A Guide to English: Literary Form

"The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally diverse, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa, influenced by great novelists working in other languages, and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, Michael Schmidt quotes from "artist practitioners," from letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists, and draws on their biographies, to invite us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggest how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English." - Publisher's description

"Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the pre-modern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call: Greek romances; Roman satires; medieval Sanskrit novels narrated by parrots; Byzantine erotic thrillers; 5000-page Arabian adventure novels; Icelandic sagas; delicate Persian novels in verse; Japanese war stories; even Mayan graphic novels. Throughout, Moore celebrates the innovators in fiction, tracing a continuum between these pre-modern experimentalists and their postmodern progeny. Irreverent, iconoclastic, informative, entertaining-The Novel: An Alternative History is a landmark in literary criticism that will encourage readers to rethink the novel." - Publisher's description

"Winner of the 2014 Christian Gauss Award for excellence in literary scholarship from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Having excavated the world's earliest novels in his previous book, literary historian Steven Moore explores in this sequel the remarkable flowering of the novel between the years 1600 and 1800-from Don Quixote to America's first big novel, an homage to Cervantes entitled Modern Chivalry. This is the period of such classic novels as Tom Jones, Candide, and Dangerous Liaisons, but beyond the dozen or so recognized classics there are hundreds of other interesting novels that appeared then, known only to specialists: Spanish picaresques, French heroic romances, massive Chinese novels, Japanese graphic novels, eccentric English novels, and the earliest American novels. These minor novels are not only worthy of attention in their own right, but also provide the context needed to appreciate why the major novels were major breakthroughs. The novel experienced an explosive growth spurt during these centuries as novelists experimented with different forms and genres: epistolary novels, romances, Gothic thrillers, novels in verse, parodies, science fiction, episodic road trips, and family sagas, along with quirky, unclassifiable experiments in fiction that resemble contemporary, avant-garde works. As in his previous volume, Moore privileges the innovators and outriders, those who kept the novel novel. This sequel, like its predecessor, is a "zestfully encyclopedic, avidly opinionated, and dazzlingly fresh history of the most 'elastic' of literary forms" (Booklist)." - from the publisher

"It has long been recognized that women writers played a significant role in the rise of the novel. Women and the Rise of the Novel is the first systematic theoretical study of early modern women's fiction showing how and why it helped shape the novel's identity. While most studies of the origin of the novel begin with the eighteenth century, Donovan traces women's literary traditions from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, focusing on the early modern period as a starting point. She examines works in Italian, French, and Spanish as well as English, highlighting the contributions of various women writers from Christine de Pizan to Jane Austen."--Jacket.

"The postmodernist novel has become famous for the extremes of its narcissistic involvement with language. In this challenging and wide-ranging new study, André Brink argues that this self-consciousness has been a defining characteristic of the novel since its inception. Taking as his starting point "the propensity for story" embedded in all language, he demonstrates that the old familiar novels may be the more startlingly modern, while postmodernist texts remain more firmly rooted in convention.
From the beginnings of the genre with Don Quixote, through "classic" novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and modern and postmodern texts of the twentieth, Brink performs a sweeping analysis of 500 years of the novel, including Moll Flanders, Emma, Madame Bovary, The Trial, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Possession. As an internationally recognized novelist, he brings a unique critical eye and enthusiasm to his exploration of the genre, offering the reader a refreshing and rewarding introduction to the novel and narrative theory." - Publisher's description

"This is a boldly original history of the novel from ancient Greece to the vibrant world of contemporary fiction. Thomas Pavel argues that the driving force behind the novel's evolution has been a rivalry between stories that idealize human behavior and those that ridicule and condemn it. Impelled by this conflict, the novel moved from depicting strong souls to sensitive hearts and, finally, to enigmatic psyches. Pavel makes his case by analyzing more than a hundred novels from Europe, North and South America, Asia, and beyond. The result is a wide-ranging survey of the novel and a provocative reinterpretation of its development." -- Publisher website.

"What do Pamela, Shamela, and Evelina have in common? Who is Coningsby? Where is The Moonstone? When does one need A Room of One's Own? Why is it that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? And just how good is the British novel? These are just a few of the questions answered in The Columbia History of the British Novel. John Richetti's comprehensive history takes us from the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century through its social and culture-conscious growing pains in the nineteenth century to its angst-ridden maturity in the twentieth century. Concise, cohesive, and complementary to any collection of must-read classics, The Columbia History of the British Novel challenges and enlightens us by examining canonical writers as well as women and postcolonial novelists." - Publisher's description

"What is ‘English’ about the English novel, and how has the idea of the English nation been shaped by the writers of fiction? How do the novel's profound differences from poetry and drama affect its representation of national consciousness? This book sets out to answer these questions by tracing English prose fiction from its late medieval origins through its stories of rogues and criminals, family rebellions and suffering heroines, to the present-day novels of immigration. Major novelists, from Daniel Defoe to authors of the late 20th century, have drawn on national history and mythology in novels that have pitted Cavalier against Puritan, Tory against Whig, region against nation, and domesticity against empire. The novel is deeply concerned with the fate of the nation, but almost always at variance with official and ruling-class perspectives on English society. This literary history outlines the English novel's distinctive, sometimes paradoxical, and often subversive view of national character and identity." - Publisher description

"This multifaceted picture of the British novel in its formative decades provides an indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century novel, and its place within the culture of its time. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. Sentimental and Gothic fiction, and fiction by women, are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett and Burney." - Publisher's description

"In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, a series of specially commissioned essays examine the work of Charles Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, and other canonical writers, as well as that of such writers as Olive Schreiner, Wilkie Collins, and H. Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. The collection combines the literary study of the novel as a form with analysis of the material aspects of its readership and production, and a series of thematic and contextual perspectives that examine Victorian fiction in the light of social and cultural concerns relevant both to the period itself and to the direction of current literary and cultural studies. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading."--Jacket.

"This guide looks at how the Victorian novel has been read over the past hundred years. Unlike other critical guides, it not only provides students with examples of significant strands of criticism, but also helps them to make sense of these articles and extracts by means of a narrative and critical framework. The novelists referred to are the acknowledged great names of Victorian fiction, including the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell. Thomas Hardy, Henry James, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope." "A short opening section describing and representing early critical responses is complemented by a longer second section looking at current themes in criticism, such as genre, gender, politics, science, language, the canon, and modes of production. The volume as a whole enhances students critical repertoire, encourages them to recognize the situatedness of all criticism, and helps them to engage with critical debates about the Victorian novel."--Jacket.

"A Very Great Profession, first published in 1983, looks at women like Katharine in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day ("Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition… She lived at home") and Laura, the heroine of Brief Encounter, women whose lives and habits were wonderfully recorded in the fiction of the time. Drawing on the novels to illuminate themes such as domestic life, romantic love, sex, psychoanalysis, the Great War and ‘surplus’ women, A Very Great Profession uses the work of numerous women writers to present a portrait, though their fiction, of middle-class Englishwomen in the period between the wars." - from the publisher

"This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present day. In a set of original essays by renowned scholars from all over the world, the volume extends important critical debates and frames new ones. Offering new views of American classics, it also breaks new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as science fiction and mystery novels - in the creation of the literary tradition. One of the original features of this book is the dialogue between the essays, highlighting cross-currents between authors and their works as well as across historical periods. While offering a narrative of the development of the genre, the History reflects the multiple methodologies that have informed readings of the American novel and will change the way scholars and readers think about American literary history"-- Provided by publisher"This ambitious literary history traces the American novel from its emergence in the late eighteenth century to its diverse incarnations in the multi-ethnic, multi-media culture of the present. Original essays by internationally renowned scholars present fresh readings of American classics and break new ground to show the role of popular genres - such as science fiction and mystery novels - in the creation of the U.S. literary tradition. In an exciting departure from its predecessors, the essays in this book talk to each other. Their dialogue highlights surprising connections within and across eras. As a collective, interwoven chronicle of the nation's dominant literary genre, The Cambridge History of the American Novel will change the way we think about the history - and the future - of American literature"-- Provided by publisher

"This Companion examines the full range and vigor of the American novel. From the American exceptionalism of James Fenimore Cooper to the apocalyptic post-Americanism of Cormac McCarthy, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars and critics chronicle the major aesthetic innovations that have shaped the American novel over the past two centuries. The essays evaluate the work, life and legacy of influential American novelists including Melville, Twain, James, Wharton, Cather, Faulkner, Ellison, Pynchon and Morrison, while situating them within the context of their literary predecessors and successors. The volume also highlights less familiar, though equally significant writers such as Theodore Dreiser and Djuna Barnes, providing a balanced and wide-ranging survey of use to students, teachers and general readers of American literature"-- Provided by publisher

"The idea of 'the great American novel' continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. Lawrence Buell demonstrates that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The dream of the G.A.N., as Henry James nicknamed it, crystallized soon after the Civil War. In in-depth readings of selected contenders from the 1850s onward, Buell delineates four 'scripts' for G.A.N. candidates. One, illustrated by The Scarlet Letter, is the adaptation of the novel's story-line by later writers, often in ways that are contrary to the original author's own design. Other aspirants, including The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man, engage the American Dream of remarkable transformation from humble origins. A third script, seen in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Beloved, is the family saga that grapples with racial and other social divisions. Finally, mega-novels from Moby-Dick to Gravity's Rainbow feature assemblages of characters who dramatize in microcosm the promise and pitfalls of democracy. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction"--Jacket.

"The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel presents landmark essays combining new and current scholarship covering one hundred fifty years of novel writing in the U.S. These newly commissioned essays examine eighty African American novels-the well-known and those recently recovered or acknowledged--grouped in terms of theme, structure, period, and influence, and in terms of their relationship to relevant traditions. Discussions of the slave narrative, coming of age, vernacular modernism, and the post-colonial novel are intended to help readers gain a better appreciation of the novel's diversity and complexity." - Publisher description

"Dreaming Out Loud brings together essays by many of the most well-known and respected African American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, discussing various aspects of the vocation, craft, and art of writing fiction. Though many of the writers included here are also accomplished poets, essayists, and playwrights, this collection and the essays it contains remains focused on the novel as a genre and an art form. Some essays explore the challenges of being an African American writer in the United States, broadly addressing aesthetic and racial prejudice in American publishing and literature and its changing face over the decades. Others are more specific and personal, recounting how the authors came to be a reader and writer in a culture that did not always encourage them to do so. Some are more general and focus on practice and craft, while still other essays offer detailed behind-the-scenes accounts of how famous novels, such as Native Son, Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and The Color Purple, came to life. Ranging from the Harlem Renaissance, through the Civil Rights movement, and into the twenty-first century, this anthology explores what it has meant to be an African American novelist over the past hundred years. Found within are essays by twenty-one African American novelists, including Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, National Book Award winners Ralph Ellison and Charles Johnson, Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Walker and James Alan McPherson, and well-known canonical writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Margaret Walker. Dreaming Out Loud seeks to inspire writers and readers alike, while offering a fascinating and important portrait of novelists at work in their own words."--Publisher's description.

