Literary studies: poetry and poets

Explores the transformative power of ekphrasis in high and late medieval dream visions and mystical visions.

Through its recovery of the metrical principles underlying the work of some of the century's major poets, this study highlights the intricacy of the relation between the 'music' of verse and its meaning, and helping us to understand the way in which the ferment of metrical experiment eventually led to the emergence of free verse.

Living Poetry demonstrates that poems are vital expressions of how we live, feel and think.

Surveying the later work of W.

The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry provides a stimulating, original and lively analysis of the Irish-Japanese literary connection from the early 1960s to 2007.

The angel can be viewed as a signal reference to modernist attempts to accommodate religious languages to self-consciously modern cultures.

Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders.

This lively, lucid book undertakes a detailed and provocative study of Shakespeare's fascination with clowns, fools, and fooling.

This is the first book-length analysis of Shakespeare s depiction of specula (mirrors) to reveal the literal and allegorical functions of mirrors in the playwright s art and thought.

This collection makes the compelling argument that Chaucer, the Perle -poet, and The Cloud of Unknowing author, exploited analogue and metaphor for marking out the pedagogical gap between science and the imagination.

Edmund Spenser's censored attacks on Lord Burghley (Elizabeth I's powerful first minister) serve as the basis for a reassessment of the poet's mid-career, challenging the dates of canonical texts, the social and personal contexts for scandalous topical allegories, and the new historicist portrait of Spenser's 'worship' of power and state ideology.

Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama explores the fruitful and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances in Shakespearean drama, with analyses of Othello , Titus Andronicus , King Henry IV Part 1 , Macbeth , Hamlet , and The Tempest.

This original and scholarly work uses three detailed case studies of plays - Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra , King Lear and Cymbeline - to cast light on the ways in which early modern writers used metaphor to explore how identities emerge from the interaction of competing regional and spiritual topographies.

This is the first book to consistently read English Modernist literature as testimony to trauma of the First and Second World Wars.

This book provides provocative information on poetry written in response to the most revolutionary set of events seen in Britain since the 1640s: 'Peterloo', a peaceful protest that became a massacre; 'Cato Street', a government scripted rebellion; and the 'Queen Caroline Controversy', when the estranged wife of George IV tried to claim her crown.

The volume explores Elizabeth I's impact on English and European culture during her life and after her death, through her own writing as well as through contemporary and later writers.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the divergence or convergence of freedom and terror in a range of Byron's works.

Arising from a research project on depression in the eighteenth century, this book discusses the experience of depressive states both in terms of existing modes of thought and expression, and of attempts to describe and live with suffering.

What is 'Wordsworthian' Romanticism and how did it evolve?

What are the means available to poetry to address crisis and how can both poets and critics meet the conflicts and challenges they face?

Carter explores early modern culture's reception of Ovid through the manipulation of Ovidian myth by Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, Marlowe and Marston.

Alliteration occurs in a wide variety of contexts in stress-initial languages, including Icelandic, Finnish and Mongolian.

Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals.

In the Romantic period's economics of 'fiat' money the legacy of romanticism involves absolutist gestures of verbal fiat.

A collection of essays on the ways the senses 'speak' on Shakespeare's stage.

This collection by leading scholars in the field provides a fascinating and ground-breaking introduction to current research in Irish Romantic studies.

Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude.

Exploring the complex relationship between aesthetic experience and personal identity in Larkin's work, this book gives close and original readings of three major poems ('Here', 'Livings' and 'Aubade'), and two neglected but important themes (Larkin and the supernatural, Larkin and Flaubert).

Taking a fresh approach to Byron, this book argues that he should be understood as a poet whose major works develop a carefully reasoned philosophy.

This book recognizes that modernist poetry can be both difficult and rewarding to teach.

In addition to being the leading philosopher of English Romanticism and one of its greatest poets, Coleridge explores the dynamics of consciousness and mental functioning more extensively than any of his contemporaries.

Can postmodern accounts of the gaze - deriving from the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan, Fanon, and Riviere - tell us anything about those structures of vision prior to, and repressed by, modernity?

This book offers a new history and theory of modern celebrity.

This book explores the theoretical concerns of recent literary and cultural studies through a reappraisal of three innovative women writers of the modernist period: Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein.

In this first book-length study of Stevie Smith, Romana Huk reassesses the work of this major twentieth-century woman writer as emerging not only from the practices of female literary modernism, but also from within the tumultuous cultural context of mid-century Europe.

Wordsworth: A Poet's History examines the range of Wordsworth's poetry and criticism over the course of his career.

Shakespearean Entrances offer a systematic study of entrances and exits on the Shakespearean stage.

Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity.

Body Narratives deals with the configurations in the literature and culture of sixteenth-century England.

Blake's comic brilliance has been variously dismissed as the nervous ramblings of a neglected genius, the tomfool doodles of a distracted youngster, or a crude tool for destabilizing textual authority.

In recent years critics of Romantic poetry have divided into two groups that have little to say to one another.

This study reads Auden's poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism.

This is the first comprehensive study of early modern texts, readings, and readers of Shakespeare's poems in print and manuscript, Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England makes a compelling contribution both to Shakespeare studies and the history of the book.

The essays in this volume read the Shakespeare films of the 1990s as key instruments with which western culture confronts the anxieties attendant upon the transition from one century to another.

Nudism, playgroups, pre-marital agreements, male breast-feeding - these are just some of the startling proposals for women's emancipation discovered in this unique anthology.

In this highly entertaining study, De Sousa argues that Shakespeare reinterprets, refashions and reinscribes his alien characters - Jews, Moors, Amazons and gypsies.

Recent theoretical approaches have compelled critics to rethink many received notions regarding the significance of contemporary parodic activity.

This work explores an aspect of Yeats's writing largely ignored until now: namely, his wide-ranging absorption in S.

John Dolan takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasising the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasion.

This book uses the framework of cultural translation to explore the work of six significant modern writers from Ireland, India, Australia and the Caribbean.