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Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism)
by David HolbrookAdmirers of the work of Sylvia Plath will welcome this new paperback edition of a study, first published by The Athlone Press in 1976, which provides coherent and persuasive readings of her poetry. Drawing upon the traditional skills of the literary critic, David Holbrook also deploys the illumination of both psychoanalysis and phenomenology in a pioneering work of literary, individual and cultural interpretation.
Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints
by Elizabeth LudlowThrough theologically-engaged close readings of her poetry and devotional prose, this book explores how Christina Rossetti draws on the Bible and encourages her Victorian readers to respond to its radical message of grace. Structured chronologically, each chapter investigates her participation in the formation of Tractarian theology and details how her interpretative strategies changed over the course of her lifetime. Revealing how her encounter with the biblical text is informed by devotional classics, Christina Rossetti and the Bible highlights the influence of Thomas a' Kempis, John Bunyan, George Herbert and John Donne and describes how Rossetti adapted the teaching of the Ancient and Patristic Fathers and medieval mystics. It also considers the interfaces that are established between her devotional poems and the anthology and periodical pieces alongside which they were published throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century.
Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by Anna BlackwellThis book offers a timely examination of the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary digital media. By focusing upon a variety of ‘Shakespearean’ individuals, groups and communities and their ‘online’ presence, the book explores the role of popular internet culture in the ongoing adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays and his general cultural standing. The description of certain performers as ‘Shakespearean’ is a ubiquitous but often throwaway assessment. However, a study of ‘Shakespearean’ actors within a broader cultural context reveals much, not only about the mutable face of British culture (popular and ‘highbrow’) but also about national identity and commerce. These performers share an online space with the other major focus of the book: the fans and digital content creators whose engagement with the Shakespearean marks them out as more than just audiences and consumers; they become producers and critics. Ultimately, Digital Shakespeareans moves beyond the theatrical history focus of related works to consider the role of digital culture and technology in shaping Shakespeare’s contemporary adaptive legacy and the means by which we engage with it.
Shakespearean Celebrity in the Digital Age: Fan Cultures and Remediation (Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture)
by Anna BlackwellThis book offers a timely examination of the relationship between Shakespeare and contemporary digital media. By focusing upon a variety of ‘Shakespearean’ individuals, groups and communities and their ‘online’ presence, the book explores the role of popular internet culture in the ongoing adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays and his general cultural standing. The description of certain performers as ‘Shakespearean’ is a ubiquitous but often throwaway assessment. However, a study of ‘Shakespearean’ actors within a broader cultural context reveals much, not only about the mutable face of British culture (popular and ‘highbrow’) but also about national identity and commerce. These performers share an online space with the other major focus of the book: the fans and digital content creators whose engagement with the Shakespearean marks them out as more than just audiences and consumers; they become producers and critics. Ultimately, Digital Shakespeareans moves beyond the theatrical history focus of related works to consider the role of digital culture and technology in shaping Shakespeare’s contemporary adaptive legacy and the means by which we engage with it.
Challenges to the Power of Zeus in Early Greek Poetry
by Noriko YasumuraIn the earliest extant works of Greek literature, Zeus reigns supreme in the Olympian hierarchy. However, scattered and scanty though they may be, there are allusions to threats of rebellion which challenge Zeus' supremacy. This book examines these passages, drawn from Homer, Hesiod and the "Homeric Hymns", to offer some new interpretations. While focusing on the theme of cosmic/divine strife, it becomes clear that hints of lost legends underlie these texts. Tracing their hidden logic helps to improve our understanding of early Greek poetry.