"A frequent complaint about contemporary American fiction is that too often it puts off readers in ways they find difficult to fathom. Books such as Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, and Don DeLillo's Underworld seem determined to upset, disgust, or annoy their readers--or to disorient them by shunning traditional plot patterns and character development. Kathryn Hume calls such works "aggressive fictions." Why would authors risk alienating their readers--and why should readers persevere? Looking beyond the theory-based justifications that critics often provide for such fiction, Hume offers a commonsense guide for the average reader who wants to better understand and appreciate books that might otherwise seem difficult to enjoy. In her reliable and sympathetic guide, Hume considers roughly forty works of recent American fiction, including books by William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Chuck Palahniuk, and Cormac McCarthy. Hume gathers "attacks" on the reader into categories based on narrative structure and content. Writers of some aggressive fictions may wish to frustrate easy interpretation or criticism. Others may try to induce certain responses in readers. Extreme content deployed as a tactic for distancing and alienating can actually produce a contradictory effect: for readers who learn to relax and go with the flow, the result may well be exhilaration rather than revulsion." - from the publisher

"What Has Happened to Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism? Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction. Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—if you like this, you might also like ...—has reorganized the fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works. This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica. Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place." - from the publisher

"Africa's strong tradition of storytelling has long been an expression of an oral narrative culture. African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka and J. M. Coetzee have adapted these older forms to develop and enhance the genre of the novel, in a shift from the oral mode to print. Comprehensive in scope, these new essays cover the fiction in the European languages from North Africa and Africa south of the Sahara, as well as in Arabic. They highlight the themes and styles of the African novel through an examination of the works that have either attained canonical status - an entire chapter is devoted to the work of Chinua Achebe - or can be expected to do so. Including a guide to further reading and a chronology, this is the ideal starting-point for students of African and world literatures." - Publisher description

"In the Victorian age there were hundreds of Irish authors who wrote thousands of novels. Some had Irish themes, others did not. Many were highly popular with what was largely a British reading audience. However, their achievements were disparaged and their work largely forgotten from the era of W. B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, with its culturally nationalist agenda, onwards. This book is the first comprehensive study of these writers, based on a reading of around 370 novels by 150 authors. They include writers whose names continue to be remembered, among them William Carleton, the peasant novelist who wielded much influence, and Charles Lever, whose serious work was destroyed by the slur of ‘rollicking’, together with Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, George Moore, Emily Lawless, Somerville and Ross, Bram Stoker and three of the leading authors from the new-woman movement, Sarah Grand, Iota, and George Egerton. The book examines their writing in a variety of contexts: the political, economic, and cultural developments of the time; the vicissitudes of the reading audience; the realities of a publishing industry that was for the most part London-based; the often difficult circumstances of the lives of the novelists; and the ever-changing genre of the novel itself, to which Irish authors often made a contribution. Politics, history, religion, gender and, particularly, land, over which nineteenth-century Ireland was deeply divided, featured as key themes for fiction. Finally, this book will engage with the critical debate of recent times concerning the supposed failure of realism in the nineteenth-century Irish novel, looking for deeper causes than have hitherto been offered and discovering occasions on which realism turned out to be possible." - Publisher description

"Studies of Irish fiction are still scanty in contrast to studies of Irish poetry and drama. Attempting to fill a large critical vacancy, Irish Novels 1890-1940 is a comprehensive survey of popular and minor fiction (mainly novels) published between 1890 and 1922, a critical period in Irish cultural and political history. Since these sixty-odd writers have rarely, if ever, been discussed (Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker are the chief exceptions), the book opens up for further exploration a literary landscape, hitherto neglected, perhaps even unsuspected. This new landscape should alter the familiar perspectives on Irish literature of the period, first of all by adding genre fiction (science fiction, detective novels, ghost stories, New Woman fiction, and Great War novels) to the Irish syllabus, secondly by demonstrating the immense contribution of women writers to popular and mainstream Irish fiction."--Jacket.

"From Ram Mohan Ray to Arundhati Roy, two hundred years of Indian literature in English are covered in this volume, essential for anyone interested in this increasingly important literary tradition. Spanning a period from 1800 to the present, this collection of historical essays covers the canonical Indian poets, novelists, and dramatists writing in English—names like Rudyard Kipling, Rabrindanath Tagore, R.K. Narayan, and Salman Rushdie—as well as lesser-known literary figures—scientists, social reformers, anthropologists—who have made significant contributions to the evolution of Indian literature in English. The essays in this volume are arranged chronologically and are devoted to a single author, a group of authors, or to a genre. The book includes 150 rare and interesting photographs and sketches of writers and their contexts." - Publisher's description

Note: Cf. these essays on the Indian novel in English: "The beginnings of the Indian novel" by Meenakshi Mukherjee; "Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s" by Leela Gandhi; "Novelists of the 1950s and 1960s" by Shyamala A. Narayan and Jon Mee; and "After midnight : the novel in the 1980s and 1990s" by Jon Mee.

"A comprehensive overview of the English short story, charting its origins and development through to the present day"-- Provided by publisher."The Cambridge History of the English Short Story is the first comprehensive volume to capture the literary history of the English short story. Charting the origins and generic development of the English short story to the present day, the historical development of the genre is presented in the first history of its kind. There is no single book that provides such an overview. Written by international experts in the field, this book covers numerous transnational and trans-historical connections between writers, modes and forms of transmission. Suitable for English Literature students and scholars of the English Short Story generally, this book has the potential to become a standard work of reference within its field"-- Provided by publisher.

"A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past two centuries. Written by leading critics in the field, and edited by two major scholars, it explores a wide range of writers, from Edgar Allen Poe and Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, and Charles Chesnutt at the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth the focus is on such important Modern writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright before moving into the contemporary period with essays on Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow, and Denise Chávez. Contributions with a broader focus address groups of multiethnic, Asian, and Jewish writers. All the essays set the short story in context, focusing on the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. The Companion takes account of cutting edge approaches to literary studies and contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, embracing genres such as ghost and detective fiction, cycles of interrelated short fiction, and comic, social and political stories. The volume also reflects the diverse communities that have adopted this literary form and made it their own, featuring entries on a variety of feminist and multicultural traditions. This volume presents an important new consideration of the role of the short story in the literary history of American literature." - Publisher description

"The life of an immigrant living in America is a difficult one, as immigrants often find themselves struggling with their families, their sense of identity, and the balance between past and present cultures. Essays in this volume review and analyze contemporary short stories by such authors as Junot Diaz, Sui Sin Far, William Saroyan, Isaac Bashevis, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Yi-yun Li, Ernesto Quiñonez, and Ha Jin. The United States has long prided itself on being a nation of immigrants, and certainly immigrants or their immediate descendants have long made valuable contributions to the nation’s literature. Wave after wave of immigrants from many nations—at first mainly from Europe, but then (more recently), mostly from other continents or regions—have added both to the population and to the culture of the country. Immigrant writers and their children have brought with them both memories and dreams, both experiences and aspirations. Sometimes they have found their status as immigrants exciting; sometimes they have found it exasperating; usually their attitudes have been mixed. In the process of sharing their thoughts and experiences with readers of fiction, they have often enriched both American literature and the English language." - Publisher description

The Pushcart Prize was named among the most influential projects in the history of American publishing by Publishers Weekly.
Winner of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award
"How has this series, published from an 8' x 8' backyard shack and staffed by hundreds of unpaid volunteers across the country, survived and thrived for decades? The commercial world informs us that this is an impossible dream. Oligarchs pick our entertainments, our celebrities, our presidents and our wars. We children of the spirit are yesterday's news, if we ever were news. Yet the Pushcart Prize, the small presses and authors we honor, have flourished. The reason? Spirit will never be quelled, certainly not by big bucks and bluster. Each edition of the Pushcart Prize is evidence of this. Many new presses and dozens of new authors emerge annually and are honored in classrooms, bookstores and libraries around the world. And so the Pushcart Prize has been renewed since our first edition in 1976. We celebrate this renewal every year. This is our joy." - from the publisher

"The Best American Short Stories of the Century brings together the best of the best - fifty-five extraordinary stories that represent a century's worth of unsurpassed accomplishments in this quintessentially American literary genre. Here are the stories that have endured the test of time: masterworks by such writers as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Saroyan, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Eudora Welty, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, and others. These are the writers who have shaped and defined the landscape of the American short story, who have unflinchingly explored all aspects of the human condition, and whose works will continue to speak to us as we enter the next century."--Jacket.

"The O. Henry Prize is the oldest major prize for short fiction in America. Awarded annually since 1919 (with a break in 2020), the prize seeks to provide a prominent platform for short story writers from all around the world and at all points in their careers. The winners’ stories are collected and published annually by Anchor Books." - Publisher's website

"The Best American Short Stories is the longest running and best-selling series of short fiction in the country." - Publisher's description for 100 Years Of The Best American Short Stories (2015) edited by Lorrie Moore

"The British short story tradition is probably the richest, most varied and historically extensive in the world. This new anthology celebrates the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones, from the story's origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding, to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle and Edwardian period, ending with the First World War. Including the most famous authors as well as some magnificent, little-known stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals, these stories are by turns topical and playful, ghostly and theatrical, rumbustious and sublime." -- Provided by publisher.

"A spectacular treasury of the best British short stories published in the last twenty years. We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of places in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted a host of remarkable, subversive, entertaining and innovative writers. Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive 'Penguin Book of British Short Stories', has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day." - Publisher description

"Over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth edition--the first new edition in almost twenty years--reflects recent changes in literary and cultural studies, providing up-to-date coverage and giving greater attention to the international aspects of poetry, all while preserving the best of the previous volumes. At well over a million words and more than 1,000 entries, the Encyclopedia has unparalleled breadth and depth, offering expert synthesis and indispensable bibliographies." - from the publisher

"To bring coverage into the twenty-first century, a new two-volume set on Contemporary Poets has been added to the Critical Survey of Poetry. By adding this supplemental set to your foundation volumes, you’ll be adding a wealth of new information on the most influential and celebrated contemporary poets from around the world. Critical Survey of Poetry: Contemporary Poets profiles the most influential and celebrated contemporary poets around the globe. Salem’s comprehensive coverage of poets and poetry continues with this two-volume supplement to the Critical Survey of Poetry (14 volumes, 2011). Containing 200 all new entries in two volumes, this collection of biographical profiles brings the Critical Survey up to the present day. The articles detail the lives and works of poets who have been active in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who did not appear in the original 14-volume set." - from the publisher

"Now thoroughly revamped with a diverse selection of poetic voices from the last fifty years, this third edition of Rhian Williams's bestselling book, The Poetry Toolkit guides readers through key terms, genres and concepts that help them to develop a richer, more sophisticated approach to reading, thinking and writing about poetry. Combining an easy-to-use reference format with in-depth practice readings and further exercises, the book helps students master the study of poetry for themselves. As well as featuring more contemporary voices, the third edition of The Poetry Toolkit includes an expanded practical section giving guidance on close reading, comparative reading and advice on writing critically about poetry." - from the publisher

"Poetry has always given rise to interpretation, judgment, and controversy. Indeed, the history of poetry criticism is as rich and varied a journey as the history of poetry itself. But classic writings such as Emerson's essay "The Poet" and Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass serve as more than a critical "call and response": the works are striking examples of how the finest poets themselves have written on poetics and the works of their peers and predecessors—revealing, in the process, much about the theory and passion behind their own works. Spanning thousands of years and including thirty-three of the most influential critical essays ever written, Classic Writings on Poetry is the first major anthology of criticism devoted exclusively to poetry. Beginning with a survey of the history of poetics and providing an introduction and brief biography for each reading, esteemed poet and critic William Harmon takes readers from Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Poetics to the Norse mythology of Snorri Sturluson's Skáldskaparmál. John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy and Shelley's A Defence of Poetry are included, as is an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, arriving, finally, at the modernist sensibility of "Poetic Reality and Critical Unreality," by Laura (Riding) Jackson. For anyone interested in the art and artifice of poetry, Classic Writings on Poetry is a journey well worth taking." - from the publisher

"Miller Williams' "Patterns of Poetry" is an encyclopedia of the forms used by poets throughout the history of English, from blank verse to hymnal measure, from englyn penfyr to the double dactyl, from the clerihew to the sonnet. Each form is introduced with a brief discussion of its origin and other relevant history, such as its relationship to other forms. This is followed by a graphic presentation of its scansion, metrics, and rhyme scheme. Each section concludes with a sample poem showing how the form actually works. In many cases more than one poem is offered, to show the contrasting ways a pattern has served poets of different centuries or the wide range of tonal possibilities even a simple form can exhibit among contemporary poets." -- From publisher's description.

