This book reads the work of contemporary women poets against recent debates in third wave feminism and democratic theory in exploring the range of ways in which women poets have interrogated the complexities of being public in contemporary U.
Ranging from Jonson to Rochester and including several critically neglected figures, select poetic contemporaries variously illuminate the scope of Hobbes's writing and the reach of his influence, in turn shedding diverse lights on the nature of their own work.
Dowdy uncovers and analyzes the primary rhetorical strategies, particularly figures of voice, in American political poetry from the Vietnam War-era to the present.
Schmid shows how reception processes work across linguistic, national, and cultural boundaries, taking the English Romantic poet Shelley's German reception as a case study.
This book offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory - including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Zizek, and Alenka Zupancic - can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture.
This book traces the process through which authors like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton adapted, rewrote, or resisted romance, mapping a world in which new cross-cultural contacts and religious conflicts demanded a rethinking of some of the most fundamental terms of early modern identity.
Shakespeare Among the Animals examines the role of animal-metaphor in the Shakespeare stage, particularly as such metaphor serves to underwrite various forms of social difference.
This book tells a remarkable story that begins in classical antiquity with ecphrasis, the art of describing the world so vividly that the audience could become imaginative eyewitnesses, and the events that caused an ideal of immediacy to be transformed into nearly its opposite, a preoccupation with representation of representation.
Haikai is an art that parodies and often subverts its linguistic, generic, and personal predecessors, and its intersections include imaginative links to the rest of Japanese literature and culture.
Drawing on much contemporary material, including Auden's fascinating unpublished diary, this book places personal experience in the context of the life of a great city: not only its political, artistic and cultural life, but the life of the streets, bars and caf, It presents portraits of figures, often fascinating in their own right, with whom Auden and Isherwood came into contact, and it demonstrates how, especially in Isherwood's fiction, the raw material of daily existence was transformed into art.
This volume combines a theoretical critique of the biographical method that dominates Larkin studies with a revolutionary interpretation of his works that better accounts for their profound influence upon leading Postmodernists like Ian McEwan, David Mitchell, Carol Ann Duffy, Damien Hirst - and the creators of Jerry Springer - the Opera .
Arguing on recent cognitive evidence that reading a Bible is much more difficult for human brains than seeing images, this book exposes the depth and breadth of Protestant theologians' misunderstandings about how people could reform their spiritual lives - how they could literally change their minds.
Romantics and Renegades examines the abiding crux of romantic criticism: the political apostasies of the Lake poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) as they renounced the revolutionary Jacobinism of their youth in the 1790s in order to claim the high ground of Regency Toryism in the 1810s.
Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England is the first extended study of the touring practices and performances of Elizabethan and Jacobean travelling players.
Romantic Dynamics creatively collides English poetry with a wide range of exotic concepts associated with the 'new physics' of relativity and quantum to uncover their shared concerns for indeterminacy, uncertainty, relativity, and complexity in a chaotic universe.
This major new interdisciplinary study argues that Shakespeare exploited long-established connections between vision, space and language in order to construct rhetorical equivalents for visual perspective.
Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance is an original study at the interface of a historicizing literary criticism and the study of modern performance.
Sarah Prescott discusses the careers of a number of key women writers of the period from 1690 to 1740, exploring the role played by geographical location, literary circles, patronage, the literary marketplace, and subscription publication in shaping patterns of female authorship.
This book examines Blake's work in the context of discourses of nation and empire, of the construction of a public sphere, and restores the longevity to his artistic career by placing emphasis on his work in the 1820s.
Tony Sharpe explores the symbiotic and antagonistic relations between Stevens's literary life and his working life as insurance executive, outlining the personal, historical and publishing contexts that shaped his writing career, and suggesting how awareness of these contexts throws new light on the poems.
Several thousand letters to and from Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning have survived, together with other information on the composition and context of works from Barrett's 'lines on virtue' written at the age of eight in 1814 to Browning's Asolando (1889).
In this beautifully illustrated book, one of the foremost Shakespeareans of our time explores the ways in which Shakespeare has been imagined from his time to ours.
This book throws new light on the issue of the dramatist's religious orientation by dismissing sectarian and one-sided theories, tackling the problem from the angle of the variegated Elizabethan context recently uncovered by modern historians and theatre scholars.
James Booth reads Philip Larkin's mature poetry in terms of his ambiguous self-image as lonely, anti-social outsider, plighted to his art, and as nine-to-five librarian, sharing the common plight of humanity.
This book argues that Romantic-era writers used the figure of the minstrel to imagine authorship as a social, responsive enterprise unlike the solitary process portrayed by Romantic myths of the lone genius.
This is the first book to cover the whole range of epistolary verse in the period, including the discursive type favoured by Pope and the familiar and dramatic epistles.
This broad and original study of the full range of John Clare's work is the first to take seriously his repeated appeals to the judgement of future readers.
By looking at the later Wordsworth's ekphrastic writings about visual art and his increased awareness of the printed dimension of his work, Simonsen calls attention to what is uniquely exciting about this neglected body of work, and argues that it complicates traditional understandings of Wordsworth based on his so-called Great Decade.