Virgil's Garden: The Nature of Bucolic Space
by Frederick JonesVirgil's book of bucolic verse, the Eclogues, defines a green space separate from the outside worlds both of other Roman verse and of the real world of his audience. However, the boundaries between inside and outside are deliberately porous. The bucolic natives are aware of the presence of Rome, and Virgil himself is free to enter their world. Virgil's bucolic space is, in many ways, a poetic replication of the public and private gardens of his Roman audience - enclosed green spaces which afforded the citizen sheltered social and cultural activities, temporary respite from the turbulence of public life, and a tamed landscape in which to play out the tensions between the simple ideal and the complexities of reality. This book examines the Eclogues in terms of the relationship between its contents and its cultural context, making connections between the Eclogues and the representational modes of Roman art, Roman concepts of space and landscape, and Roman gardens.
Bucolic Ecology: Virgil's Eclogues and the Environmental Literary Tradition
by Timothy SaundersBeginning in outer space and ending up among the atoms, "Bucolic Ecology" illustrates how these poems repeatedly turn to the natural world in order to define themselves and their place in the literary tradition. It argues that the 'Eclogues' find there both a sequence of analogies for their own poetic processes and a map upon which can be located other landmarks in Greco-Roman literature. Unlike previous studies of this kind, "Bucolic Ecology" does not attribute to Virgil a predominantly Romantic conception of nature and its relationship to poetry, but by adopting such differing approaches to the physical world as astronomy, geography, topography, landscape and ecology, it offers an account of the Eclogues that emphasises their range and complexity and reaffirms their innovation and audacity.
The Iliad
by Martin MuellerNo Western text boasts a life as long as the "Iliad", and few can match its energy and glory. This introduction to Homer's poem sees it as rooted in a particular culture with narrative and thematic conventions that are only partly explained by assumptions about the properties of oral poetry. Professor Mueller follows Plato and Aristotle in seeing the plot of the "Iliad" as a distinctly Homeric 'invention' which shaped Attic tragedy and the concept of dramatic action in Western literature. In this second edition the text has been revised in many places, and a new chapter on Homeric repetitions has been added.
Martial (Ancients in Action)
by Peter HowellMartial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) was a Spanish writer who lived in Rome in the second half of the first century AD. He wrote only in the genre of epigram, invented by the Greeks, which he chose because of his dislike of all that was pretentious and escapist in contemporary literature, where stale mythological topics were regarded as both 'elevated' and, in times of political danger, safe. His own boundless interest in the life he saw around him in Rome, and his sense of humour, led him to prefer to express himself in short and highly polished poems. He brought the genre to such a pitch of perfection that his work has defined it for subsequent authors. Although only a limited number of his own epigrams conform to the dictionary definition as 'a short poem ending in a witty turn of thought', their effectiveness has shaped this definition. This book tells what we know about the man's commonsense attitude to life, and his hatred of hypocrisy and malice. It assesses his debt to literary tradition and the astonishing influence he had on later writers. This book is part of the Ancient in Action series which features short incisive books introducing major figures of the ancient world to the modern general reader, including the essentials of each subject's life, works, and significance for later western civilisation.
Ovid Revisited: The Poet in Exile
by Jo-Marie ClaassenIn time for the bimillennium of Ovid's relegation to Tomis on the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus in 8 AD, Jo-Marie Claassen here revises and integrates into a more popular format two decades of scholarship on Ovid's exile. Some twenty articles and reviews from scholarly journals have been shortened, rearranged and merged into seven chapters, which, together with some new material, offer a wide-ranging overview of the exiled poet and his works. "Ovid Revisited" treats the poems from exile as the literary culmination of Ovid's oeuvre, ascribing the poet's resilience in the face of extreme hardship to the relief that his poetry afforded him. An introduction considers the phenomenon of Ovid's continued popularity, explains the importance of chronology in reading the exilic poems and gives a brief summary of the contents of the 'Tristia' and 'Epistulae ex Ponto'. The rest of the book ranges from consideration of Ovid's relationship with the emperor and with his own poetry, to his ubiquitous humour, to his skill in metrics, vocabulary and verbal play, and to his use of mythological figures from earlier parts of his oeuvre. The degree to which Ovid universalised the sufferings of the dispossessed is assessed in a chapter comparing his exilic works with modern exilic literature. An excursus considers various directions in Ovidian studies today.