"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 the 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 meter, as well as a detailed introduction and accessible, stimulating chapters on lyric, the sonnet, elegy, soliloquy, dramatic monologue, and ballad and narrative." - from the publisher

"A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives. How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry and feeling. In language at once acute and emotional, National Book Critics Circle award-winning distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including work by Pablo Neruda, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath, among many others, Hirsch discovers the true meaning of their words and ideas and brings their sublime message home into our hearts." - from the publisher

"One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades worth of Helen Vendler's essays, book reviews, and occasional prose including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture in a single volume. Taken together, they serve as a reminder that if the arts and the patina of culture they cast over the world were deleted, we would, in Wallace Stevens's memorable formulation, inhabit a geography of the dead. These essays also remind us that without the enthusiasm, critiques, and books of each century's scholars, there would be imperfect perpetuation and transmission of culture. All of the modern poets who have long preoccupied Vendler - Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham - are fully represented, as well as others, including Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, and Mark Ford. And Vendler reaches back into the poetic tradition, tracing the influence of Keats, Yeats, Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and others in today's poets. As ever, her readings help to clarify the imaginative novelty of poems, giving us a rich sense not only of their formal aspects but also of the passions underlying their linguistic and structural invention. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar is an eloquent plea for the centrality, both in humanistic study and modern culture, of poetry's beautiful, subversive, sustaining, and demanding legacy." - from the publisher

"Frank Kermode is the preeminent practitioner of the art of criticism in the English-speaking world. As such his task entails the readiness to evaluate in general terms the widest range of texts, both ancient and modern, and also the ability to make public sense of the seemingly arcane debates about theories of literature as they pertain to the ongoing process of evaluation. It has been Kermode’s distinction to make a virtue―as all the best critics have done―of the necessarily occasional nature of his profession. That virtue is evident in every page of this set of essays. This is a book in which Kermode asks the reader to share his pleasure in the literature of a set of major writers―Milton, Eliot, Stevens. He vividly evokes Milton after the Restoration of Charles II, with a fine speculative discussion of the interplay between his personal and political circumstances and the preoccupations of his poetry. He sets before us T. S. Eliot living in a condition of permanent exile, Wallace Stevens in his old age dwelling poetically in Connecticut, and author/critic William Empson, whose singular career was marked by both the pleasure of the text and the delight in conceptual issues that characterizes so much of the contemporary taste for theory. Other essays draw our attention to debates on the literary canon and problems of biblical criticism and their implications for the study of narrative in particular and the interpretation of secular literary texts in general. These are professional essays that nevertheless defy the excesses of modern professionalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the polemical Prologue to the book, in which Kermode sorts out the good from the meretricious in contemporary criticism. He argues that some proclaimed theorists “seem largely to have lost interest in literature,” while the best, like Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, have never lost what Kermode prizes most highly, the very appetite or hunger for poetry and literature. Always readable, elegant even on gnarled matters, and courteous in contexts where others are bad-tempered, An Appetite for Poetry is the work of one of the most distinguished minds of our time. In reaffirming the professional responsibilities of criticism now being neglected, it displays a generous hospitality to new ideas." - from the publisher

"Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the leader of any critical "camp," his argument that all literary texts are a response to those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory in this country. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature and has sold over 17,000 copies in paperback since 1984. Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorably quotable, Bloom's book maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded--neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics. This second edition contains a new Introduction, which explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past twenty years.criticism of the past twenty years. Here, Bloom asserts that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation he calls "poetic misprision." The influence-anxiety does not so much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem, or essay. In other words, without Keats's reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, we could not have Keats's odes and sonnets and his two Hyperions. Given the enormous attention generated by Bloom's controversial The Western Canon, this new edition is certain to find a readymade audience among the new generation of scholars, students, and layreaders interested in the Bloom cannon." - from the publisher

"Benedetto Croce's influence pervades Anglo-Saxon culture, but, ironically, before Giovanni Gullace heeded the call of his colleagues and provided this urgently needed translation of La Poesia, speakers of English had no access to Croce's major work and final rendering of his esthetic theory. Aesthetic, published in 1902 and translated in 1909, represents most of what the English-speaking world knows about Croce's theory. It is, asserts Gullace, "no more than a first sketch of a thought that developed, clarified, and corrected itself through new literary experience and more mature reflection." During the 34 years between Aesthetic and La Poesia (1936), for example, Croce added a striking new element to his thought: the analysis of prose literature. Gullace's introduction to La Poesia constitutes a major undertaking in its own right. It is aimed at acquainting the reader with the evolution of Croce's thought and at explaining the relationship between this final work and the philosopher's previous work in esthetic theory and literary criticism. La Poesia is divided into two parts, text and postscripts. The text consists of four chapters: Poetry and Literature; The Life of Poetry; Criticism and History of Poetry; and The Formation of the Poet and the Precepts. Croce saw the postscripts "as a re¬laxed conversation after the tension of theoretical exposition. In Gullace's translation the text and relevant postscripts appear conveniently side by side in a double column. Gullace has annotated both text and postscripts"--Publisher description.

"William Logan has been a thorn in the side of American poetry for more than three decades. Though he has been called the "most hated man in American poetry," his witty and articulate reviews have reminded us how muscular good reviewing can be. These new essays and reviews take poetry at its word, often finding in its hardest cases the greatest reasons for hope. Logan begins with a devastating polemic against the wish to have critics announce their aesthetics every time they begin a review. "The Unbearable Rightness of Criticism" is a plea to read those critics who got it wrong when they reviewed Lyrical Ballads or Leaves of Grass or The Waste Land. Sometimes, he argues, such critics saw exactly what these books were--they saw the poems plain yet often did not see that they were poems. In such wrongheaded criticism, readers can recover the ground broken by such groundbreaking books. Logan looks again at the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Frank O'Hara, and Philip Larkin; at the letters of T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell; and at new books by Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney. Always eager to overturn settled judgments, Logan argues that World War II poets were in the end better than the much-lauded poets of World War I. He revisits the secretly revised edition of Robert Frost's notebooks, showing that the terrible errors ruining the first edition still exist. The most remarkable essay is "Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp," which prints for the first time her early adolescent verse along with the intimate letters written to the first girl she loved." - from the publisher

"An illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe) "This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's preface The Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues." - from the publisher

"In this collection of essays, consummate poet Wallace Stevens reflects upon his art. His aim is not to produce a work of criticism or philosophy, or a mere discussion of poetic technique. As he explains in his introduction, his ambition in these various pieces, published in different times and places, aimed higher than that, in the direction of disclosing "poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words." Stevens proves himself as eloquent and scintillating in prose as in poetry, as he both analyzes and demonstrates the essential act of repossessing reality through the imagination." - from the publisher

"When Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" appeared in the Atlantic in 1991, it sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion over the role of the poet in today's world - a dialogue in which Gioia participated on radio, television, and in print. One of the more stimulating and provocative figures on our literary horizon, and the author of two widely praised books of poems, Gioia is also an essayist of wide renown. This collection of essays demonstrates that Gioia's talents do not lie in the area of controversy alone. Can Poetry Matter? is an old-fashioned sort of literary book, part literary criticism, part social commentary, and part plain good reading. Addressing such subjects as the poet as businessman and New Formalism as the real avant-garde, it also includes pieces on the life and work of such diverse figures as Robinson Jeffers, Weldon Kees, Robert Bly, and Wallace Stevens. In an age when literary discourse often seems either bleached of any real content or academic to the point of inaccessibility, the essays in Can Poetry Matter? are certain to educate, provoke, and, perhaps most of all, delight readers. They also establish Dana Gioia as one of the foremost cultural observers of his generation." - from the publisher

"Proofs & Theories is a long-awaited first gathering of essays by one of this country's most brilliant poets. Like her poems, the prose of Ms. Gluck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for The Wild Iris, is compressed, fastidious, fierce, alert, and absolutely unconsoled. The force of her thought is apparent everywhere in her writing and whether she is contemplating - skeptically - the critical currency of ideas like 'courage' and 'sincerity,' T.S. Eliot's reduced reputation as a poet of impersonality, the loyalties of the objectivist George Oppen, or the ferocity in the headlong art of Sylvia Plath, there is something exhilarating about her seriousness, spare, austere, mind-clearing, and adamantly alive." - from the publisher

"Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading A Book Is A Sign Of Order In The World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, 'Madness, Rack, and Honey' resists definition, demanding instead an utter - and utterly pleasurable - immersion."

"No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible" - from the publisher

"In this stunning volume of epic breadth, Michael Schmidt connects the lives and works of more than 300 poets over the last 700 years--spanning distant shores from Scotland to Australia to the Caribbean, all sharing the English language. Schmidt reveals how each poet has transformed "a common language of poetry" into the rustic rhythms and elegiac ballads, love sonnets, and experimental postmodern verse that make up our lyrical canon. A comprehensive guided tour that is lively and always accessible, Lives of the Poets illuminates our most transcendent literary tradition." - from the publisher

"The contemporary reader of English poetry is able to take pleasure in the sounds and movements of the English language in works written over the past eight centuries, and to find poems that convey powerful emotions and vivid images from this entire period. This book investigates the ways in which poets have exploited the resources of the language as a spoken medium - its characteristic rhythms, its phonetic qualities, its deployment of syntax - to write verse that continues to move and delight. The chapters in the first of the two parts examine a number of issues relating to poetic form: the resurgence of interest in formal questions in recent years, the role of syntactic phrasing in the operation of poetry, the function of rhyme, and the relation between sound and sense. The second part is concerned with rhythm and metre, explaining and demonstrating 'beat prosody' as a tool of poetic analysis, and discussing three major traditions in English versification: the free four-beat form used in much popular verse, the controlled power of the iambic pentameter, and the twentieth-century invention of free verse." - from the publisher

"Peter Clemoes brings a lifetime's close study of Anglo-Saxon texts to this appreciation of Old English poetry, with an alternative interpretation which relates the poetry to both the entire Anglo-Saxon way of thinking and the structures of its society. Clemoes proposes a dynamic principle of Old English poetry, very different from the common notion of formulas slotted into poems for stylistic variation. In extended discussions of particular poems and images as well as of changes in language, he shows how the poetic medium became a vehicle for increasing transformation to Christian literacy and to that religion's conceptions of the natural world, morality, and individuality. Carefully thought out and elegantly written, this book is also accessible to students: its numerous quotations are accompanied by modern English translations."

"Readings in Medieval Poetry is a linked collection of essays on such poems as the Song of Roland, King Horn, Havelok, Sir Orfeo, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde, the alliterative Morte Arthure, The Siege of Jerusalem, Purity, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. The connecting purpose is to open up a variety of kinds of medieval poetry to modern readers; and, while the methods used vary with the kinds of poetry being discussed, they frequently involve, along with historical treatments in terms of medieval practices and systems of ideas, the adoption and adaptation of theoretical frameworks borrowed from outside the medieval field." - from the publisher

"The meter of Middle English alliterative poetry, Thomas Cable contends, holds the key to a reinterpretation of both Old English meter and iambic pentameter, which in turn provides a new understanding of Middle English meter itself. Drawing upon recent insights in linguistics, Cable articulates a revolutionary theory of rhythm in English poetry from its beginnings through the Renaissance and beyond. Cable's discussion moves from the rhythms of Old English poetry and prose to the poetry of Chaucer and the Alliterative Revival, to Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. He demonstrates that Middle English poetry does not show the continuity of tradition that standard authorities have asserted. With the Norman Conquest of 1066 came a clear break, and what followed was a drastic misreading by the poets of what had come before. Throughout the book, Cable constantly asks fundamental questions regarding the intentions of the poet, the impact of the perceived metrical tradition upon that poet, and, with reference to Peircean abduction, the possibility of constructing any metrical theory, especially one from the distant past. The answers and their implications - metrical, cognitive, and philosophical - provide the foundation for a new understanding of the creation and evolution of English versification from the seventh century to the present. The English Alliterative Tradition is a major and controversial study in medieval English poetics that illustrates and clarifies key ideas of the New Philology. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Old and Middle English, prosody, and historical linguistics."

"George Puttenham's Art of English Poesy is a foundational work of English Renaissance criticism and literary theory. Rich in detail about the nature, purpose, and functions of poetry as well as the poet's character and goals, it is also a valuable historical document, offering generous insight into Elizabethan court culture, implicitly on display in the attitudes and values of the writer. His illustrative anecdotes enable us to watch European courtiers negotiating their social and political relationships with one another as well as with rulers and social inferiors. The editors' masterly essay introduces Puttenham to modern readers and situates The Art of English Poesy in the context of the rhetorical theory, poetics, and courtly conduct of its time." - from the publisher

"An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy) is a work of literary criticism by Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney. It was written in approximately 1580 and first published in 1595, after his death. It is generally believed that he was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in 1579, but Sidney primarily addresses more general objections to poetry, such as those of Plato. In his essay, Sidney integrates a number of classical and Italian precepts on fiction. The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The work also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan stage. Sidney states that there "have been three general kinds" of poetry: (i) "the chief" being religious which "imitate[d] the inconceivable excellencies of God", (ii) philosophical and (iii) imaginative poetry written by "right poets" who "teach and delight". - from Wikipedia

"The Model of Poesy is one of the most exciting literary discoveries of recent years. A manuscript treatise on poetics written by William Scott in 1599, at the end of the most revolutionary decade in English literary history, it includes rich discussions of the works of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and their contemporaries. Scott's work presents a powerful and coherent theoretical account of all aspects of poetics, from the nature of representation to the rules of versification, with a commitment to relating theory to contemporary practice. For Scott, any theory of literature must make sense not of the classics but of what English writers are doing now: Scott is at the same time the most scholarly and the most relevant of English Renaissance critics. In this groundbreaking edition, Gavin Alexander presents a text of The Model of Poesy framed by a detailed introduction and an extensive commentary, which together demonstrate the range and value of Scott's thought" - from the publisher

"This Companion seeks to bridge the current gap between Shakespeare's poems and plays, as well as between his 'theatrical' and his 'poetical' achievements. Chapters discuss the Sonnets, individual narrative poems, the topic of poetry in the plays, the special contexts important for viewing 'Shakespearean poetry', and the afterlife of this topic. The book presents Shakespeare as a pioneering author of poems and plays, one who remains committed to the absolute intersection of the poetical with the theatrical within the English and European tradition on both stage and page." - from the publisher

