|
Showing 1 - 11 of
11 matches in All Departments
This Reader's Guide charts the reception history of Ted Hughes'
poetry from his first to last published collection, culminating in
posthumous tributes and assessments of his lifetime achievement.
Sandie Byrne explores the criticism relating to key issues such as
nature, myth, the Laureateship, and Hughes' relationship with
Sylvia Plath.
Who owns, who buys, who gives, and who notices objects is always
significant in Austen's writing, placing characters socially and
characterizing them symbolically. Jane Austen's Possessions and
Dispossessions looks at the significance of objects in Austen's
major novels, fragments, and juvenilia.
Tony Harrison: Loiner is published to celebrate the poet and
playwright Tony Harrison's sixtieth birthday through an exploration
of his work, including his best-known poem v.. Harrison (1937- )
has been called `our best English poet', and has been awarded a
number of prizes for his poetry, including the Geoffrey Faber
Memorial Prize, the Royal Television Society Award, the Prix
Italia, and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. This book gives his
work the serious critical attention it merits, with essays from a
number of prominent contributors, including Richard Eyre and Melvyn
Bragg, and a foreword by Grey Gowrie. The collection ranges from
personal recollections of working with Tony Harrison and personal
responses to his poems, to detailed critical analyses of his
techniques and themes, covering Harrison's short poems and sonnet
sequence, his plays, his television poem-films, and his libretti,
spanning the years 1955-1997. A `loiner' is a native of Leeds,
where Tony Harrison was born and spent the early part of his life,
and from which he was dispossessed by the enforced translation of
the state scholarship system. The word also connotes other aspects
of Tony Harrison: the `loins' of his poetry-its energy and
physicality-and the `loners' who are its main protagonists-men and
women dispossessed of their class, nation, language, and identity.
At sixty, Harrison is at his poetic peak, producing plays,
film-scripts, libretti, journalistic responses to social and
national strife, impassioned speeches of love and outrage-always in
poetry. Tony Harrison: Loiner introduces the major themes and forms
of our most exciting and cosmopolitan as well as technically
accomplished poet, and reassesses his achievement and place in
twentieth-century literature.
Saki is the acknowledged master of the short story. His writing is
elegant, economical, and witty, its tone worldly, flippant
irreverence delivered in astringent exchanges and epigrams more
neat, pointed, and poised even than Wilde's. The deadpan narrative
voice allows for the unsentimental recitation of horrors and the
comically grotesque, and the generation of guilty laughter at some
very un-pc statements.
Saki's short stories have been much reprinted as well as adapted
for radio, stage, and television, but his novels, The Unbearable
Bassington and When William Came, are almost unknown, his
journalism and travel writing forgotten, and his plays rarely
performed. Sandie Byrne argues that his reputation has been
unfairly overshadowed by his predecessor Oscar Wilde, contemporary
George Bernard Shaw, and successors P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn
Waugh.
In a well-meaning introduction to the Penguin Complete Saki, Noel
Coward reinforced the received image of Saki's work as celebrating
an Edwardian or even Victorian milieu of privilege, luxury, and
affectation; comedies of manners and light satire. Byrne shows that
Saki's writing was no nostalgic evocation of a lost golden age, and
that he was rarely concerned with the charm and delight Coward
describes. His preoccupations were with England, the values of
Empire, and the dangerous beauty of the feral ephebe. The threat to
the first two of these triggered his alleged metamorphosis from
cosmopolitan cynic and dandy-about-town to patriotic, even
jingoistic, NCO, in a manner worthy of his blackest humor.
Who owns, who buys, who gives, and who notices objects is always
significant in Austen's writing, placing characters socially and
characterizing them symbolically. Jane Austen's Possessions and
Dispossessions looks at the significance of objects in Austen's
major novels, fragments, and juvenilia.
This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in
English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and
twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production,
dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the
factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as
literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various
alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between
class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be
comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and
poems from each period considered.
This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in
English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and
twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production,
dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the
factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as
literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various
alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between
class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be
comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and
poems from each period considered.
The letters H, v., and O are central to Harrison's poetry. "H" in
the play "The Big H," and many of Harrison's poems on language and
class, stands for dropped aitches--missed rungs in his "ladder of
aspiration," and for the chain of association he makes from the
[h]owl of the Leeds City coat of arms to Herod, H-block, H-bomb,
and Hiroshima. "H" is also celebrated in its absence, in loving
reaffirmations of the bonds of dialect, class, and family. The
verses/versus of Harrison's most controversial piece, "v.," are
echoed in the "v-signs" and other invective of the angry
dispossessed to whom his polyphonic writing gives a voice. "V" also
stands for victory--the dearly-bought victories of wars, explored
with the concomitant themes of imperialism and political
propaganda. The black O haunts Harrison's work. The abyss; the
nothingness of death, the extinction of personality, of art, of
languages, of species, perhaps even of humankind; is figured in
black burn-out circles, pits, mines, and empty skies. Its obverse
is another O, where life is affirmed--the acting circle of
Harrison's theatre work. Lucid and trenchant, Byrne's study is now
the benchmark for students of Harrison's work.
Each play is fully annotated. "Contexts and Criticism" features
all-new material on the author and his work, from traditional
critical readings to more theorized approaches, among them essays
on Shaw's Fabianism and his alleged feminism. Contributors include
Leon Hugo, Sally Peters, Tracy C. Davis, John A. Bertolini, Stanley
Weintraub, and J. Ellen Gainor. A Chronology and a Selected
Bibliography are included.
|
|