Pindar
by Anne Pippin BurnettOf all the lyric poets of ancient Greece, Pindar is the one whose work has been best preserved. His odes to victorious Greek athletes were entertainments designed for performance in a hospitable atmosphere of drinking, dining and jokes. The victor has known the favour of the god whose contest he entered, and has brought back pan-Hellenic fame to his family, friends and city. To extend this glory and make it permanent, he has commissioned a song of praise, had dancers trained to sing it, and summoned an audience of kinsmen, neighbours and friends to enjoy it. Pindar's odes contain invocations and prayers, but their most characteristic effects are achieved thhrough the depiction of fragments of myth. Anne Pippin Burnett argues that these passages were meant neither as mere decoration nor as moral instruction, but served rather as a dramatic mechanism by which dancers brought an experience of another world to guests gathered in the banqueting suite of the victor.
Ovid: A Poet on the Margins (Classical World)
by Laurel FulkersonThe Latin poet Ovid was famously exiled by the Emperor Augustus to the shores of the Black Sea for his self-confessed crimes of 'a poem and a mistake'. Throughout his poetry, he discusses his exile and embraces the themes of marginality and alterity. This core motif is explored throughout this overview of Ovid's life, the society he lived in and his innovative, perennially popular body of work. Presenting basic biographical information and the historical context of the newly Augustan Rome, the book details the contextual instabilities inherent in living at the border between republic and empire. Examining Ovid's poetic representations of 'otherness' from self-portraits to the mythological characters who populate his work, and his audacious experiments with genre, metre and poetic form, the book provides a coherent and original look at this much-studied author. An analysis of Ovid's parodic spirit alongside his more serious exposure of the workings of power reveals his focus on the powerless, the marginalized and the aberrant, as well as Ovid's treatment of the powerful and the abuses they perpetuate. Intelligible to readers with little or no experience of Ovid, all passages of Latin are translated and the work includes relevant maps, glossaries, a timeline and suggestions for further reading.
Virgil: Aeneid VIII (Latin Texts)
by Keith MaclennanBook VIII of the Aeneid presents a crucial turning point in the mythological foundation of Rome, with clear political resonances for the future Augustan regime. Set on the verge of war between the Latins and Aeneas' Trojan forces, it describes Aeneas' visit to the future site of Rome, where he enlists the help of the Arcadian King Evander for the forthcoming war.In confirmation of the gods' support for Aeneas, his mother Venus presents her son with new armour, including a shield depicting key events in the future history of Rome. Their climax is Augustus' victory at Actium over the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. This new edition makes the Latin text accessible to students, with commentary notes providing ample linguistic help, explanation of difficult words and phrases, a glossary of grammatical and literary terminology, and a full list of vocabulary and proper names. The in-depth introduction sets the work in its literary and historical context, and provides an overview of Virgil's metrical and stylistic points.
The Odyssey (Bloomsbury Revelations)
by Homer Jasper Griffin Martin Hammond'Muse, tell me of a man: a man of much resource, who was made to wander far and long, after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy. Many were the men whose lands he saw and came to know their thinking: many too the miseries at sea which he suffered in his heart, as he sought to win his own life and the safe return of his companions.' Recounting the epic journey home of Odysseus from the Trojan War, The Odyssey - alongside its sister poem The Iliad - stands as the well-spring of Western Civilisation and culture, an inspiration to poets, writers and thinkers for thousands of years since. This authoritative prose translation by Martin Hammond brings Homer's great poem of homecoming to life as Odysseus battles through such familiar dangers as the cave of the Cyclops, the call of the Sirens and his hostile reception back in his native land of Ithaca.
Ovid, Metamorphoses X (Latin Texts)
by Ovid Lee FratantuonoMetamorphoses is an epic-style, narrative poem written in hexameters. Original, inventive and charming, the poem tells the stories of myths featuring transformations, from the creation of the universe to the death and deification of Julius Caesar. Book X contains some of Ovid's most memorable stories: Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion, Atalanta and Hippomenes (with the race for the golden apples), Venus and Adonis, and Myrrha.This edition contains the Latin text as well as in-depth commentary notes that provide language support, explain difficult words and phrases, highlight literary features and supply background knowledge. The introduction presents an overview of Ovid and the historical and literary context, as well as a plot synopsis and a discussion of the literary genre. Suggested reading is also included.
Auf der Suche nach dem Modernen: Eine komparatistische Verortung ausgewählter bulgarischer Lyriker im Kontext der europäischen Moderne (Schriften zur Weltliteratur/Studies on World Literature #8)
by Maria SlavtschevaDiese Monographie leistet einen erkenntnisreichen und vielfach anschlussfähigen Beitrag zur Osterweiterung der Komparatistik, genauer zur komparatistischen Forschungsdiskussion über die moderne Lyrik, indem sie ein Desiderat füllt. Mittels ihrer doppelten Suche, nach dem und den in Bulgarien rezipierten Modernen und nach in bulgarischer Sprache geschaffenem Modernem, sei es in der Form programmatischer, theoretischer oder poetischer Texte, integriert sie eine kleine Nationalliteratur in einen größeren wissenschaftlichen Kontext. Gleichzeitig räumt sie mit historisch gewordenen Interpretationen auf und bietet eine neue Sicht auf die behandelten Autoren. Die von der Verfasserin angefertigten Übersetzungen machen den deutschsprachigen Lesern viele bis dato nicht übertragene Werke zugänglich.
Liminale Lyrik: Freirhythmische Hymnen von Klopstock bis zur Gegenwart (Abhandlungen zur Literaturwissenschaft)
by Erik SchillingHymnische Dichtung gehört zu den ältesten Formen poetischen Ausdrucks. Götter werden angefleht, Helden besungen, die Schönheit gepriesen. Die Texte gestalten zu diesem Zweck ein Sprechen an den Grenzen des Menschen: Sie behaupten, das Äußerste zum Ausdruck zu bringen, was ein Mensch erfahren kann, in anthropologischer, sozialer, formaler, poetologischer und kommunikativer Hinsicht. Hymnische Dichtung ist daher liminale Lyrik. - Die Traditionslinie beginnt in der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert bei Klopstock, Goethe, Novalis und Hölderlin. Im 19. Jahrhundert umfasst sie etwa Heine, Platen und Nietzsche; im 20. Jahrhundert wird sie u.a. von George, Rilke, Lasker-Schüler, Celan oder Bachmann fortgeführt. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt diese Geschichte hymnischer Dichtung in der deutschen Literatur erstmals ebenso historisch umfassend wie systematisch präzise.
Theodor Fontane: Realismus, Redevielfalt, Ressentiment
by Norbert MecklenburgDas literarische Werk Theodor Fontanes ist erstaunlich gegenwärtig geblieben. Denn er gestaltete Individuen in gesellschaftlichen Verstrickungen, deren Muster bis heute fortbestehen. Dabei registrierte er, wie die jüngste Forschung zeigt, neue Entwicklungen in Politik, Kultur, Medien, Technik. Dieses Buch stellt Fontanes modernen Realismus als eine Kunst dar, Redevielfalt zu inszenieren: Gruppensprachen und Sprachspiele, Diskurse und Ideologien, Mentalitäten und Vorurteile. So regen seine Werke Nachdenken an über Weisheiten und Dummheiten, soziale Distinktionsregeln, Geschlechterrollen, Nationalstereotype. Sie führen sogar Ressentiments des Autors selbst wie etwa gegenüber Juden oft so vor, dass Leser sie durchschauen und sich von ihnen distanzieren können.
