Prolific, popular and critically acclaimed, Michael Moorcock is the most important British fantasy author of his generation. His Elric of Melnibone is an iconic figure for millions of fans but Moorcock has also been a pioneer in science fiction and historical fiction. He was hailed as the central figure of the ""New Wave"" in science fiction, and has won numerous awards for his fantasy and science fiction, as well as his ""mainstream"" writing. This first full-length critical look at Moorcock's career, from the early 1960s to the present, explores the author's fictional multiverse: his fantasy tales of the ""Eternal Champion""; his experimental Jerry Cornelius novels; his hilarious science-fiction satire of his ""End of Time"" books; and his complex meditations on 20th-century history of Mother London and the Colonel Pyat tetralogy.

Robert Toombs of Georgia stands as one of the most fiery and influential politicians of the nineteenth century. Sarcastic, charming, egotistical, and gracious, he rose quickly from state office to congressman to senator in the decades before the Civil War. Though he sought sectional reconciliation throughout the 1840s and 1850s, he eventually became one of the South's most ardent secessionists. This thorough biography chronicles his days as a student and young lawyer in Georgia, his boisterous political career, his appointment as the Confederacy's first Secretary of State, his unsuccessful stint as a Confederate General, and his role as a proud, unreconstructed rebel after the war. A thorough exploration of Toombs' career reveals the political forces and political missteps that drove him--and men like him--to secede from the United States and form the Confederacy.

Swinburne was born in 1837 in London and spent his childhood on the Isle of Wight and in Northumberland. He attended Eton and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he became friends with the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti, Morris and Burne-Jones. Atalanta in Calydon was released in 1865 to considerable acclaim, but the following year his Poems and Ballads generated a firestorm of critical and public controversy on account of their licentiousness and anti-theism. His publisher withdrew the book within days of publication, and he was forced to transfer his works to another house. His next collection Songs Before Sunrise (1870), the plays Bothwell (1874) and Erectheus (1876), and the 1878 Poems and Ballads, Second Series were far more favourably received than the first Poems and Ballads had been. Swinburne was prodigiously active through the 1870s, but his personal life was in alarming disarray, and his alcoholic dissipation forecast an almost certain early grave. In 1879, he was `rescued’ by the lawyer and writer Theodore Watts-Dunton, who took him to a suburban retreat in Putney, weaned him from his drinking habit, and became his companion and de facto guardian for the rest of his life, which was productive and largely uneventful. He died in 1909. No Victorian poet suffered a more precipitous decline in reputation in the twentieth century than Swinburne. His formal and musical mastery, however, have never been denied, and more recent readers have found in his work a surprising precision of language and subtlety and complexity of thought. Our Lady of Pain is the first selection of Swinburne’s poetry to focus precisely on what early readers found most objectionable: erotic passion, in both its `normal’ and `perverse’ varieties. Swinburne’s treatment of physical passion, and the varieties of passion about which he chose to write, retain the power to shock. Swinburne’s early work explores same-sex desire, necrophilia, transexualism, and even bestiality, and throughout his writing is an obsession with the conjunction of `pleasure’ and `pain’. Included here are many of the most transgressive poems from Poems and Ballads, along with a selection of other works that make a strong argument for the Swinburne as the greatest nineteenth-century English poet of sexual desire.

Poetry. The poems of RED ARCADIA present a jittery, spasmodic--often obscured--series of moving x-ray images of contemporary culture in its frenetic contradictions, its self-destructiveness, and sometimes in its moments of fractured sublimity; a wobbly digicam portrait of the bewildered, mournful, and sometimes bemused subject caught in the rush of sounds and images, scrabbling through the levels of the city's palimpset/midden, checking his watch for the arrival of some heroic Captain Modernism."These sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued poems register damage, reading commodities or movies for us, out there in shopping malls or imaginary museums. They resolutely think through the world, half-scratched mordant footnotes to our political realities. They offer small consolation. This neatly organized book presents a poetry of ideas, then, but concocted by an intelligence unusually passionate, raw nerve-endings tingling with 57 varieties of ersatz. Mark Scroggins's ventriloquy--knowing, ironical, satirical--is the book's singular pleasure, its delicate likeness chiming in our ears with delight."--Robert Sheppard"Mark Scroggins practices a literature of contained excess, drawn from the welter of experience and its reflexive twin, theory. His poetry combines Benjaminian and Zukofskyan author functions, disclosing the cultural logics of distributed financialization through the method of materialist inversion. As it turns out, these condensed surfaces are identical to the ages' insights insofar as we could ever hope to live them. Consonantal lushness, vocalic variation, beautiful lineation, sublime contradiction are the predominant features of Scroggins's perverse constructivism. Poetry is thereby redeemed in its damaged finality."--Barrett Watten

In Intricate Thicket: Some Late Modernist Poetries, Mark Scroggins writes with wit and dash about a fascinating range of key twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets and writers. In nineteen lively and accessible essays, he persuasively argues that the innovations of modernist verse were not replaced by postmodernism, but rather those innovations continue to infuse contemporary writing and poetry with intellectual and aesthetic richness. In these essays, Scroggins reviews the legacy of Louis Zukofsky, delineates the exceptional influence of the Black Mountain poets, and provides close readings of a wealth of examples of poetic works from poets who have carried the modernist legacy into contemporary poetry. He traces with an insider's keen observation the careers of many of the most dynamic, innovative, and celebrated poets of the past half-century, among them Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ronald Johnson, Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, and Anne Carson. In a concluding pair of essays, Scroggins situates his own practice within the broad currents he has described. He reflects on his own aesthetics as a contemporary poet and, drawing on his extensive study and writing about Louis Zukofsky, examines the practical and theoretical challenges of literary biography. While the core of these essays is the interpretation of poetry, Scroggins also offers clear aesthetic evaluations of the successes and failures of the poetries he examines. Scroggins engages with complex and challenging works, and yet his highly accessible descriptions and criticisms avoid theoretical entanglements and specialized jargon. Intricate Thicket yields subtle and multifaceted insights to experts and newcomers alike.

Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, published first in 1967 and then in an expanded edition in 1981, was a definitive set of critical statements by Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings of Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others.
Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the "Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics.