Book:
Race, American Literature and Transnational ModernismsAuthor:
Anita PattersonPages:
248Format:
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0521884055Modernist poetry crosses racial and national boundaries. The emergence of poetic modernism in the Americas was profoundly shaped by transatlantic contexts of empire-building and migration. In this ambitious book, Anita Patterson examines cross-currents of influence among a range of American, African American and Caribbean authors. Works by Whitman, Poe, Eliot, Pound and their avant-garde contemporaries served as a heritage for black poets in the US and elsewhere in the New World. In tracing these connections, Patterson argues for a renewed focus on intercultural and transnational dialogue in modernist studies. This bold and imaginative work of transnational literary and historical criticism sets canonical American figures in fascinating new contexts and opens up new readings of Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Aime Cesaire. This book will be of interest to scholars of American and African American literature, modernism, postcolonial studies, and Caribbean literature. 
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The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone LiteratureAuthor:
Patrick CorcoranPages:
274Format:
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0521849713The literature of French-speaking countries forms a distinct body of work quite separate from literature written in France itself, offering a passionate creative engagement with their postcolonial cultures. This book provides an introduction to the literatures that have emerged in the French-speaking countries and regions of the world in recent decades, illustrating their astonishing breadth and diversity, and exploring their constant state of tension with the literature of France. The study opens with a wide-ranging discussion of the idea of francophonie. Each chapter then provides readers with historical background to a particular region and identifies the key issues that have influenced the emergence of a literature in French, before going on to examine in detail a selection of the major writers. These case studies tackle many of the key authors of the francophone world, as well as new, up-and-coming authors writing today.
Book:
The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to MarvellAuthor:
Stephens DorothyPages:
264Format:
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0521034698The poet Petrarch imagined that the hopeless but pure love of a woman could lead a man to heaven. In sixteenth-century England Edmund Spenser wrote poetry in the petrarchan tradition while heightening its dilemmas--flirting with a very different kind of feminine image. Dorothy Stephens shows that this flirtation emerges only in conditional language and situations, and that the eroticism the reader feels often belies a narrator's insistence that it is illusory. She goes on to look at responses to Spenser's eroticism among male and female writers in the seventeenth century.
Book:
Rhythm and Will in Victorian PoetryAuthor:
Matthew CampbellPages:
292Format:
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EnglishISBN10:
0521604222Matthew Campbell explores the work of four Victorian poets--Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and Hardy--in the context of their concern with questions of human agency and will. Through close study of meter, rhyme and rhythm, Campbell reveals how closely, for these poets, questions of poetics are related to issues of psychology, ethics and social change. He goes on to discuss more general questions of poetics, from Milton through Romanticism and into contemporary critical debate, making a major contribution to the current renewal of interest in formalist readings of poetry.
Book:
Romantic Poets and the Culture of PosterityAuthor:
Andrew BennettPages:
288Format:
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EnglishISBN10:
052102689XThis original book examines the way in which the Romantic period's culture of posterity inaugurates a tradition of writing which demands that the poet should write for an audience of the future: the true poet, a figure of neglected genius, can be properly appreciated only after death. Andrew Bennett argues that this involves a radical shift in the conceptualization of the poet and poetic reception, with wide-ranging implications for the poetry and poetics of the Romantic period. He surveys the contexts for this transformation of the relationship between poet and audience, engaging with issues such as the commercialization of poetry, the gendering of the canon, and the construction of poetic identity. Bennett goes on to discuss the strangely compelling effects which this new reception theory produces in the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, who have come to embody, for posterity, the figure of the Romantic poet.
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The Cambridge Introduction to Russian PoetryAuthor:
Michael WachtelPages:
178Format:
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EnglishISBN10:
0521808812Including examples from Russia's greatest poets, Michael Wachtel draws on three centuries of verse, from the beginnings of secular literature in the eighteenth century to the present day. The first part of his book is devoted to concepts such as versification, poetic language and tradition. In the second part he examines the ode, the elegy, love poetry, nature poetry and patriotic verse.
Book:
Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the SpeciesAuthor:
Maureen N. McLanePages:
296Format:
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EnglishISBN10:
0521028205This innovative study examines the dialogue between British Romantic poetry and the human sciences of the period. Maureen McLane reveals how Romantic writers participated in a new-found consciousness of human beings as a species, engaging with major discourses on moral philosophy, political economy and anthropology by preeminent theorists such as Malthus, Godwin and Burke. The book provides original readings of canonical works, including Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and has much to say about the place of Romantic poetry within its culture.