Gottfried von Straßburg: 'Tristan'
by Monika SchulzGottfried von Straßburg ist neben Hartmann von Aue und Wolfram von Eschenbach der meistgelesene Autor im Studium der Älteren deutschen Literatur und sein 'Tristan' ist einer der vielschichtigsten Texte dieser Zeit. Dieser Band bietet eine übersichtlich strukturierte Gesamtdarstellung des 'Tristan', er erläutert seine zentralen Themen und Motive ausführlich und verweist jeweils auf wichtige Forschungsfragen. Bei der Analyse werden zudem Vergleiche mit den Vorläuferversionen von Berol, Eilhart von Oberg und Thomas von Bretagne geboten. Ein Schlusskapitel behandelt weiterführende Aspekte wie etwa Passion und Gender und die Rezeption bei den Fortsetzern Gottfrieds.
Nietzsche und die Lyrik: Ein Kompendium
by Christian Benne Claus ZittelDas Kompendium nimmt zum ersten Mal die umfangreiche Lyrik Nietzsches in ihrer Gesamtheit in den Blick und gibt so einen Nachweis der Gleichberechtigung von Nietzsches Lyrik im Kontext seines Schaffens. Im Mittelpunkt stehen Beiträge, die einzelne Gedichte und lyrische Zusammenhänge durch genaue Lektüre unter der Prämisse erschließen, dass es sich bei ihnen um spezifisch philosophische Redeweisen handelt. Dazu zählt auch die Aufmerksamkeit gegenüber textueller Genese sowie der Präsentation der Gedichte. Dergestalt verfolgt der Band das Ziel, am Beispiel Nietzsches dem Verhältnis von Philosophie und Literatur in seiner ganzen Komplexität auf die Spur zu kommen: dem Dichterischen der Philosophie, dem Denkerischen der Dichtung.
Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer: On the Poetics of Community (Historicizing Modernism)
by Alex LatterDespite the brevity of its run and the diminutive size of its audience, The English Intelligencer is a key publication in the history of literary modernism in the British Isles. Emerging in the mid-1960s from a dissatisfaction with the prevailing norms of 'Betjeman's England', the young writers associated with it were catalysed by the example of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry as they sought to establish a revitalised modernist poetics. Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer gives the first full account of the extraordinary history of this publication, bringing to light extensive new archival material to establish an authoritative contextualisation of its operation and its relationship with post-war British poetry. This material provides compelling new insights into the work of the Intelligencer poets themselves and, more broadly, the continued presence of an international poetic modernism as a vital force in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.
Poetry: The Basics (The\basics Ser. (PDF))
by Jeffrey WainwrightNow in its third edition Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the world of poetry. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain more pleasure from poetry. Exploring poetry's relationship to everyday language and introducing major genres and technical aspects in an accessible way, it is a clear introduction to how different types of poetry work through the study of details and of whole poems. With a revised chapter on the different practices and ideas in the writing of poetry now, including sections on film poetry and digital poetics, this is a must read for all students of English Literature.
Poetry: The Basics (The\basics Ser. (PDF))
by Jeffrey WainwrightNow in its third edition Poetry: The Basics remains an engaging exploration of the world of poetry. Drawing on examples ranging from Chaucer to children's rhymes, Cole Porter to Carol Ann Duffy, and from around the English-speaking world, it shows how any reader can understand and gain more pleasure from poetry. Exploring poetry's relationship to everyday language and introducing major genres and technical aspects in an accessible way, it is a clear introduction to how different types of poetry work through the study of details and of whole poems. With a revised chapter on the different practices and ideas in the writing of poetry now, including sections on film poetry and digital poetics, this is a must read for all students of English Literature.
World Building: Discourse in the Mind (Advances in Stylistics)
by Joanna Gavins Ernestine LaheyWorld Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory.The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants.The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.
Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry
by Kevin HartReligious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith, that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of thinking about "experience" are given to us by phenomenology. Poetry and Revelation is the first study of religious poetry through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide range of “religious poems”, some medieval, some modern; some written in English, others written in European languages; some from America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and the nature of revelation itself.