"English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century, an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This introductory Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, provides individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell, together with general essays on the political, social and religious context, and the relationship of poetry to the mutations and developments of genre and tradition. of the early seventeenth century set in its cultural and ideological context." - from the publisher

"This study presents a comprehensive view of the epic tradition from Homer through Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, and the host of minor writers who helped create the idiom within which these writers worked, to the great achievements of Milton. Detailed studies of individual authors in historical context link to develop a powerful explanation of how and why the epic changed from Homer to Milton." - from the publisher

"The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England explores how attitudes toward, and explanations of, human emotions changed in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Typically categorized as "literary" writers, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Milton were all active in the period's reappraisal of the single emotion that, due to their efforts, would become the passion most associated with the writing life: melancholy. By emphasizing the shared concerns of the "non-literary" and "literary" texts produced by these figures, Douglas Trevor asserts that quintessentially "scholarly" practices such as glossing texts and appending sidenotes shape the methods by which these same writers come to analyze their own moods. He also examines early modern medical texts, dramaturgical representations of learned depressives such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the opposition to materialistic accounts of the passions voiced by Neoplatonists such as Edmund Spenser. By so doing, he details the growing cultural signification of sadness in Renaissance England, and considers what the wide-ranging writings of self-described melancholics tell us about the era in which they lived." - from the publisher

"For readers daunted by the formal structures and rhetorical sophistication of eighteenth-century English poetry, this introduction by John Sitter brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700-1785 triumphantly to life. Sitter begins by offering a guide to poetic forms ranging from heroic couplets to blank verse, then demonstrates how skilfully male and female poets of the period used them as vehicles for imaginative experience, feelings and ideas. He then provides detailed analyses of individual works by poets from Finch, Swift and Pope, to Gray, Cowper and Barbauld. An approachable introduction to English poetry and major poets of the eighteenth century, this book provides a grounding in poetic analysis useful to students and general readers of literature." - from the publisher

"The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry analyzes major premises, preoccupations, and practices of English poets writing from 1700 to the 1790s. These specially commissioned essays avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to look at the century afresh. Chapters consider such large poetic themes as nature, the city, political passions, the relation of death to desire and dreams, appeals to an imagined future, and the meanings of "sensibility." Other chapters explore historical developments such as the connection between poetic couplets and conversation, the conditions of publication, changing theories of poetry and imagination, growing numbers of women poets and readers, the rise of a self-consciously national tradition, and the place of lyric poetry in thought and practice. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for scholars and students." - from the publisher

"This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms. Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women's poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet." - from the publisher

"Edited by George Birkbeck Hill. With brief memoir of Birkbeck Hill by Harold Spencer Scott." -title page

"Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), alternatively known by the shorter title Lives of the Poets, is a work by Samuel Johnson comprising short biographies and critical appraisals of 52 poets, most of whom lived during the eighteenth century. These were arranged, approximately, by date of death. [...] In mentioning this reading of Johnson's Lives at the start of his own article in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, Greg Clingham describes the topics covered there as 'like a list of most of the important issues in literary history during the years 1600–1781' as well as something like a social, philosophical and political history of that era. But Philip Smallwood, commenting on the Lives in The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800, nuances this by pointing out that Johnson did not set out to produce a literary history. His main preoccupation is with how literary work is in a state of flux and advanced by individuals writing within a historical context. Consideration of their lives is therefore justified as it helps the reader in a different time to appreciate the significance of the works described." - from Wikipedia

"The best way to learn about Romantic poetry is to plunge in and read a few Romantic poems. This book guides the new reader through this experience, focusing on canonical authors - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Blake and Shelley - whilst also including less familiar figures as well. Each chapter explains the history and development of a genre or sets out an important context for the poetry, with a wealth of practical examples. Michael Ferber emphasizes connections between poets as they responded to each other and to great literary, social and historical changes around them. A unique appendix resolves most difficulties new readers of works from this period might face: unfamiliar words, unusual word order, the subjunctive mood and meter. This enjoyable and stimulating book is an ideal introduction to some of the most powerful and pleasing poems in the English language, written in one of the greatest periods in English poetry." - from the publisher

"This collection of contemporary reviews of the five major English Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley - makes available the critical documents of a great period of literature and literary reviewing. Professor Hayden has selected sixty-eight reviews in which twenty-six periodicals are represented, ranging from the powerful quarterlies and the monthly reviews to the newly established weeklies and the fashionable ladies' magazines. The reviews give an insight into the Romantic period in England, its literature, critical values, and general interests. This title includes annotations to explain allusions to contemporary events and persons and to translate foreign words and phrases." - from the publisher

"The relationship between the various Romantic manifestos and the major poetry of the time is here examined by one of our leading critics of Romanticism. In spite of the apparent confidence associated with so many of these writers, Mark Storey argues that there is an underlying unease about the validity of poetry, perhaps best represented by Wordsworth's lines: 'We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness'. The question, 'What is a poet?' is frequently asked, and many of the answers are involved with issues of identity, which in turn are reflected in the poetry. The doubts about individual abilities are matched by doubts as to what poetry can actually achieve: eventually there is even a sense that poetry can be destructive, and that the poet is best either silent or dead. Separate chapters are devoted to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley, John Clare, Byron, and George Darley, all of whom confront themselves in their work." - from the publisher

"This Handbook is the largest and most comprehensive collection of essays on Victorian poetry and poetics yet published. It provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements ('Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'). The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, and the final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions." - from the publisher

"Poised on the brink of modernism and the twentieth century, the Victorian era was the most productive period of poetry there has ever been, in any language. This book is the definitive guide to the range of Victorian poets and poems, from the famous to the less well known. Approaching the poets and poems in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns, this absorbing book places poetry written during the nineteenth century in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological contexts, and considers the poets' major anxieties, such as self, body, and melancholy. The author insists that rhyming and repetition are the major formal features of this (or any) poetry and focuses on the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems. The Victorians, at the helm of a global empire, were innovative and ambitious, and the poetry of the age reflects the aspirations and self-consciousness of Victorian society. Esteemed critic, Valentine Cunningham, exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and, with dazzling close readings of a number of poems, cuts through the often complex Victorian poetic form to reveal the key themes and contexts of the poems and the passions that drove the men and women who wrote them." - from the publisher

"The poets of the mid-nineteenth century lived in a time of 'nation-building'. The Realms of Verse brings this political and intellectual context to life. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Matthew Reynolds shows that the Italian Risorgimento raised questions about community and individual liberty which were especially problematic for subjects of the multi-national United Kingdom, and argues that these questions are at the heart of the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, and Clough. Their long poems characteristically tell stories about marriage, investigating the symbolic and actual interactions between that personal union and national unity. Their verse as a whole exploits correspondences between political government and poetic form, and is alert to its own role in fostering a common culture. Historically detailed, theoretically astute, critically nimble, and stylishly written, The Realms of Verse is the most far-reaching reassessment of Victorian poetry to have been published in recent years." - from the publisher

"Featuring innovative research by emergent and established scholars, The Fin-de-Siecle Poem throws new light on the remarkable diversity of poetry produced at the close of the nineteenth century in England. Opening with a detailed preface that shows why literary historians have frequently underrated fin-de-siecle poetry, the collection explains how a strikingly rich body of lyrical and narrative poems anticipated many of the developments traditionally attributed to Modernism. Each chapter in turn provides insights into the ways in which late-nineteenth-century poets represented their experiences of the city, their attitudes toward sexuality, their responses to empire, and their interest in religious belief. The eleven essays presented by editor Joseph Bristow pay renewed attention to the achievements of such legendary writers as Oscar Wilde, John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and W.B. Yeats, whose careers have always been associated with the 1890s. This book also explores the lesser-known but equally significant advances made by notable women poets, including Michael Field, Amy Levy, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Graham R. Tomson. The Fin-de-Siecle Poem brings together innovative research on poetry that has been typecast as the attenuated Victorianism that was rejected by Modernism. The contributors underscore the remarkable innovations made in English poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and show how woman poets stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their better-known male contemporaries.Joseph Bristow is professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he edits the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature. His recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Oscar Wilde: Contextual Conditions, and the variorum edition of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray." - from the publisher

"The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre's radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes towards time and space: the book's first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form's transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel's substantial influence on the modernist novel." - from the publisher

" A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors." - from the publisher

"The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers." - from the publisher

"In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century." - from the publisher

"A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry offers a detailed record and analysis of an array of publications, activities and achievements.Organized into three historical periods (1900-1945, 1945-1980 and 1980-2000), each part is introduced by an evaluative overview in which the emerging poets are mapped against cultural and literary events or trends.""A chronology and detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources covering over 200 writers make this a reference source for scholars and students of British poetry and women's writing." - from the publisher

"Offering a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry provides readers with detailed discussions of individual poets, 'schools' and 'movements' within modernist poetry, and the cultural and historical context of the modernist period. Provides an in-depth and accessible summary of the latest trends in the study of modernist poetry. Balances discussion of individual poets, 'schools', and 'movements' with in-depth literary and historical context. Brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important. Edited by highly respected and notable critics in the field who have a broad knowledge of current debates and of rising and senior scholars in the field." - from the publisher

"The Verse Revolutionaries tells the story of the Imagists, a turbulent and colourful group of poets, who came together in London in the years before the First World War. As T. S. Eliot was to say, appropriately re-invoking the Imagist habit of turning anything they admired into French, the imagist movement was modern poetry's point de repère, the landmark venture that inaugurated Anglo-American literary modernism. A disparate, stormy group, who had dispersed before the twenties began, these 'verse revolutionaries' received both abuse and acclaim, but their poetry, fragmented, pared-down, elliptical yet direct, exerted a powerful influence on modernist writers, and contributed vitally to the transformation of American and British cultural life in those crucial years. Among those involved were the Americans Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell and John Gould Fletcher, and the British T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington and D.H. Lawrence. On the edges of the story are figures such as W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. They came from very different class backgrounds, a heterogeneous mélange then only possible in a great metropolis like London. The Verse Revolutionaries traces the passionate interactions, love affairs and bitter quarrels of these aspiring poets from 1905 to 1917. Helen Carr unpicks the story of how they came together, what they gained from each other in the heady excitement of those early days, and what were the fissures that eventually broke up the movement and their friendships in the dark days of the Great War. Her compelling account challenges the conventional view of Imagism, and offers an acute analysis of the poetry, of the psychology of the individuals involved, and of the evolution and emergence of a transformative cultural movement." - from the publisher

"A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative Anglophone poetries from Decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic."

"If modernist poetry dominated the early twentieth century, what did it mean for British poets like Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen not to be modernist? This is the first critical account of how non-modernist poetry responded to the modernist revolution. Peter Howarth uncovers the origins of the battles over poetic style still being fought today, and connects the early twentieth-century controversy about poetic form with contemporary social and political developments and the trauma of the First World War. Howarth argues that at the heart of the division between modern and traditional poetic form are different ideas of freedom, power and individuality. Scholars and students of twentieth-century poetry will find this an informative and inspiring account of the themes and debates that have shaped British poetry of the last hundred years." - from the publisher

"The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions." - from the publisher

"A History of African American Poetry: African American poetry is as old as America itself, yet this touchstone of American identity is often overlooked. In this critical history of African American poetry, from its origins in the transatlantic slave trade, to present day hip-hop, Lauri Ramey traces African American poetry from slave songs to today's award-winning poets. Covering a wide range of styles and forms, canonical figures like Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) and Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) are brought side by side with lesser known poets who explored diverse paths of bold originality. Calling for a revised and expanded canon, Ramey shows how some poems were suppressed while others were lauded, while also examining the role of music, women, innovation, and art as political action in African American poetry. Conceiving of a new canon reveals the influential role of African American poetry in defining and reflecting the United States at all points in the nation's history."-- Provided by publisher

"From Outlaw to Classic presents a sweeping history of the forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the American poetry canon. Students, scholars, critics, and poets will welcome this enlightening and impressively documented book. Recent writings by critics and theorists on literary canons have dealt almost exclusively with prose; Alan Golding shows that, like all canons, those of American poetry are characterized by conflict. Choosing a series of varied but representative instances, he analyzes battles and contentions among poets, anthologists, poetry magazine editors, and schools of thought in university English departments. The chapters present a history of American poetry anthologies; compare competing models of canon-formation, the aesthetic (poet-centered) and the institutional (critic-centered); discuss the influence of the New Critics, emphasizing their status as practicing poets, their anti-nationalist reading of American poetry, and the landmark textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; examine the canonizing effects of an experimental "little magazine," Origin; and trace how the Language poets address, in both their theory and their method, the canonizing institutions and canonical assumptions of the age." - from the publisher

"Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists, demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy's adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events-such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War-and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today."

