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      • 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?

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2019

        Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance

        An anthology

        by J. B. Lethbridge, Sukanta Chaudhuri

        Renaissance pastoral poetry is gaining new interest for its distinctive imaginative vein, its varied allusive content, and the theoretical implications of the genre. This is by far the biggest ever anthology of English Renaissance pastoral poetry, with 277 pieces spanning two centuries. Spenser, Sidney, Jonson and Drayton are amply represented alongside their many contemporaries. There is a wide range of pastoral lyrics, weightier allusive pieces, and translations from classical and vernacular pastoral poetry; also, more unusually, pastoral ballads and poems set in all kinds of prose works. Each piece has been freshly edited from the original sources, with full apparatus and commentary. This book will be complemented by a second volume, to be published in 2017, which includes a book-length introduction, textual notes and analytic indices.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2009

        John Ashbery and American Poetry

        by David Herd

        starting point. David Herd sets out to provide readers with a new critical language through which they can appreciate the beauty and complexity of Ashbery's writing. Presenting the poet in all his forms -avant-garde, nostalgic, sublime and camp - the book argues that the perpetual inventiveness of Ashbery's work has always been underpinned by the poets desire to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion. Tracing Ashbery's development in the light of this idea, and from its origins in the dazzling artistic environment of 1950's New York, the book evaluates his poetry against the aesthetic, literary and historical backgrounds that have informed it. The story of a brilliant career, and a history of the period in which that career has taken shape, John Ashbery and American Poetry provides a compelling account of Ashbery's importance to Twentieth Century Literature. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2023

        Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

        Emotions, ethics, dreams

        by Megan Leitch

        Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2022

        The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry

        by Caitlin Flynn

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2023

        The gift of narrative in medieval England

        by Nicholas Perkins

        This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.

      • Trusted Partner
        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. ;

      • 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
        July 2018

        European Erotic Romance

        by Victor Skretkowicz, J. B. Lethbridge

      • 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. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2023

        The politics of male friendship in contemporary American fiction

        by Michael Kalisch

        How might our friendships shape our politics? This book examines how contemporary American fiction has rediscovered the concept of civic friendship and revived a long tradition of imagining male friendship as interlinked with the promises and paradoxes of democracy in the United States. Bringing into dialogue the work of a wide range of authors - including Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, and Teju Cole - this innovative study advances a compelling new account of the political and intellectual fabric of the American novel today.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland

        by Paul Smith

        In 1660 Charles II was restored to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, but his hold on power was precarious. In particular, Ireland was fundamentally unstable - Catholics formed the majority of the population in a country where Protestantism was the established religion, a state of affairs unique in Europe. It was through the law that the restored Stuart monarchy governed its subjects and its colonial dependencies, and this book examines how Catholics engaged with and experienced English common law primarily through the eyes of Catholic clerics and Gaelic poets. It also examines how Catholics engaged with the Courts and the particular challenges they faced as lawyers. The book draws on an extensive body of primary source materials, including Irish-language poetry and little-used archival material relating to elite Catholic families.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2024

        Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature

        by Carolyne Larrington

        Over the last twenty-five years, the 'history of emotion' field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature - in particular secular literature - as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences - those who read them or hear them read or performed?

      • Trusted Partner
        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 2024

        Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition

        Words, ideas, interactions

        by Megan Cavell, Jennifer Neville

        Capitalising on developments in the field over the past decade, Riddles at work provides an up-to-date microcosm of research on the early medieval riddle tradition. The book presents a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. The contributors treat the riddles both as individual poems and as parts of a tradition, but, most importantly, they address Latin and Old English riddles side-by-side, bringing together texts that originally developed in conversation with each other but have often been separated by scholarship. Together, the chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but rather a multitude of productive paths. This book will appeal to students and scholars of early medieval studies. It contains new as well as established voices, including Jonathan Wilcox, Mercedes Salvador-Bello and Jennifer Neville.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2021

        Rebel angels

        Space and sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England

        by Jill Fitzgerald

        Over six hundred years before John Milton's Paradise Lost, Anglo-Saxon authors told their own version of the fall of the angels. This book brings together various cultural moments, literary genres and relevant comparanda to recover that version, from the legal and social world to the world of popular spiritual ritual and belief. The story of the fall of the angels in Anglo-Saxon England is the story of a successfully transmitted exegetical teaching turned rich literary tradition. It can be traced through a range of genres - sermons, saints' lives, royal charters, riddles, devotional and biblical poetry - each one offering a distinct window into the ancient myth's place within the Anglo-Saxon literary and cultural imagination.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2016

        The American bomb in Britain

        by Ken Young

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