Exploring more than 100 key novels, stories, plays, and poems and the geniuses who created them, this book is the perfect introduction to literature and writing from around the world.
Taking as its starting point the long-standing characterization of Milton as a "e;Hebraic"e; writer, Milton and the Rabbis probes the limits of the relationship between the seventeenth-century English poet and polemicist and his Jewish antecedents.
And as I groped in darkness and felt the pain of millions,gradually, like day driving night across the continent,I saw dawn upon them like the sun a vision.
A masterful meditation on our most mercurial and abiding of poetic forms-the long poem For decades, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown readers how genres, forms, and the literal acts of writing and reception can be understood as sites of struggle.
An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems provides a lively and informed examination of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; the Sonnets; and various minor poems, including some only recently attributed to Shakespeare.
The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to a literary culture in which he sought to define and defend all imaginative life.
This study takes a look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged?
This book focuses on Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it demonstrates the interconnectedness of their friendships and creativity, giving information about literary composition and artistic output, publication and exhibition, and details literary and artistic influences.
Leading scholars in the field analyze Shakespeare's plays to show how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law.
This new study focuses on the critically neglected area of Rossetti's devotional poetry and her prose, offering a critical intervention in the feminist construction of an important Victorian woman poet.
This book examines contemporary female portrayals of male Shakespearean roles and shows how these performances invite audiences to think differently about Shakespeare, the English nation, and themselves.
The sites of inspiration documented in this book range from nineteenth century linguistic theory to postmodern strategies of conceptual writing, encompassing well known instances of modernist poetics (Mallarme, Pound, Olson) alongside obscure but revealing figures like Otto Nebel and Henri-Martin Barzun.
This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words that give direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson.
Ledbetter explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era using taste, style and the significance of poetry to advance our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century.
The essays in this volume interrogate the unique and often problematic relationship between early modern cultural studies and ecocriticism, providing theoretical insights and models for a future practice that successfully wed the two disciplines.
This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.
Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.
Unhistorical Shakespeare argues against the ideas of difference that underpin historicist studies of the past and its desires, offering, instead, the idea of homo-history to engage with issues of narcissism, anachronism, and recursiveness in conjunction with sexual desire.
Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery stand out among major American poets - all three shaped the direction and pushed the boundaries of contemporary poetry on an international scale.
This book is the first in-depth cultural history of cinema's polyvalent and often contradictory appropriations of Shakespearean drama and performance traditions.
This book traces the musical and cultural achievements of this contemporary musical phenomenon to its origin in the Romantic revolution of the 1790's in England when traditional concepts of literature, politics, education and social relationships were challenged as they were in the 1960's.
Comedy Matters traces the long tradition of the expansive comic embrace of cultural difference and diversity that manages to survive even in some of mankind s darkest moments.
This exciting collection represents a range of scholarly approaches and include close textual study, comparative readings, and broad cultural analysis.
The book advances the idea that American, Southern, white, planter class authors have appropriated models and modes of masculinity from William Shakespeare.
This book is a study of As You Like It , which shows how the play represents issues of interest to literate playgoers of its time, as well as speculatively to Shakespeare himself.
This book brings together fresh research from experts on contemporary Chinese poetry, built upon one of the most glorious poetic traditions of any civilization in the world yet historically neglected by scholars in English.
This book offers a case study of four of the most influential contemporary Chinese writers and 'cultural bastards' - Duoduo, an underground 'misty' poet; Wang Shuo, a 'hooligan' writer; Zhang Chengzhi, an old 'Red Guard' and new 'cultural heretic'; and Wang Xiaobo, a chronicler of Rabelaisian modern history.