleridge's poetry, accounts of the imagination and later religious thought.

Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry illuminates the dynamic mutual influences of poetic and translation cultures in Victorian Britain, drawing on new materials, archival and periodical, to reveal the range of thinking about translation in the era. The results are a new account of Victorian translation and fresh readings both of canonical poems (including those by Browning and Tennyson) and of non-canonical poems (including those by Michael Field). Revealing Victorian poets to be crucial agents of intercultural negotiation in an era of empire, Annmarie Drury shows why and how meter matters so much to them, and locates the origins of translation studies within Victorian conundrums. She explores what it means to 'sound Victorian' in twentieth-century poetic translation, using Swahili as a case study, and demonstrates how and why it makes sense to consider Victorian translation as world literature in action.

'The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day ...' Thomas Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' has been loved and admired throughout the centuries. First circulated to a select group of friends, it was rushed to official publication in 1751 in order to avoid pirated copies being sold without the young poet's permission. Praised by Samuel Johnson, reprinted over and over again in Gray's lifetime and recited by generations of school children, it is one of the most famous poems in the English language. This edition reproduces the exquisite wood engravings made by Agnes Miller Parker in 1938. Parker visited the churchyard at St Giles, Stoke Poges, where the poem is set, in order to make her sketches, and all thirty-two stanzas of the poem are accompanied by detailed full-page illustrations. Commemorating the 250th anniversary of the poet's death, this edition will not only bring new readers to the 'Elegy' but will also appeal to those already familiar with its riches.

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.

Body Narratives deals with changing body configurations in the literature and culture of sixteenth-century England. It investigates the relationship between disciplinary discourses of the human body and political body imagery in the texts of courtly writers like Spenser, Sidney, Ralegh, and others, and traces its interdependence in their narratives of national identity, imperial expansion, and gender difference.

Jay Parini (b. 1948), is best known for The Last Station, a novel about Leo Tolstoy's last year has been translated into more than twenty-five languages and made into a Hollywood film. But he has also published numerous volumes of poetry; biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and John Steinbeck; novels; and literary and cultural criticism. This book contains the most important interviews with the former Guggenheim fellow; a former Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford; and a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of London. Parini's work is valuable not just because of its high quality and intellectual range. Parini's life and writings often seem like a seminar table, with friends gathered, talking and trading stories. He has openly written poems in conversation with writers he knew personally: Robert Penn Warren, Gore Vidal, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He has, in his own life, kept an ongoing conversation with many literary friends over the years--Alastair Reid, Seamus Heaney, Anne Stevenson, Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez, Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, and countless others. These interviews offer a more comprehensive understanding of Parini's work as a poet, scholar, public intellectual, literary critic, intellectual historian, biographer, novelist, and biographical novelist. More importantly, these interviews will contribute to our understanding of the history of ideas, the condition of knowledge, and the state of literature, all of which Parini has played an important role in shaping. MICHAEL LACKEY, Morris, Minnesota, is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is the author of African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith and The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis' Christian Reich as well as numerous articles in journals.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

From his work editing "Wordsworth's Juvenile Poetry (1785-1790)," Duncan Wu came to understand that much of the content of the poet's later great work drew on early childhood experiences, particularly delayed mourning arising from his parents' deaths. This original study is the first fully to investigate the impact of this formative experience on Wordsworth's poetry and to integrate it into a critical account of how his art developed from 1787 to 1813. In doing so it seeks to explain the importance of Wordsworth's great epic, "The Recluse," to his work as a whole, and looks at how some of it got written and why it was left unfinished at his death.

The book includes 20 illustrations from original notebooks retained by the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, and, among its numerous discoveries, presents the first annotated reading text of The "White Doe of Rylstone" (1808) with its important 'Advertizement'. Written in an accessible manner, this revealing study will be of great interest to students and researchers of Wordsworth's poetry.

Taking into account recent developments in historical and ecological criticism, and incorporating fresh research into poetry and politics in the 1790s, the second edition of The Politics of Nature enlarges and updates Nicholas Roe's acclaimed study of Romanticism. Hitherto marginal figures are restored to prominence, and there is new material on William Wordsworth's radical years. The book includes the full text of John Thelwall's Essay on Animal Vitality with commentary, exploring how ideas of nature revolution and radical science were entwined.

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 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.

This book examines the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and traces its impact on modernist poetics. This study shows that the most pervasive East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchange that has taken place in modern and postmodern times was in the reading and writing of haiku in the West. Hakutani roots Y.B Yeats' symbolism in cross cultural visions; reveals Ezra Pound's imagism to have originated in haiku; and discusses some of the finest haiku written by Jack Kerouac, Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel.

"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"--