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        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2000

        Contemporary British poetry and the city

        by Peter Barry, Kim Latham

        Though poets have always written about cities, the commonest critical categories (pastoral poetry, nature poetry, Romantic poetry, Georgian poetry, etc.) have usually stressed the rural, so that poetry can seem irrelevant to a predominantly urban populati. Explores a range of contemporary poets who visit the 'mean streets' of the contemporary urban scene, seeking the often cacophonous music of what happens here. Poets discussed include: Ken Smith, Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, Sean O'Brien, Ciaran Carson, Peter Reading, Matt Simpson, Douglas Houston, Deryn Rees-Jones, Denise Riley, Ken Edwards, Levi Tafari, Aidan Hun, and Robert Hampson. Approaches contemporary poetry within a broad spectrum of personal, social, literary, and cultural concerns. Includes 'loco-specific' chapters, on cities including Hull, Liverpool, London, and Birmingham, with an additional chapter on 'post-industrial' cities such as Belfast, Glasgow and Dundee. ;

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2024

        Borrowed objects and the art of poetry

        Spolia in Old English verse

        by Denis Ferhatovic

        This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts - especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts - yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of materiality and poetics, balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2024

        Geoffrey Hill and the ends of poetry

        by Tom Docherty

        The idea of the end is an essential motivic force in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016). This book shows that Hill's poems are characteristically 'end-directed'. They tend towards consummations of all kinds: from the marriages of meanings in puns, or of words in repeating figures and rhymes, to syntactical and formal finalities. The recognition of failure to reach such ends provides its own impetus to Hill's poetry. This is the first book on Hill to take account of his last works. It is a significant contribution to the study of Hill's poems, offering a new thematic reading of his entire body of work. By using Hill's work as an example, the book also touches on questions of poetry's ultimate value: what are its ends and where does it wish to end up?

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2022

        The pastor in print

        Genre, audience, and religious change in early modern England

        by Amy G. Tan

        The pastor in print explores the phenomenon of early modern pastors who chose to become print authors, addressing ways authorship could enhance, limit or change clerical ministry and ways pastor-authors conceived of their work in parish and print. It identifies strategies through which pastor-authors established authorial identities, targeted different sorts of audiences and strategically selected genre and content as intentional parts of their clerical vocation. The first study to provide a book-length analysis of the phenomenon of early modern pastors writing for print, it uses a case study of prolific pastor-author Richard Bernard to offer a new lens through which to view religious change in this pivotal period. By bringing together questions of print, genre, religio-politics and theology, the book will interest scholars and postgraduate students in history, literature and theological studies, and its readability will appeal to undergraduates and non-specialists.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2023

        Critical theory and human rights

        From compassion to coercion

        by David McGrogan

        This book describes how human rights have given rise to a vision of benevolent governance that, if fully realised, would be antithetical to individual freedom. It describes human rights' evolution into a grand but nebulous project, rooted in compassion, with the overarching aim of improving universal welfare by defining the conditions of human well-being and imposing obligations on the state and other actors to realise them. This gives rise to a form of managerialism, preoccupied with measuring and improving the 'human rights performance' of the state, businesses and so on. The ultimate result is the 'governmentalisation' of a pastoral form of global human rights governance, in which power is exercised for the general good, moulded by a complex regulatory sphere which shapes the field of action for the individual at every turn. This, unsurprisingly, does not appeal to rights-holders themselves.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2021

        Writing on sheep

        by William Welstead

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2003

        The poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

        Choosing tough words

        by Angelica Michelis, Anthony Rowland

        The first full-length collection of essays on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy's poetry is both respected by academics, and widely read and enjoyed by both children and adults. Approaches Duffy's work from a variety of literary theoretical perspectives, including feminism, masculinity, national identity and post-structuralism. Situates Duffy's work in relation to current debates about the state, value and social relevance of contemporary British poetry. Will become the benchmark anthology on Duffy. ;

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2005

        Early modern women's manuscript poetry

        by Jill Millman, Gillian Wright

        'Early modern women's manuscript poetry' is an anthology of texts by fourteen women poets writing between 1589 and 1706. It is the only currently available anthology of early modern women's writing which focuses exclusively on manuscript material. Authors include Mary Sidney, Lucy Hutchinson and Katherine Philips; central figures in the emerging canon of early modern women writers, but whose work appears in a fresh and very different light in the manuscript context emphasised by this anthology. The volume also includes substantial excerpts from a recently discovered verse paraphrase of Genesis, thought to be by the previously unknown seventeenth-century writer Mary Roper, as well as selections from the unjustly neglected poet, Hester Pulter. The mix of canonical and non-canonical writers makes this book ideal for use on undergraduate and early postgraduate courses, while specialists will be particularly interested in the sophisticated and varied material taken from less familiar sources. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2022

        The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry

        by Caitlin Flynn

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2020

        Spenser and Virgil

        by Syrithe Pugh, J. B. Lethbridge

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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2017

        Spenserian satire

        A tradition of indirection

        by Series edited by J. B. Lethbridge, Rachel Hile, Joshua Samuel Reid

        Scholars of Edmund Spenser have focused much more on his accomplishments in epic and pastoral than his work in satire. Scholars of early modern English satire almost never discuss Spenser. However, these critical gaps stem from later developments in the canon rather than any insignificance in Spenser's accomplishments and influence on satiric poetry. This book argues that the indirect form of satire developed by Spenser served during and after Spenser's lifetime as an important model for other poets who wished to convey satirical messages with some degree of safety. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton and George Wither, to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2021

        Spenser and Donne

        Thinking poets

        by Yulia Ryzhik

        The names Edmund Spenser and John Donne are typically associated with different ages in English poetry, the former with the sixteenth century and the Elizabethan Golden Age, the latter with the 'metaphysical' poets of the seventeenth century. This collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge this dichotomous view and to engage critically with both poets, not only at the sites of direct allusion, imitation, or parody, but also in terms of common preoccupations and continuities of thought, informed by the literary and historical contexts of the politically and intellectually turbulent turn of the century. Juxtaposing these two poets, so apparently unlike one another, for comparison rather than contrast changes our understanding of each poet individually and moves towards a more holistic, relational view of their poetics.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2019

        The art of The Faerie Queene

        by J. B. Lethbridge, Richard Brown

        The Art of The Faerie Queene is the first book centrally focused on the forms and poetic techniques employed by Spenser. It offers a sharp new perspective on Spenser by rereading The Faerie Queene as poetry which is at once absorbing, demanding and experimental. Instead of the traditional conservative model of Spenser as poet, this book presents the poem as radical, edgy and unconventional, thus proposing new ways of understanding the Elizabethan poetic Renaissance. The book moves from the individual words of the poem to metre, rhyme and stanza form onto its larger structures of canto and book. It will be of particular relevance to undergraduates studying Elizabethan poetry, graduate students and scholars of Renaissance poetry, for whom the formal aspect of the poetry has been a topic of growing relevance in recent years.

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