Introducing students to the full range of approaches to the study of Renaissance poetry that they are likely to encounter in their course of study, Perspectives on Renaissance Poetry is an authoritative and accessible guide to the verse of the Early Modern period. Each chapter covers a major figure in Early Modern poetry and explores two different poems from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including: - Classical - Formalist - Psychoanalytic - Marxist - Structuralist - Reader-response - New Historicist - Ecocritical - Multicultural Poets covered include: Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Anne Vaughan Lock, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, Martha Moulsworth, Lady Mary Wroth, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, John Milton and Katherine Philips.

"Othello "has long been, and remains, one of Shakespeare's most popular works. It is a favourite work of scholars, students, and general readers alike. Perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies, this one seems to speak most clearly to contemporary readers and audiences, partly because it deals with such pressing modern issues as race, gender, multiculturalism, and the ways love, jealousy, and misunderstanding can affect relations between romantic partners. The play also features Iago, one of Shakespeare's most mesmerizing and puzzling villains. This guide offers students and scholars an introduction to the play's critical and performance history, including notable stage productions and film versions. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further research.

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook is an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive introduction to English literature in the seventeenth century. It provides a one-stop resource for literature students, with the essential information and guidance needed at the beginning of a course through to the development of more advanced knowledge and skills. It includes: - introductions to authors, texts and contexts- guides to key critics, concepts and topics- an overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research - case studies in reading literary and critical texts- an annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for students beginning their study of seventeenth-century literature.>

Introducing students to the full range of critical approachesto the poetry of the period, Perspectives on World War I Poetry is an authoritative and accessible guide to the extraordinary variety of international poetic responses to the Great War of 1914-18. Each chapter covers one or more major poets, and guides the reader through close readings of poems from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including: . Classical . Formalist . Psychoanalytic . Marxist . Structuralist . Reader-response . New Historicist . Feminist Including the full text of each poem discussed and poetry from British, North American and Commonwealth writers, the book explores the work of such poets as: Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, Alys Fane Trotter, Eva Dobell, Charlotte Mew, John McCrae, Edward Thomas, Eleanor Farjeon, Margaret Sackville, Sara Teasdale, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Teresa Hooley, Isaac Rosenberg, Leon Gellert, Marian Allen, Vera Brittain, Margaret Postgate Cole, Wilfred Owen, E.E. Cummings and David Jones.

A survey, within one volume, of the history of critical responses to LGBTQ literature from the beginning to the present day, this book explores changes in attitudes, literature and criticism over a period of two and a half thousand years. For various reasons it focuses on literature of ‘the West’, trying to give readers a clear sense, within a relatively short compass, not only of the development of ‘queer’ literature (perhaps the most encompassing of all terms) but especially of critical responses to that literature, notably during the past century and particularly the past fifty years. All in all, this book offers a roadmap to much of the excellent scholarship concerning LGBTQ literature that has arisen in the last half-century – an era of unparalleled interest in the topic and an era that has moved the topic from the distant sidelines of literary study to a place ever closer to the center of things.

Philip Larkin is widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the 20th century. As such, there is a vast amount of literary criticism surrounding his work. This Readers' Guide provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the key reactions to Larkin's poetry. Using a chronological structure, Robert C. Evans charts critical responses to Larkin's work from his arrival on the British literary scene in the 1950s to the decades after his death. This includes analyses of critical material from around the world, making this an excellent guide for all students of Larkin.

Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668-1723) is an intriguing poet who wrote a great deal of poetry during a period when women poets were relatively rare. Her career also began at an astonishingly early age: she was barely fourteen years old when one of her poems was first printed in London. Throughout much of her life Egerton used poetry to share her thoughts, vent her feelings, and participate, to a highly unusual degree, in the public discourse of her times. The Female Advocate is perhaps her most famous single work. It was her very first publication and was printed three times in her own lifetime"in 1686, in a revised edition in 1687 and once more in 1707. The original 1686 edition is included in this volume along with the third edition of 1707, which is very rare. Alongside The Female Advocate in this volume is Egerton's Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral. This is a diverse volume with no obvious pattern or design but which includes many poems which display real talent and can express surprisingly assertive or unexpected views, suggesting the volume deserves far more analytical attention than it has yet received.

Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668-1723) is an intriguing poet who wrote a great deal of poetry during a period when women poets were relatively rare. Her career also began at an astonishingly early age: she was barely fourteen years old when one of her poems was first printed in London. Throughout much of her life Egerton used poetry to share her thoughts, vent her feelings, and participate, to a highly unusual degree, in the public discourse of her times. The Female Advocate is perhaps her most famous single work. It was her very first publication and was printed three times in her own lifetime"in 1686, in a revised edition in 1687 and once more in 1707. The original 1686 edition is included in this volume along with the third edition of 1707, which is very rare. Alongside The Female Advocate in this volume is Egerton's Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral. This is a diverse volume with no obvious pattern or design but which includes many poems which display real talent and can express surprisingly assertive or unexpected views, suggesting the volume deserves far more analytical attention than it has yet received.

Jane Barker (1652-1732) is increasingly being recognised as one of the most important English women writers of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. The author of both poems and novels (including novels containing numerous poems), Barker was largely ignored for many years but has recently been the subject of intense interest and investigation. Despite this, no complete, collected edition of Barker's poems has yet appeared, and the present volume is the first reproduction of her important early published volume, Poetical Recreations, to be issued in facsimile as a printed book (rather than on microfilm). Jane Barker's life was rich in incident. Her early poetry was enthusiastically advocated by the male students at St. John's College, Cambridge. A persecuted Catholic and a subsequent longtime exiled supporter of the Jacobite cause in France following the 'Bloodless Revolution', she was also physically disabled and without great financial means, in part because she never married. Almost certainly her decision to begin publishing novels was motivated, on some level, by financial need. By the time she died, in March 1732, at the age of seventy-nine, she had lived a life that had been long, eventful, and accomplished, but by no means easy.

This volume reproduces twenty short texts written by named and unnamed women in the years 1641-1700. These texts, selected and introduced by various hands, are grouped in thematic clusters for the reader's ease - poetry on religion, on politics, on society, on domestic/social affairs and on mourning. The poems are arranged chronologically within each cluster. The volume closes with Anne Wentworth's pamphlet England's Spiritual Pill.

An Collins' Divine Songs and Meditacions were first printed in a small octavo volume in London in 1653. The only extant copy is presently held at The Huntington Library and it is, therefore, this copy that is reproduced in this facsimile edition. It is an important text because it is one of the earliest volumes of collected poems by an English woman in the seventeenth century. The poems are especially intriguing because of the glimpses they provide into the life and mind of a woman writer during this period and because of the social, political, historical and religious contexts in which they are embedded. The precise identity of An Collins' remains a mystery, and scholars have had to rely on the Divine Songs and Meditacions for most of their understanding of its author, often drawing very different conclusions about her religious, social and political beliefs. To date critics have focused on the biographical and historical interest of the poems, but as Robert Evans highlights in his Introductory Note to the volume, these works also exhibit a rhetorical power and skill that merits further attention.

Born Alice Clarke, the daughter of Oxford university's 'first director of printing', Alicia D'Anvers' poetry demonstrates an intimate familiarity with Oxford and especially with the workings of the press. This volume reproduces three works: A Poem Upon His Sacred Majesty, His Voyage for Holland (1691), Academia: or, the Humours of the University of Oxford in Burlesque Verse (1691), and The Oxford-Act: A Poem (1693). A Poem Upon His Sacred Majesty... responds to William III's decision to visit his native Holland to negotiate with fellow Protestants about their conflict with Catholic France. William, often impatient with English political wrangling, sometimes hinted that he might abdicate and return to Holland. D'Anvers' poem reflects real anxieties about such an event, as well as solid support for the Protestant king. The copy reproduced in this edition is from the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Academia and The Oxford-Act concern more local matters. Probably D'Anvers' best poem, Academia satirises some of Oxford University's 'younger sort', often adopting language that seems as rough and coarse as that of the men that she mocks. The Oxford-Act focuses on the annual university 'Act' or commencement ceremony which lasted for several days and included many rituals. The copy reproduced here is from The Huntington Library. The copy of Academia is reproduced from that held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

This volume, the ninth in the series of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, presents newly edited critical texts of 25 love lyrics. Based on an exhaustive study of the manuscripts and printed editions in which these poems have appeared, Volume 4.2 details the genealogical history of each poem, accompanied by a thorough prose discussion, as well as a General Textual Introduction of the Songs and Sonets collectively. The volume also presents a comprehensive digest of the commentary on these Songs and Sonets from Donne's time through 1999. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material for each poem is organized under various headings that complement the volume's companions, Volume 4.1 and Volume 4.3.

