'In Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning, Mark Sandy skillfully explores the fraught Romantic engagement with the inconceivable and unspeakable event of death" (p.1) through a poetry of grief and loss. His meticulous engagement with the representation of death, mourning, and loss across genres as disparate as the ballad, the sonnet, the epic, the romance, and the ode (a list by no means complete), is complemented by the diverse range of poets he situates his discussions in 'The impressive scope of the project does not come at the expense of depth, and Sandy's insightful close readings offer fresh perspectives on often familiar Romantic texts.' - Keats-Shelley Review
The Sonnet provides a comprehensive study of one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, widely used by Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, and still used today by poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Carol Ann Duffy. This book traces the development of the sonnet from its origins in medieval Italy to its widespread acceptance in modern Britain, Ireland and America. It shows how the sonnet emerges from the aristocratic courtly centres of Renaissance Europe and gradually becomes the chosen form of radical political poets such as Milton. The book draws on detailed critical analysis of some of the best-known sonnets written in English to explain how the sonnet functions as a poetic form, and it argues that the flexibility and versatility of the sonnet have given it a special place in literary history and tradition.
In The Love Darg (the title is an expression meaning 'unpaid labour'), Paul Batchelor draws with sharp intelligence on his working-class upbringing in the North of England during the period when the mining industry was being destroyed, and on the legacy, this left him in adulthood. His subjects range from civic unrest to the natural world, from family tradition to erotic misadventure. Avoiding sentimentality and easy declarations of solidarity, these poems resound with formal elegance and emotional candour.
Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on this renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates and more advanced readers of poetry alike. The book sees form as neither ornamenting nor mimicking content, but as shaping and animating it, encouraging readers to cultivate techniques to read poems as poems. Lively and wide-ranging, engaging with poems as aesthetic experiences, the book includes a long chapter on the elements of form that throws new light on troubling terms such as rhythm and metre, as well as a detailed introduction and accessible, stimulating chapters on lyric, the sonnet, elegy, soliloquy, dramatic monologue and ballad and narrative.
In this detailed study of literary culture in the inter-war period, Jason Harding examines the standing of T.S. Eliot's journal the Criterion in relation to other literary periodicals and, beyond that, to the larger cultural networks of the time. The Criterion may at first sight seem a well-studied publication, often dismissed as predictably conservative, even proto-Fascist. However, through his examination of insufficiently known archive material and interviews with living witnesses to the period, Harding significantly alters our understanding of the journal and of Eliot's role as editor. More than that, by carefully resituating the journal in its relations - of both competition and co-operation - with a range of other literary periodicals (for the most part little-studied themselves), he shows himself an authoritative and discriminating guide to the often-complex networks within which Eliot worked. The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain defends the journal against charges of Fascism and anti-Semitism: it is an invaluable book for scholars of Eliot and original and incisive exploration of difficult areas of literary-cultural exchange.
A unique anthology covering 150 years of Irish writing in English across a wide range of literary genres, of which Paul Muldoon says: 'Stephen Regan's anthology vividly and valiantly presents a nation, and a national literature, coming into being.' The best-value single-volume anthology of Irish writing, featuring essays, speeches, and memoirs as well as fiction, poems, plays, and stories.
T.S. Eliot's work demands much from his readers. The more the reader knows about his allusions and range of cultural reference, the more rewarding are his poems, essays and plays. This book is carefully designed to provide an authoritative and coherent examination of those contexts essential to the fullest understanding of his challenging and controversial body of work. It explores a broad range of subjects relating to Eliot's life and career; key literary, intellectual, social and historical contexts; as well as the critical reception of his oeuvre. Taken together, these chapters sharpen critical appreciation of Eliot's writings and present a comprehensive, composite portrait of one of the twentieth century's pre-eminent men of letters. Drawing on original research, T.S. Eliot in Context is a timely contribution to an exciting reassessment of Eliot's life and works and will provide a valuable resource for scholars, teachers, students and general readers.
Beginning with a reassessment of contemporary romantic studies, this book provides a modern critical comparison of Keats and Shelley. The study offers detailed close readings of a variety of literary genres (including the romance, lyric, elegy and literary fragment) adopted by Keats and Shelley to explore their poetic treatment of self and form. The poetic careers of Keats and Shelley embrace a tragic affirmation of those darker elements latent in the earlier writings to meditate on their own posthumous reception and reputation.
The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley takes stock of developments in the study of a major Romantic poet and prose writer and seeks to advance Shelley studies in new directions. It consists of forty-two chapters written by an international cast of established and emerging scholar-critics. This Handbook is divided into five thematic sections: Biography and Relationships; Prose; Poetry; Cultures, Traditions, Influences, and Afterlives.
/prod01/prodbucket01/media/durham-university/research-/research-centres/centre-for-poetry-and-poetics/40867-Hero.jpg)