"During the U.S. Civil War, a combination of innovative technologies and catastrophic events stimulated the development of news media into a central cultural force. Reacting to the dramatic increases in news reportage and circulation, poets responded to an urgent need to make their work immediately relevant to current events. As poetry's compressed forms traveled more quickly and easily than stories, novels, or essays through ephemeral print media, it moved alongside and engaged with news reports, often taking on the task of imagining the mental states of readers on receiving accounts from the war front. Newspaper and magazine poetry had long editorialized on political happenings--Indian wars, slavery and abolition, prison reform, women's rights--but the unprecedented scope of what has been called the first modern war, and the centrality of the issues involved for national futures, generated a powerful sense of single-mindedness among readers and writers that altered the terms of poetic expression. In Battle Lines, Eliza Richards charts the transformation of Civil War poetry, arguing that it was fueled by a symbiotic relationship between the development of mass media networks and modern warfare. Focusing primarily on the North, Richards explores how poets working in this new environment mediated events via received literary traditions. Collectively and with a remarkable consistency, poems pulled out key features of events and drew on common tropes and practices to mythologize, commemorate, and ponder the consequences of distant battles. The lines of communication reached outward through newspapers and magazines to writers such as Dickinson, Whitman, and Melville, who drew their inspiration from their peers' poetic practices and reconfigured them in ways that bear the traces of their engagements." - from the publisher

"The nineteenth century is often viewed as a golden age of American literature, a historical moment when national identity was emergent and ideals such as freedom, democracy, and individual agency were promising, even if belied in reality by violence and hypocrisy. The writers of this “American Renaissance”—Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, among many others—produced a body of work that has been both celebrated and contested by following generations. As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, this singular book asks a dozen North American poets to engage with texts by their predecessors in ways that avoid both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring a handful of texts not commonly included in its canon. A polyvocal collection that reflects the complexity of the cross-temporal encounter it enacts, 21|19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today." - from the publisher

"This Concise Companion gives readers a rich sense of how the poetry produced in the United States during the twentieth century is connected to the country’s intellectual life more broadly. Helps readers to fully appreciate the poetry of the period by tracing its historical and cultural contexts. Written by prominent specialists in the field. Places the poetry of the period within contexts such as: war; feminism and the female poet; poetries of immigration and migration; communism and anti-communism; philosophy and theory. Each chapter ranges across the entire century, comparing poets from one part of the century to those of another. New syntheses make the volume of interest to scholars as well as students and general readers." - from the publisher

"Altieri's account embraces four generations of American poets, tracing the ambitions, the disillusionments, and the continuities of modernist poetry through to the 1980s. He describes how the sense of liberation created by early modernist formal experiments was followed by disappointment as the limitations of these discoveries emerged. He contends that, in response, poets such as Wallace Stevens and W. H. Auden reformulated modernist strategies to develop new ways for poetry to take social responsibility. Finally, he shows how these transformations were carried through by later poets suds as Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Creeley." - from the publisher

"Whether Thersites in Homer’s Iliad, Wilfred Owen in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” or Allen Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium “Poetry and the American Voice” in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful. Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart of who is authorized to speak about war and how it can be represented. As such, he explores a largely neglected area of scholarship: the poet’s relationship to dissenting political movements and the nation. In his elegant study, Metres examines the ways in which war resistance is registered not only in terms of its content but also at the level of the lyric. He proposes that protest poetry constitutes a subgenre that—by virtue of its preoccupation with politics, history, and trauma—probes the limits of American lyric poetry. Thus, war resistance poetry—and the role of what Shelley calls unacknowledged legislators—is a crucial, though largely unexamined, body of writing that stands at the center of dissident political movements." - from the publisher

"Since the cultural conflicts over the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, poets and poetry have consistently raised questions surrounding public address, social relations, friction between global policies and democratic institutions, and the interpretation of political events and ideas. InPoets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960, Dale Smith makes meaningful links among rhetoric, literature, and cultural studies, illustrating how poetry and discussions of it shaped public consciousness from the socially volatile era of the 1960s to the War on Terror of today." - from the publisher

"Ecocritics and other literary scholars interested in the environment have tended to examine writings that pertain directly to nature and to focus on subject matter more than expression. In this book, Scott Knickerbocker argues that it is time for the next step in ecocriticism: scholars need to explore the figurative and aural capacity of language to evoke the natural world in powerful ways.Ecopoetics probes the complex relationship between artifice and the natural world in the work of modern American poets - in particular Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, and Sylvia Plath. These poets relate to nature as a deep wellspring of meaning, although they all avoid using language the way most nature writers do, merely to reflect or refer directly to the world. Each of these poets, in his or her own distinct way, employs instead what Knickerbocker terms sensuous poesis, the process of rematerializing language through sound effects and other formal devices as a sophisticated response to nonhuman nature.Rather than attempt to erase the artifice of their own poems, to make them seem more natural and thus supposedly closer to nature, the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice - not for its own sake but in order to perform and enact the natural world. Indeed, for them, artifice is natural. In examining their work, Knickerbocker charts a new direction for ecocriticism." - from the publisher

"Poetry has long been thought of as a genre devoted to grand subjects, timeless themes, and sublime beauty. Why, then, have contemporary poets turned with such intensity to documenting and capturing the everyday and mundane? Drawing on insights about the nature of everyday life from philosophy, history, and critical theory, Andrew Epstein traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that a potent hunger for everyday life explodes in the post-1945 period as a reaction to the rapid, unsettling transformations of this epoch, which have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction. Epstein demonstrates that poetry is an important, and perhaps unlikely, cultural form that has mounted a response, and even a mode of resistance, to a culture suffering from an acute crisis of attention. In this timely and engaging study, Epstein examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday becomes predominant in the decades after modernism and why it has so often sparked genre-bending formal experimentation. With chapters devoted to illuminating readings of a diverse group of writers--including poets associated with influential movements like the New York School, language poetry, and conceptual writing--the book considers the variety of forms contemporary poetry of everyday life has taken, and analyzes how gender, race, and political forces all profoundly inflect the experience and the representation of the quotidian. By exploring the rise of experimental realism as a poetic mode and the turn to rule-governed "everyday-life projects," Attention Equals Life offers a new way of understanding a vital strain at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature. It not only charts the evolution of a significant concept in cultural theory and poetry, but also reminds readers that the quest to pay attention to the everyday within today's frenetic world of and social media is an urgent and unending task." - from the publisher

"Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers. He shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and its reception helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. Poetry was then part and parcel of American popular culture, spreading rapidly as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. Poetry also offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political, and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs, or poetry contests. Reenvisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, Chasar provides a richer understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception." - from the publisher

"One Kind of Everything elucidates the uses of autobiography and constructions of personhood in American poetry since World War II, with helpful reference to American literature in general since Emerson. Taking in one of the most crucial issues in American poetry of the last fifty years, celebrated poet Dan Chiasson explores what is lost or gained when real-life experiences are made part of the subject matter and source material for poetry. In five extended scholarly essays--on Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank Bidart, Frank O'Hara and Louise Glück--Chiasson looks specifically to bridge the chasm between formal and experimental poetry." - from the publisher

"A luminous collection of essays from one of our most original and influential poets. Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück's second book of essays--her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück's moving and disabusing lyricism is on full display in this decisive new collection. From its opening pages, American Originality forces readers to consider contemporary poetry and its demigods in radical, unconsoling, and ultimately very productive ways. Determined to wrest ample, often contradictory meaning from our current literary discourse, Glück comprehends and destabilizes notions of "narcissism" and "genius" that are unique to the American literary climate. This includes erudite analyses of the poets who have interested her throughout her own career, such as Rilke, Pinsky, Chiasson, and Dobyns, and introductions to the first books of poets like Dana Levin, Peter Streckfus, Spencer Reece, and Richard Siken. Forceful, revealing, challenging, and instructive, American Originality is a seminal critical achievement." - from the publisher

"A Cultural History of Theatre presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers a span of 2,500 years, tracing the complexity of the interactions between theatre and culture. 1. A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity (500 BCE-1000CE) 2. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages (1000-1400) 3. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (1400-1650) 4. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800) 5. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire (1800-1920) 6. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age (1920-2000+) Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters: 1. Institutional Frameworks 2. Social Functions 3. Sexuality and Gender 4. The Environment of Theatre 5. Circulation 6. Interpretations 7. Communities of Production 8. Repertoire and Genres 9. Technologies of Performance 10. Knowledge Transmission: Media and Memory This structure offers readers a broad overview of a period within each volume or the opportunity to follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter across volumes. Generously illustrated, the full six-volume set combines to present the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on theatre in history." - from the publisher

"Known as the "bible" of theatre history, Brockett and Hildy's History of the Theatre is the most comprehensive and widely used survey of theatre history in the market. This 40th Anniversary Edition retains all of the traditional features that have made History of the Theatre the most successful text of its kind, including worldwide coverage, more than 530 photos and illustrations, useful maps, and the expertise of Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, two of the most widely respected theatre historians in the field. As with every edition, the text reflects the current state of knowledge and brings the history of theatre up to the present. This tenth edition continues to provide the most thorough and accurate assessment of theatre history available."

"Reaching back in time and across the world, this authoritative and wide-ranging new history draws on the latest scholarly research to describe and celebrate theatre's greatest achievements over 4,500 years, from festival performances in ancient Egypt to international multi-cultural theatre in the late twentieth century." "Beginning with the origins of theatre in Greece and Rome, and in the early civilizations of Africa and the Americas, the book then guides the reader through the full spectrum of dramatic representation in Europe - from medieval mystery cycles and miracle plays to the Renaissance in Italy, Spain, England, and France; from Lope de Vega and Calderon to Shakespeare, Corneille, Moliere, and Racine; the Golden Age in Spain to Restoration London. In Part Three the focus widens in four period surveys: the Eighteenth Century, the Nineteenth Century, Modern Theatre 1890-1920, and Theatre After Two World Wars. Finally, there are three stimulating essays on the main theatres of Asia and a concluding account of theatre since 1970." "Throughout the book, the chronological record is related to a number of general themes, including theatre's changing role within society, the reasons for popularity or failure, varieties of form and means of production, interactions with other art forms and with contemporary currents of thought. In addition, the text gives due weight to technical, practical, and organizational issues - backstage personnel and equipment; musicians; light and sound technicians; set designers; and financiers - and to the role of audiences and critics." - from the publisher

"Scholars, amateur historians and actors have shaped theatre history in different ways at different times and in different places. This Companion offers students and general readers a series of accessible and engaging essays on the key aspects of studying and writing theatre history. The diverse international team of contributors investigates how theatre history has been constructed, showing how historical facts are tied to political and artistic agendas and explaining why history matters to us." - from the publisher

"This Introduction - an indispensable 'how to' guide for students and teachers alike - investigates the methods and aims of historical study in the performing arts, from archival research to historical writing. Beginning with case studies on Shakespearean theatre and avant-garde theatre, this study examines fundamental procedures and problems in documentary history and cultural history. It demonstrates how historians not only construct various kinds of performance events but also place them in relation to the historical agents, the political and social conditions, artistic traditions, audience responses, and historical periods. Drawing upon scholarship in classics, literary studies, art history, performance studies, and general history, Postlewait shows how to ask appropriate historical questions, construct evidence, use plays as historical documents, eliminate faulty sources, challenge unreliable witnesses, and develop historical arguments and narratives. The book concludes with a survey of the 'twelve cruxes' of research, analysis, and writing in theatre history." - from the publisher

"The future of theatre history studies requires consideration of theatre as a global phenomenon. The Challenge of World Theatre History offers the first full-scale argument for abandoning an obsolete and parochial Eurocentric approach to theatre history in favor of a more global perspective. This book exposes the fallacies that reinforce the conventional approach and defends the global perspective against possible objections. It moves beyond the conventional nation-based geography of theatre in favor of a regional geography and develops a new way to demarcate the periods of theatre history. Finally, the book outlines a history that recognizes the often-connected developments in theatre across Eurasia and around the world. It makes the case that world theatre history is necessary not only for itself, but for the powerful comparative and contextual insights it offers to all theatre scholars and students, whatever their special areas of interest." - from the publisher

"Scenography--the manipulation and orchestration of the performance environment--is an increasingly popular and key area in performance studies. This book introduces the reader to the purpose, identity and scope of scenography and its theories and concepts. Settings and structures, light, projected images, sound, costumes and props are considered in relation to performing bodies, text, space and the role of the audience." - from the publisher

Summary"Contemporary Mise en Scène is Patrice Pavis's masterful analysis of the role that staging has played in the creation and practice of theatre throughout history. This stunningly ambitious study considers the staged reading, at the frontiers of mise en scène; scenography, which sometimes replaces staging; the reinterpretation of classical and contemporary works; the development of intercultural theatre and ritual; new technologies and their usage live on the stage; and the postmodern practice of deconstruction. But it also applies sustained critical attention to the challenges of defining mise en scène, of tracking its development, and of exploring its possible futures. Joel Anderson's powerful new translation lucidly realises Pavis's investigation of the changing possibilities for stagecraft in the context of performance art, physical theatre and modern theory." - from the publisher

"Imagined Theatres collects theoretical dramas written by some of the leading scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. These dialogues, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary performance events that explore what might be possible and impossible in the theatre. Each scenario is mirrored by a brief accompanying reflection, asking what they might mean for our thinking about the theatre. These many possible worlds circle around questions that include: In what way is writing itself a performance? How do we understand the relationship between real performances that engender imaginary reflections and imaginary conceptions that form the basis for real theatrical productions? Are we not always imagining theatres when we read or even when we sit in the theatre, watching whatever event we imagine we are seeing?" - from the publisher

" Theater and Cultural Politics for a New World presents a radical re-examination of the ways in which demographic shifts will impact theater and performance culture in the twenty-first century. Editor Chinua Thelwell brings together the revealing insights of artists, scholars, and organizers to produce a unique intersectional conversation about the transformative potential of theater. Opening with a case study of the New WORLD Theater and moving on to a fascinating range of essays, the book looks at five main themes: 1. Changing demographics 2. Future aesthetics 3. Making institutional space 4. Critical multiculturalism 5. Polyculturalism." - from the publisher

"This three-volume set explores the rich and complex histories of English, Scottish and Welsh theatres from early Britain to the present. Volume 1 begins in Roman Britain and ends with Charles II's restoration to the throne imminent. Volume 2 begins in 1660 with the restoration of King Charles II to the throne and the re-establishment of the professional theatre, interdicted since 1642, and follows the far-reaching development of the form over two centuries and more to 1895. Volume 3 explores the rich and complex histories of English, Scottish and Welsh theatres in the 'long' twentieth century since 1895. Original essays written by leading British and American historians and critics investigate the major aspects of theatrical performance, combining an interest in the written drama with an understanding of the material conditions of the evolving professional theatre that the drama helped to sustain." - from the publisher

"Combining authoritative writing with superb illustration, The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre is a fascinating exploration of the development of the live performing arts. Taking a broad view of theatre, the book covers everything from the minor and 'illegitimate' to the mainstream and 'official' - whether the mystery plays of the Middle Ages or the 'real time drama' of Coronation Street, the courtly theatre of Shakespeare's day or the 'fringe' of the 1990s." "Theatre is considered throughout as the popular expression of its creators' and audiences' values and concerns. The contributions of players, patrons, playwrights, and audiences are vividly recounted, together with the social and political forces which inevitably influenced them." "Ranging from theatre in the metropolis to theatre in the provinces, the book also examines the influences on theatre from abroad and the impact of British theatre on the cultural scene beyond its own frontiers." - from the publisher

"This comprehensive anthology brings together a diverse collection of dramatic writing from the late fourteenth century to the onset of the Renaissance. The volume presents for the first time the key plays of the period in their entirety, alongside more unusual selections, covering religious narrative, religion and conscience, and politics and morality. The first section focuses on Biblical plays, including coherent sequences of the narrative Cycle plays from York and N-Town and supporting pageants from Chester and Wakefield. This approach allows a clear narrative line to develop, and permits the comparison of the treatment of key stories between the Cycles. The selected material demonstrates how the drama of the towns and cities of East Anglia and the North of England mediated religious culture to a heterodox urban audience, and explored biblical events in an intensely contemporary setting. In the second and third sections, the attention turns to secular drama, and the Moral Plays and Interludes. The featured texts illustrate the range of themes and issues covered, from the salvation of the individual human soul to the renovation of the political nation, and the variety of settings and audiences for which the plays were designed. The flexibility of the Interlude form is explored, as are the ways in which it was utilised by playwrights and their patrons to address issues of direct political and social concern to them and their audiences. Medieval Drama: An Anthology is an indispensable guide to the breadth and depth of dramatic activity in medieval Britain." - from the publisher

"For many years the study of pre-seventeenth-century English drama was shaped largely by an understanding that everything written revolved around the individual author, either as part of the tradition that prepared the way for Shakespeare or as part of his legacy. Now twenty-five original essays by leading theorists and historians chart a paradigmatic shift within the field. In contrast to the traditional emphasis on individual authors, the contributors here explore the place of the stage within the larger society, as well as issues of performance and physical space. The essays are organized into three sections: "Early English Drama and Physical Space" examines the settings in which plays were acted; "Early English Drama and Social Space" juxtaposes the theater with such contemporary subcultures as the church, the city, and the court. Finally, "Early English Drama and Conditions of Performance and Publication" explores a wide range of material conditions and contexts, from props to printers. A major summary of contemporary scholarship and a storehouse of new theoretical and historical information, A New History of Early English Drama skillfully illustrates the complex influence of physical and social elements woven into the texts, and provides an innovative approach to literary studies and cultural history." - from the publisher

"This second edition of the Companion offers students up-to-date factual and interpretative material about the principal theatres, playwrights and plays of the most important period of English drama, from 1580–1642. Three wide-ranging chapters on theatres, dramaturgy and the social, cultural and political conditions of the drama are followed by chapters describing and illustrating various theatrical genres: private and occasional drama, political plays, heroic plays, burlesque, comedy, tragedy, with a final essay on the drama produced during the reign of Charles I. All the essays have been revised and their references updated. An expanded biographical and bibliographical section details the work of the dramatists discussed in the book and the best sources for further study. A chronological table provides a full listing of new plays performed from 1497–1642, with a parallel list of major political and theatrical events." - from the publisher

"While Shakespeare's popularity has continued to grow, so has the attention paid to the work of his contemporaries. The contributors to this Companion introduce the distinctive drama of these playwrights, from the court comedies of John Lyly to the works of Richard Brome in the Caroline era. With chapters on a wide range of familiar and lesser-known dramatists, including Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton and John Ford, this book devotes particular attention to their personal and professional relationships, occupational rivalries and collaborations. Overturning the popular misconception that Shakespeare wrote in isolation, it offers a new perspective on the most impressive body of drama in the history of the English stage." - from the publisher

"Written by major international scholars, this Companion combines analysis of topics crucial to Renaissance tragedy with the interpretation of canonical and frequently taught texts. Part I introduces key topics, such as religion, revenge, and the family, and, uniquely, discusses modern performance traditions on stage and screen. Bridging this section with Part II is a chapter which engages with Shakespeare's generic distinctiveness as well as the difficulties our familiarity with Shakespearean tragedy engenders for our appreciation of the tragedies of his contemporaries. Individual essays in Part II introduce important critical conversations about specific canonical tragedies and provide their own contributions to those discussions. Topics include The Revenger's Tragedy and the theatrics of original sin, Arden of Faversham and the preternatural, and The Duchess of Malfi and the erotics of literary form. Providing fresh readings of key texts, the Companion is an essential guide for all students of Renaissance tragedy." - from the publisher

"For one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare's contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd's Spanish Tragedy to Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions does it serve? What preceded it, and is it possible for it to become something else? Jeremy Lopez takes up these questions by tracing a history of anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama from Robert Dodsley's Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) through those recently published by Blackwell, Norton, and Routledge. Containing dozens of short, provocative readings of unfamiliar plays, this book will benefit those who seek a broader sense of the period's dazzling array of forms." - from the publisher

"British drama of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considered disreputable in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, has in the twentieth century been revived by producers and reappraised by critics. Scholars are now questioning prior assumptions about the significance of this drama and are reexamining the social, cultural, political, and technological conditions under which it was produced. The development of this drama over 119 years is the subject of Frances M. Kavenik's British Drama, 1660-1779: A Critical History, a fascinating account of the people and events shaping the genre during the period. Approaching her subject from a popular culture perspective, Kavenik argues that the drama produced in these years was the most innovative since Shakespeare's time, giving rise to such forms as the musical and the situation comedy. A comprehensive first chapter describes the theaters, stage apparatus, playwrights, performers, audiences, and critics of the period, while four chronologically arranged chapters--The Carolean Period, The Last of the Stuarts, The Hanoverian Accession to Garrick's, and The Age of Garrick--detail key developments during each subperiod. The Lincoln's Inn Fields and Drury Lane theaters, the Licensing Act of 1737, legendary figures like Nell Gwyn and David Garrick, the growth of the periodical press as a medium for dramatic criticism, the popularity of productions like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and Aphra Behn's The Rover - these and much more are brought vividly to life for readers, as is Kavenik's theme that 'late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century comedies, heroic plays, tragicomedies, and tragedies were the genre films and soap operas of their day, enthralling their audiences and speaking to their needs and desires, offering entertainment, excitement, and escape. They also were capable ... of creating or reforming their audiences' needs and desires.'" - from the publisher

"This rich and varied portrait of the drama from 1660 to 1714 provides students with essential information about playwrights, staging and genres, situating them in the social and political culture of the time. No longer seen as a privileged arena for select dramatists and elite courtiers, the Restoration theatre is revealed in all of its tumult, energy and conflict. The fourteen newly-commissioned essays examine the theatre, paying attention to major playwrights such as Dryden, Wycherly and Congreve and also to more minor works and to plays by the first professional female dramatists. The book begins with chapters on the performance of the drama in its own time, on theatres, acting and staging, and continues with the main dramatic genres and themes, with a final chapter on the critical history of the drama. The volume also includes a thorough chronology and biographies and bibliographies of dramatists." - from the publisher

"This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft, and the audiences themselves, plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of theatre." - from the publisher

"This newly commissioned series of essays by leading scholars is the first volume to offer both an overview of the field and also current emerging critical views on the history, form, and influence of English melodrama. Authoritative voices provide an introduction to melodrama's early formal features such as tableaux and music, and trace the development of the genre in the nineteenth century through the texts and performances of its various sub-genres, the theatres within which the plays were performed, and the audiences who watched them. The historical contexts of melodrama are considered through essays on topics including contemporary politics, class, gender, race, and empire. And the extensive influences of melodrama are demonstrated through a wide-ranging assessment of its ongoing and sometimes unexpected expressions - in psychoanalysis, in other art forms (the novel, film, television, musical theatre), and in popular culture generally - from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. " - from the publisher

"Why does historical memory exclude nineteenth-century women playwrights when hundreds worked prolifically across the spectrum of professional theatre, amateur theatricals, and publishing? What might it mean to adjust the collective focus of cultural historians and literary critics so that these women can come into view? This collection of essays, written by a team of leading scholars in the field, undertakes not simply to recover the names and careers of women playwrights but to call into question the whole idea of what a playwright is, what she does, and why it matters. Gender inquiry is the start: destabilizing the category of playwrights loosens the borders of theatre history making it possible to reconceptualize theatre and drama not as products of culture but as social processes dynamically interacting with culture." - from the publisher

"A revised and updated version of Modern British Drama, 1890-1990, which is the first one-volume analysis of English playwriting over the twentieth century. Through detailed discussions of major dramatists and plays, Christopher Innes traces the evolution of modernism from Bernard Shaw to the present as well as theatrical developments over the period. The text includes information on the social and political environment surrounding the plays, first productions and critical reception, and chronology and illustrations from key performances, lists of playwrights and works, and selective bibliographies. It is an invaluable guide for students, theater-goers and theater historians." - from the publisher

"This Companion, first published in 2000, addresses the work of women playwrights in Britain throughout the twentieth century. The chapters explore the historical and theatrical contexts in which women have written for the theatre and examine the work of individual playwrights. A chronological section on playwriting from the 1920s to the 1970s is followed by chapters which raise issues of nationality and identity. Later sections question accepted notions of the canon and include chapters on non-mainstream writing, including black and lesbian performance. Each section is introduced by the editors, who provide a narrative overview of a century of women's drama and a thorough chronology of playwriting, set in political context. The collection includes essays on the individual writers Caryl Churchill, Sarah Daniels, Pam Gems and Timberlake Wertenbaker as well as extensive documentation of contemporary playwriting in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, including figures such as Liz Lochhead and Anne Devlin." - from the publisher

"This collection of contemporary postcolonial plays demonstrates the vitality of a body of work that is currently influencing the shape of contemporary world theatre. The anthology, the first of its kind, includes both internationally admired 'classics' and previously unpublished texts. It draws upon work from Canada, the Caribbean, South and West Africa, Southeast Asia, India, New Zealand, Hawai'i and Australia.""Dealing with imperialism and its aftermath, the plays use a wide range of dramaturgical techniques drawn from Western theatre and local performance traditions. Agit-prop dialogue, musical routines, storytelling, ritual incantation, epic narration, dance, multimedia presentation and puppetry are among the many ways through which individuals and groups express their concerns." "Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology includes a general introduction that outlines key issues relevant to the study of postcolonial theatre. Individual introductions to plays include biographical information on the author, an overview of the play's main thematic concerns and performance features, and a summary of its performance history." - from the publisher