The first chronological overview of O'Connor criticism from the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952 to the present. Flannery O'Connor is one of the most widely read, discussed, and taught of all American authors. She is immensely popular with students, general readers, and literary critics. Her work, often characterized as "Southern Gothic," betrays in its focus on morality her devout Roman Catholic faith even as it displays a wicked sense of humor. She has been the subject of numerous articles and books, and indeed an entire journal devoted to her writings has existedfor decades. There is not, however, any chronological overview of the history of O'Connor criticism. The present volume fills that very conspicuous gap. It is the sort of book that practically every college and university library,as well as many public libraries, will need to own, and it will appeal not only to scholars and students but to non-academic readers of O'Connor, whose numbers are legion. A particular value of the book is that it synthesizes criticism and commentary that is now only available in individual essays that are widely scattered. Robert C. Evans is Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery. Among his many books is Critical Insights: ShortFiction of Flannery O'Connor (2016).

"Othello "has long been, and remains, one of Shakespeare's most popular works. It is a favourite work of scholars, students, and general readers alike. Perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies, this one seems to speak most clearly to contemporary readers and audiences, partly because it deals with such pressing modern issues as race, gender, multiculturalism, and the ways love, jealousy, and misunderstanding can affect relations between romantic partners. The play also features Iago, one of Shakespeare's most mesmerizing and puzzling villains. This guide offers students and scholars an introduction to the play's critical and performance history, including notable stage productions and film versions. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further research.

Censored & Banned Literature examines the wide range of important literary texts that have been subjected to censorship, either at the time of their first publication, later in their history, or both. Because important works frequently offer challenging responses to social, historical, and political issues, often it is the very best works that provoke – at least initially – the most hostility or discomfort. This volume includes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1884), The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger (1951) and Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987).

Philip Larkin is widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the 20th century. As such, there is a vast amount of literary criticism surrounding his work. This Readers' Guide provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the key reactions to Larkin's poetry. Using a chronological structure, Robert C. Evans charts critical responses to Larkin's work from his arrival on the British literary scene in the 1950s to the decades after his death. This includes analyses of critical material from around the world, making this an excellent guide for all students of Larkin.

Introducing students to the full range of approaches to the study of Renaissance poetry that they are likely to encounter in their course of study, Perspectives on Renaissance Poetry is an authoritative and accessible guide to the verse of the Early Modern period. Each chapter covers a major figure in Early Modern poetry and explores two different poems from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including: - Classical - Formalist - Psychoanalytic - Marxist - Structuralist - Reader-response - New Historicist - Ecocritical - Multicultural Poets covered include: Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Anne Vaughan Lock, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, Martha Moulsworth, Lady Mary Wroth, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, John Milton and Katherine Philips.

This is a one-stop resource offering complete textbook for courses in seventeenth-century literature - progressing from introductory topics through to overviews of current research. ??i??The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook??i?? is an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive introduction to English literature in the seventeenth century. It provides a one-stop resource for literature students, with the essential information and guidance needed at the beginning of a course through to the development of more advanced knowledge and skills. It includes: introductions to authors, texts and contexts; guides to key critics, concepts and topics; an overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research; case studies in reading literary and critical texts- an annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for students beginning their study of seventeenth-century literature. ??i??Literature and Culture Handbooks??i?? are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills.

This book presents a comprehensive digest of general and topical commentary on John Donne's Songs and Sonets from the early 17th century through 1999. Arranged chronologically within sections, the material in the present volume is organized under the following chapter headings: General Commentary; Autobiography and Persona; Critical Reception; Dating, Publication History, and Manuscript Tradition; Donne's Originality: Praise and Blame; Dramatic Elements; T. S. Eliot; Imagery; Language and Rhetoric; Love and Sexual Imagery; Mannerism and Baroque; Medievalism; Paradox; Petrarchism; Platonism; Psychological Analysis; Religion; Science and the New Learning; Versification; Wit and Metaphysical Conceit; Women. This book was begun under the direction of Albert C. Labriola, who served as the Volume Commentary Editor until his death in March 2009. Completed by his students and colleagues with the Variorum project, the volume is dedicated to Professor Labriola's memory.