The seventh instalment in the Poet's Chair series, it is Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's tenure as Ireland's Professor of Poetry that provides the pretext for this book, a collection of three essays exploring the forces that affect the work of every practising poet. The first essay pays tribute to a valued friend and colleague of Ni Chuilleanain's, the late Pearse Hutchinson, as well as to the languages he used and the impact they had even on readers that did not fully understand them. The second looks at the response of the reader of poetry and at the often disparaging treatment of the poet in fiction, from P. G. Wodehouse to Flann O'Brien. In the third lecture, Ni Chuilleanain returns to her lifelong academic interest in the poetry of seventeenth-century England and calls on the work of poets as diverse as Bishop Henry King, Walt Whitman and Thomas Kinsella to explore poetry's relation to the ceremonies surrounding death in how it may both comment on and substitute for ritual. Elegantly designed and masterfully written, Instead of a Shrine offers a unique opportunity to return to - or, indeed, begin engaging with - the dynamic world of poetry.

Dublin: Renaissance city of literature interrogates the notion of a literary 'renaissance' in Dublin. Through detailed case studies of print and literature in Renaissance Dublin, the volume covers innovative new ground, including quantitative analysis of print production in Ireland, unique insight into the city's literary communities and considerations of literary genres that flourished in early modern Dublin. The volume's broad focus and extended timeline offer an unprecedented and comprehensive consideration of the features of renaissance that may be traced to the city from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. With contributions from leading scholars in the area of early modern Ireland, including Raymond Gillespie and Andrew Hadfield, students and academics will find the book an invaluable resource for fully appreciating those elements that contributed to the complex literary character of Dublin as a Renaissance city of literature. -- .

English literature from Chaucer to Milton was produced in a culture where accusations of heresy were frequently made, and where the meaning of orthodoxy was unsettled. The essays in this book show the ways in which ideas about heresy and orthodoxy had their impact, sometimes fatally, on writers. The various movements - Lollardy, Bible Protestantism, Calvinist orthodoxy, and antinomian heresy - produced vital, often eloquent or satiric, writing from all sides in the recurring debates. The literary genres - where these issues are important - include autobiography, romance, history, theology, drama, and poetry.