Book:
The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern EnglandAuthor:
Gary KucharPages:
253Format:
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EnglishISBN10:
0521174422In early modern England, religious sorrow was seen as a form of spiritual dialogue between the soul and God, expressing how divine grace operates at the level of human emotion. Through close readings of both Protestant and Catholic poetry, Kuchar explains how the discourses of 'devout melancholy' helped generate some of the most engaging religious verse of the period. From Robert Southwell to John Milton, from Aemilia Lanyer to John Donne, the language of 'holy mourning' informed how poets represented the most intimate and enigmatic aspects of faith as lived experience. In turn, 'holy mourning' served as a way of registering some of the most pressing theological issues of the day. By tracing poetic representations of religious sorrow from Crashaw's devotional verse to Shakespeare's weeping kings, Kuchar expands our understanding of the interconnections between poetry, theology and emotion in post-Reformation England.
Book:
Survivors' Songs: From Maldon to the SommeAuthor:
Jon StallworthyPages:
240Format:
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EnglishISBN10:
0521727898From Homer to Heaney, the voices of men and women have seldom been more piercing, more poignant, than in time of conflict. For fifty years, Jon Stallworthy has been attuned to such voices. In Survivors' Songs he explores a series of poetic encounters with war, with essays on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. Beautifully written, this moving book sets the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare from prehistoric Troy to Anglo-Saxon England; from Agincourt to Flanders; from El Alamein to Vietnam; from the wars of yesterday to the wars of tomorrow.
Book:
Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama)Author:
Jeffrey H. RichardsPages:
1Format:
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0521066689Jeffrey Richards examines a variety of phenomena connected to the stage, including closet Revolutionary political plays, British drama on American boards, American-authored stage plays, and poetry and fiction by early Republican writers. American theatre is viewed by Richards as a transatlantic hybrid in which British theatrical traditions provide material and templates by which Americans express themselves and their relationship to others. Through intensive analysis of plays, this book confronts matters of political, ethnic, and cultural identity by moving from play text to theatrical context and from historical event to audience demography.
Book:
Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love PoetryAuthor:
Joshua EckhardtPages:
320Format:
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0199559503This book reappraises the work of early-seventeenth-century collectors of English Renaissance poetry in manuscript. The verse miscellanies, or poetry anthologies, of these collectors have long attracted the attention of literary editors looking for texts by individual, major authors, and they have more recently interested historians for their poems on affairs of state, called verse libels. By contrast, this book investigates the relationships that the compilers of miscellanies established between such presumably literary and political texts. It focuses on two of the most popular, and least printable, literary genres that they collected: libels, and anti-courtly love poetry, a literary mode that the collectors of John Donne's poems played a major role in establishing. They made Donne the most popular poet in manuscripts of the period, and they demonstrated a special affinity for his most erotic or obscene poems, such as 'To his Mistress going to bed' and 'The Anagram'.Donne collectors also exhibited the similarities between these Ovidian love elegies and the sexually explicit or counter-Petrarchan verse of other authors, thereby organizing a literary genre opposed to the conventions of courtly love lyrics. Furthermore, collectors politicized this genre by relating examples of it to libels. In so doing, manuscript verse collectors demonstrated a type of literary and political activity distinct from that of authors, stationers, and readers. Based on a thorough investigation of manuscript verse miscellanies, the book appeals to scholars and students of early modern English literature and history, Donne studies, manuscript studies, and the history of the book.
Book:
R. O. A. M. Lyne: Collected Papers on Latin PoetryAuthor:
R. O. A. M. LynePages:
360Format:
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EnglishISBN10:
0199203962This volume presents a wide range of pieces from a world-class Latinist which displays both his diverse interests as a scholar and his consistent concern with Augustan texts, their language and literary texture. The range of articles, written over more than three decades and including one previously unpublished piece, covers the same connected territory - largely Virgil, Horace, and elegy. R. O. A. M. Lyne's consistent approach of close reading means that the articles form a coherent whole, while his compelling style as an engaged literary analyst ensures that these are not dry or forbidding pieces.