"The first truly continentally representative collection of modern African drama in any language, this Norton Critical Edition includes plays from Egypt, Algeria, the Republic of South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya. 'Backgrounds and Criticism' presents documents on modern African drama generally and on the assembled texts and authors specifically, including little-known materials. Featured are essays on Tawfik al-Hakim, Kateb Yacine, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and Femi Osofisan. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included." - from the publisher

"This book traces a significant shift in 20th century Irish theatre from the largely national plays produced in Dublin to a more expansive international art form. Confirmed by the recent success outside of Ireland of the "third wave" of Irish playwrights writing in the 1990s, the new Irish drama has encouraged critics to reconsider both the early national theatre and the dramatic tradition it fostered. On the occasion of the centenary of the first professional production of the Irish Literary Theatre, the contributors to this volume investigate contemporary Irish drama's aesthetic features and socio-political commitments and re-read the plays produced earlier in the century. Although these essayists cover a wide range of topics, from the productions and objectives of the Abbey Theatre's first rivals to mid-century theatre festivals, to plays about the "Troubles" in the North, they all reassess the oppositions so commonplace in critical discussions of Irish drama: nationalism vs. internationalism, high vs. low culture, urban experience vs. rural or peasant life. A Century of Irish Drama includes essays on such figures as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Read, Martin McDonagh, and many more." - from the publisher

"This new and updated Guide, with over 2,700 cross-referenced entries, covers all aspects of the American theatre from its earliest history to the present. Entries include people, venues and companies scattered through the U.S., plays and musicals, and theatrical phenomena. Additionally, there are some 100 topical entries covering theatre in major U.S. cities and such disparate subjects as Asian American theatre, Chicano theatre, censorship, Filipino American theatre, one-person performances, performance art, and puppetry. Highly illustrated, the Guide is supplemented with a historical survey as introduction, a bibliography of major sources published since the first edition, and a biographical index covering over 3,200 individuals mentioned in the text." - from the publisher

"The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged, while the work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material." - from the publisher

"This is an authoritative and wide-ranging history of American theatre in all its dimensions, from theatre building to playwriting, directors, performers, and designers. Engaging the theatre as a performance art, a cultural institution, and a fact of American social and political life, the history addresses the economic context that conditioned the drama presented. The history approaches its subject with a full awareness of relevant developments in literary criticism, cultural analysis, and performance theory. At the same time, it is designed to be an accessible, challenging narrative. All volumes include an extensive overview and timeline, followed by chapters on specific aspects of theatre. Volume Three examines the development of the theatre after World War II, through the productions of Broadway and beyond and into regional theatre across the country. Contributors also analyze new directions in theatre design, directing, and acting, as well as key plays and playwrights through the 1990s."

"First published in 1984, Gerald Bordman's The Oxford Companion to American Theatre is the standard one-volume source on our national theatre." "Now thoroughly revised, this volume once again provides an up-to-date guide to the American stage from its beginnings to the present. Completely updated by theatre professor Thomas S. Hischak, the volume includes playwrights, plays, actors, directors, producers, songwriters, famous playhouses, dramatic movements, and much more. The book covers not only classic works (such as Death of a Salesman) but also many commercially successful plays (such as Getting Gertie's Garter), plus entries on foreign figures that have influenced our dramatic development (from Shakespeare to Beckett and Pinter). New entries include recent plays such as Angels in America and Six Degrees of Separation, performers such as Eric Bogosian and Bill Irwin, playwrights such as David Henry Hwang and Wendy Wasserstein, and relevant developments and issues including AIDS in American theatre, theatrical producing by Disney, and the rise in solo performance." "Accessible and authoritative, this valuable A-Z reference is ideal not only for students and scholars of theatre, but everyone with a passion for the stage."--Jacket.

" In this brilliant study, Marc Robinson explores more than two hundred years of plays, styles, and stagings of American theater. Mapping the changing cultural landscape from the late eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, he explores how theater has―and has not―changed and offers close readings of plays by O’Neill, Stein, Wilder, Miller, and Albee, as well as by important but perhaps lesser known dramatists such as Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and many others. Robinson reads each work in an ambitiously interdisciplinary context, linking advances in theater to developments in American literature, dance, and visual art. The author is particularly attentive to the continuities in American drama, and expertly teases out recurring themes, such as the significance of visuality. He avoids neatly categorizing nineteenth- and twentieth-century plays and depicts a theater more restive and mercurial than has been recognized before. Robinson proves both a fascinating and thought-provoking critic and a spirited guide to the history of American drama." - from the publisher

"In From Aphra Behn to Fun Home: A Cultural History of Feminist Theatre, Carey Purcell traces the evolution of these important artists and productions over several centuries. After examining the roots of feminist theatre in early Greek plays and looking at occasional works produced before the twentieth century, Purcell then identifies the key players and productions that have emerged over the last several decades. This book covers the heyday of the second wave feminist movement--which saw the growth of female-centric theatre groups--and highlights the work of playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems, and Wendy Wasserstein. Other prominent artists discussed here include playwrights Paula Vogel Lynn and Tony-award winning directors Garry Hynes and Julie Taymor. The volume also examines diversity in contemporary feminist theatre--with discussions of such playwrights as Young Jean Lee and Lynn Nottage--and a look toward the future."--Publisher's description.

"This volume addresses the work of women playwrights throughout the history of the American theater, from the early pioneers to contemporary feminists. Each chapter introduces the reader to the work of one or more playwrights, covering significant writers such as Rachel Crothers, Susan Glaspell, Lillian Hellman, Sophie Treadwell, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Megan Terry, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Kennedy, Wendy Wasserstein, Marsha Norman, Beth Henley and Maria Irene Fornes, in the context of topics such as early comedy and melodrama, feminism and realism, the Harlem Renaissance and feminism." - from the publisher

"Violence against women in plays by women has earned little mention. This revolutionary collection fills that gap, focusing on plays by American women dramatists, written in the last thirty years, that deal with different forms of gender violence. Each author discusses specific manifestations of violence in carefully selected plays: psychological, familial, war-time, and social injustice. This book encompasses the theatrical devices used to represent violence on the stage in an age of virtual, immediate reality as much as the problematics of gender violence in modern society." - from the publisher

"This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Along the way, it chronicles the evolution of African American theatre and its engagement with the wider community, including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the 'New Negro' and 'Black Arts' movements. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights and actors whose efforts helped to fashion a more accurate appearance of Black life on stage, and reveal the impact of African American theatre both within the United States and further afield. Chapters also address recent theatre productions in the context of political and cultural change and ask where African American theatre is heading in the twenty-first century"-- Provided by publisher

"African American Theater is a vibrant and unique entity enriched by ancient Egyptian rituals, West African folklore, and European theatrical practices. A continuum of African folk traditions, it combines storytelling, mythology, rituals, music, song, and dance with ancestor worship from ancient times to the present. It afforded black artists a cultural gold mine to celebrate what it was like to be an African American in The New World." "The Historical Dictionary of African American Theater celebrates nearly 200 years of black theater in the United States, identifying representative African American theater-producing organizations and chronicling their contributions to the field from its birth in 1816 to the present. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries on actors, directors, playwrights, plays, theater producing organizations, themes, locations, and theater movements and awards."--Jacket.

"The Harlem Renaissance was the time when Harlem came alive with theatre, drama, sports, dance and politics. David Krasner paints a vibrant portrait of the exciting years 1910 to 1927 and the diverse events they encompassed: the prizefight between Jack Johnson and Jim "White Hope" Jeffries; the first glimpse of new dance styles pioneered by Aida Overton Walker and Ethel Waters; the social significance of Zora Neale Hurston's play, Color Struck; and the extravagant productions of Star of Ethiopia pageants that emphasized African heritage. These were the fertile years when the residents of northern Manhattan were at the vanguard of artistic ferment, leading their downtown counterparts while at the same time playing a pivotal role in one of the most important political movements of the twentieth century: black nationalism." - from the publisher

"Based on over seventy interviews, the book surveys the history of Asian American theatre from 1965 to 2005 with focus on actors, playwrights, companies, audiences, and communities. Emphasizing historical contexts, Esther Kim Lee examines how issues of cultural nationalism, interculturalism, and identity politics affect a racially defined theatre. Addressing issues ranging from actors' activism to Asian diaspora, the book documents how Asian American theatre has become an indispensable part of American culture."--Jacket.

"In her groundbreaking book, Performing Asian America, Josephine Lee meets a formidable challenge. How does one go about describing and analyzing the cultural production of Asian Americans, a group just beginning to make their complex political and social positions more visible? Lee approaches her specific subject, how Asian American playwrights depict race and ethnicity onstage, from the perspective that theatrical performances and dramatic texts can tell us much about these contemporary dynamics."

"Unlike today, Broadway's influence reached out beyond its confines to influence culture throughout the fifty states. If you were a sophisticate (or wanted to be one), you knew what was happening on Broadway." "Ethan Mordden re-creates this lost world as only he can, telling us how those fifteen square blocks of Manhattan real estate became every American's touchstone for sophistication, intelligence, and wit."--Jacket.

"In the mid-1970s Times Square was the seedy symbol of New York’s economic decline. Its once shining star, the renowned Shubert Organization, was losing theaters to make way for parking lots and losing money. Bernard Jacobs and Jerry Schoenfeld, two ambitious board members, saw the crumbling company was ripe for takeover and staged a coup and staved off corporate intrigue, personal betrayals and criminal investigations. Once Jacobs and Schoenfeld solidified their power, they turned a collapsed theater-owning holding company into one of the most successful entertainment empires in the world, spearheading the revitalization of Broadway and the renewal of Times Square." - Publisher description

"On the occasion of American Theatre magazine's 25th anniversary, the editors have selected the best essays and interviews from its pages to provide an intimate look at the people, plays and events that have shaped the American theatre over the past quarter-century. More than 100 artists, critics and theatre professionals are gathered in this one-of-a-kind collection, from the visionaries who conceived of a diverse and thriving national theatre community to the practitioners who have made that dream a reality, The American Theatre Reader captures their wide-ranging stories in a single compelling volume, essential reading for theatre professionals and theatregoers alike."--Jacket.

"With the memoir boom, life storytelling has become ubiquitous and emerged as a distinct field of study. Reading Autobiography, originally published in 2001, was the first comprehensive critical introduction to life writing in all its forms. Widely adopted for undergraduate and graduate-level courses, it is an essential guide for students and scholars reading and interpreting autobiographical texts and methods across the humanities, social sciences, and visual and performing arts. Thoroughly updated, the second edition of Reading Autobiography is the most complete assessment of life narrative in its myriad forms. It lays out a sophisticated, theoretical approach to life writing and the components of autobiographical acts, including memory, experience, identity, embodiment, space, and agency. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore these components, review the history of life writing and the foundations of autobiographical subjectivity, and provide a toolkit for working with twenty-three key concepts. Their survey of innovative forms of life writing, such as autographics and installation self-portraiture, charts recent shifts in autobiographical practice. Especially useful for courses are the appendices: a glossary covering dozens of distinct genres of life writing, proposals for group and classroom projects, and an extensive bibliography."--Publisher.

"Focusing on first-person accounts that tell, at least in part, the remembered stories of childhood and youth, this guide organizes more than 2,800 titles in categories that reflect shared themes and characteristics. Long groups works into such chapters as The Traveled and the Captive: Adventurers, Explorers, and Warriors; Homes and Haunts: The Places and Cultures of Native Lands; and The Darker Side of Childhood; Outcasts, Violence, Abuse, Poverty, and Other Traumas. Keywords and occasional notes, along with birth and death dates of the author, accompany the entries, offering further insights." - Publisher description

"An innovative study of the contemporary memoir, blending autobiography and literary analysis to illuminole the intellectual, cultural, and emotional dynamics of life writing Maintaining that the memoir requires a more personal relationship with its readers and critics, Janet Mason Ellerby calls for intimate readings. She begins this work with her own memoir, narrating a long-held secret - her pregnancy at age sixteen, her life in the Florence Crittendon Home for Unwed Mothers, and the birth and adoption of her first daughter. She goes on to tell about the aftermath of this pivotal time in and the painful consequences of keeping a secret. Included are detailed analyses of more than a dozen contemporary memoirs by American women, all of which share a common purpose: the disclosure of secrets. Ellerby describes the costs of this secrecy and explores the possibilities of breaking intractable codes of silence. It is a study that is germane to the intellectual and emotional lives of all women. This book is the first serious exploration of a genre that has gained acceptance with an expanding audience of readers." - from the publisher

"The centuries-old art of handwriting is practiced daily by millions, yet few have any idea of its history or the tools used in handwriting. In Pen, Ink, and Evidence, Joe Nickell traces the development of writing and writing materials from the ancient cuneiform tablet to today's ball-point-scribbled memo. Nickell not only describes how ink, paper, pens, and pencils have been manufactured and used over the centuries, but also explores the history of such ancillary activities as learning calligraphy, cutting quill pens, deciphering old scripts, detecting forgeries, identifying watermarks, dating ink bottles, and reading faded manuscripts. He also traces the development of autograph collecting, describes how to identify inks, and offers sidelights on postage stamps, early typewriters, mourning stationery, fountain-pen fillers, and the evolution of the desk. Richly illustrated from the author's own collection, the book includes photos of historic inkwells, traveling writing kits, pens of glass and gold, ink eraser knives, quill cutters, paperweights, letter openers, pen racks, and sealing-wax melters, as well as documents ranging from valentines and genealogical records to secret messages. Pen, Ink, and Evidence is an essential text for calligraphers, archivists, literary scholars, historians, genealogists, collectors, document analysts, teachers of handwriting, and all others with an interest in writing and its accoutrements."

"Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England represents one of the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period to be undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document "higher" forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women." - from the publishers

"Susan Whyman draws on a hidden world of previously unknown letter writers to explore bold new ideas about the history of writing, reading and the novel. Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, The Pen and the People will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people. Based on over thirty-five previously unknown letter collections, it tells the stories of workers and the middling sort -- a Yorkshire bridle maker, a female domestic servant, a Derbyshire wheelwright, an untrained woman writing poetry and short stories, as well as merchants and their families. Their ordinary backgrounds and extraordinary writings challenge accepted views that popular literacy was rare in England before 1800. This democratization of letter writing could never have occurred without the development of the Royal Mail. Drawing on new information gleaned from personal letters, Whyman reveals how the Post Office had altered the rhythms of daily life long before the nineteenth century. As the pen, the post, and the people became increasingly connected, so too were eighteenth-century society and culture slowly and subtly transformed." - from the publisher

"With the growth of efficient postal service in England and the stimulus of a growing tradition of informal prose among eighteenth-century men of leisure, the intimate letter reached unprecedented literary heights as the exemplary form of the period. Considered here are the striking and diverse qualities both of the art and the personalities of the great letter-writers: Swift, Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Richardson, the Earl of Chesterfield, Johnson, Sterne, Gray, Walpole, Burke, Cowper, Gibbon, and Boswell." - from the publisher

"This study of three French and seven English letter-writers begins with Dorothy Osborn and Madame de Sévigné and ends with Mrs. Carlyle. But rather than a collection of biographical and critical sketches it is a discussion of self-expression and character through three centuries, dealing with such matters as feminine talent, the changes in sense of humour, and the contrast between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth." - from the dust-jacket

"This biography of Mme de Sevigne brings to life the world of seventeenth-century France, a mother and her daughter, a writer and her brilliant letters. The passion and the pathos of this correspondence brings us as close as we can come to the mind of a woman in the court of Louis XIV." - from the publisher

"Not originally intended for publication, the celebrated and controversial correspondences between Lord Chesterfield and his son Philip, dating from 1737, were praised in their day as a complete manual of education, and despised by Samuel Johnson for teaching 'the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master.' Reflecting the political craft of a leading statesman and the urbane wit of a man who associated with Pope, Addison, and Swift, Lord Chesterfield's Letters reveal the author's political cynicism, his views on good breeding, and instruction to his son in etiquette and the worldly arts." - from the publisher

"Author of the first gothic novel and son of the first prime minister of Great Britain, Horace Walpole had wide-ranging interests that included literature, politics, world affairs, collecting, antiquities, and architecture. He wrote to his numerous correspondents on these and other topics in prose that is celebrated for its charm, eloquence, and wit. This new Everyman's edition offers an extensive selection of Walpole's letters, helpfully arranged by subject so the reader can choose from themes including social life, the Court, politics, literature, and the evolution of his Gothic castle and art and book collections at Strawberry Hill. This edition offers new annotations throughout, with introductions to its various sections and a general introduction on Walpole as a letter writer. In addition, the text of the letters has been corrected and previously excised passages have been restored." - publisher description of new Everyman's Library edition

"A moderate conservative, as became his period and his station, an aristocrat, a lover of the best, of quality, like most authentic artists, he looked with sharp distrust and prophetic shame upon even the earlier, more pardonable and more amiable manifestations of German separatism, of German arrogance, upon the whole German cult of pride and blood and death....Goethe's greatest work, which includes his writings, was himself, his life, both the act and the recording of his experiences between earth and sky. He was supremely capable of experience and supremely capable of reacting to experience and learning from it. [...] Now the life of this man happens to be one of the most fully recorded and most richly documented of all human lives." - from the introduction

"The letters of John Keats are, T. S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably. Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man. Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written."

"The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle opens a window onto the lives of two of the Victorian world’s most accomplished, perceptive, and unusual inhabitants. Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, attracted to them a circle of foreign exiles, radicals, feminists, revolutionaries, and major and minor writers from across Europe and the United States. The collection is regarded as one of the finest and most comprehensive literary archives of the nineteenth century." - from the publisher

"Rilke's timeless letters about poetry, sensitive observation, and the complicated workings of the human heart. Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke's life that shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote them." - from the publisher

"With clarity, conviction, and passion, James Baldwin delivers a dire warning of the effects of racism that remains urgent nearly sixty years after its original publication. In the first of two essays, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” Baldwin offers kind and unflinching counsel on what it means to be Black in the United States and explains the twisted logic of American racism. In “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” Baldwin recounts his spiritual journey into the church after a religious crisis at the age of fourteen, and then back out of it again, as well as his meeting with Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Throughout, Baldwin urges us to confront the oppressive institutions of race, religion, and nationhood itself, and insists that shared resilience among both Black and white people is the only way forward. As much as it is a reckoning with America’s racist past, The Fire Next Time is also a clarion call to care, courage, and love, and a candle to light the way." - from the publisher

"Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men -- bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son -- and readers -- the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder."

"Written in history celebrates the great letters of world history, creative culture and personal life. Acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore selects over one hundred letters from ancient times to the twenty-first century: some are noble and inspiring, some despicable and unsettling; some are exquisite works of literature, others brutal, coarse and frankly outrageous; many are erotic, others heartbreaking. The writers vary from Elizabeth I, Rameses the Great and Leonard Cohen to Emmeline Pankhurst, Mandela, Stalin, Michelangelo, Suleiman the Magnificent and unknown people in extraordinary circumstances from love letters to calls for liberation, declarations of war to reflections on death. In the colourful, accessible style of a master storyteller, Montefiore shows why these letters are essential reading: how they enlighten our past, enrich the way we live now and illuminate tomorrow." - from the publisher

"A Collection of love letters, with a brief introduction for each author, written by some of the most famed personalities in history. Collection includes letters by Henry VIII, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexander Pope, Laurence Stern, Queen Victoria, Horation Nelson, John Keats, Benjamin Franklin, Aaron Burr, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Rousseau, Richard Wagner, George Sand, Shelley, Byron and dozens of others." - from the publisher

"Mallon has assembled a guide to the great diaries of literature -- from Samuel Pepys to Anais Nin. Mallon has written a new introduction for this edition which comments on the political consequences of keeping a journal, as in the former controversy involving Sen. Bob Packwood. A diarist himself, Mallon places journal writers in history, fleshing them out with both background and witty anecdote." - from the publisher

"People are compelled to keep diaries for a great many reasons. Although the diary is the most private form of writing, there have been few diarists who have not hoped that their daily confidences would ultimately be read by 'other eyes.' (Philip Larkin's order to burn his diary was, in this sense, most unusual.) As a result, there now exist an enormous number of published diaries, some works of genius, most not less than enthralling. In this collection, Ronald Blythe tempts us with a selection of passages spanning four centuries of self-examination, self-explanation, and self-presentation. Writing in a personal and uninhibited style, diarists offer us an intimate view of themselves and their times. Some, like Boswell or Evelyn Waugh, are prolific, and this volume serves as an introduction to their more extensive works. Others who are less well known shed light on their personal concerns and the events of their day. This anthology contains substantial portions of some eighty diaries, providing both intriguing portraits of their authors and a witty study of the diarist's art. The diarist's range--that of life itself--reaches to the heights and the depths of human experience: funny, profound, wicked, enchanting, gossipy, absurd, grubby, and learned, these diary entries will undoubtedly strike a familiar chord with readers. The door marked 'private' is left ajar, and we, the diary readers, are free to step inside the minds of some extraordinary personalities." - from the publisher

"As writers such as Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, and Anais Nin recognized, keeping a journal is a powerful tool of creative expression and self-healing. In A Voice of Her Own - a companion for both new and longtime diarists - Marlene Schiwy shows that journal writing is the ideal way to find one's individual voice, an opportunity for women to explore feelings, intuitions, perceptions, and ideas often suppressed in our society, and to record the truths of their own experience. Schiwy invites readers to share the journeys other women have made toward selfhood and encourages them to begin a journey of their own. She weaves together passages from published and unpublished journals, from works of literature, psychology, and women's studies with her personal insights. A Voice of Her Own is a treasure chest of inspiration for every woman seeking deeper self-awareness and new outlets for creativity." - from the publisher

"To artist-writer-naturalist Hannah Hinchman, the blank pages of a journal are a call to awaken the soul, to celebrate being alive in the world, to get to know both the wilderness of our inmost selves and the "unpredictable and potent" natural world. In the richly illustrated pages of this book, she unfolds a myriad of wonders ― the pattern of a bee abdomen, varieties of ice forms and sky colors, the joys of a garden ― and shows us how to capture them on the page. Hinchman's respect for the miracle of our five senses, and her passion for what they can tell us about the world, is contagious. "Start with a smell, like a crushed marigold leaf, the sea, coal smoke," she advises, and from such raw materials begin to "decant the stuff of life" into journal form, "where it remains fresh, still tasting of its source." Even for one who has no intention of journal-keeping, to delve into Hinchman's own work is to see with new eyes. A Trail Through Leaves is a true gift and inspiration, a treasure-box of ways to write, draw, and be alive to the world." - from the publisher

"This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies." - from the publisher

"The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form. This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media."

"This unorthodox but delightful anthology of 42 essays focuses on the masters of world literature—writers best known for novels, plays, and poems—and how they put the essay to their personal use. Contributors include Auden, Balzac, Conrad, Dickens, Dostoevski, Eliot, Faulkner, Flaubert, Gide, Goethe, Hardy, Hawthorne, Heine, Hemingway, Kafka, Kipling, Lawrence, Melville, Pirandello, Poe, Proust, Sartre, Tolstoy, Twain, Whitman, Wilde, Woolf, and Yeats." - from the publisher

"For more than four hundred years the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this lively, fertile genre. Distinguished from the formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its drive toward candor and confession, and its often quirky first-person voice, the personal essay offers above all a feast of individuality." - from the publisher

"The essay is one of the richest of literary forms. Its most obvious characteristics are freedom, informality, and the personal touch--though it can also find room for poetry, satire, fantasy, and sustained argument. All these qualities, and many others, are on display in The Oxford Book of Essays. The most wide-ranging collection of its kind to appear for many years, it includes 140 essays by 120 writers: classics, curiosities, meditations, diversions, old favorites, recent examples that deserve to be better known. A particularly welcome feature is the amount of space allotted to American essayists, from Benjamin Franklin to John Updike and beyond. This is an anthology that opens with wise words about the nature of truth, and closes with a consideration of the novels of Judith Krantz. Some of the other topics discussed in its pages are anger, pleasure, Gandhi, Beau Brummell, wasps, party-going, gangsters, plumbers, Beethoven, potato crisps, the importance of being the right size, and the demolition of Westminster Abbey. It contains some of the most eloquent writing in English, and some of the most entertaining." - from the publisher

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon and Thoreau and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns, dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, and famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay." - from the publisher

"The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," and Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time." - from the publisher

"The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America's best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing." - from the publisher

"How much of the human experience can fit into 750 words? A lot, it turns out. Since its founding in 1997, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction has published hundreds of brief nonfiction essays by writers around the world, each within that strict word count. Over the past 20 years, Brevity has become one of the longest-running and most popular online literary publications, a journal readers regularly return to for insightful essays from skilled writers at every stage of their careers. Featuring examples of nonfiction forms such as memoir, narrative, lyric, braided, hermit crab, and hybrid, The Best of Brevity brings you 84 of the best-loved and most memorable reader favorites, collected in print for the first time. Compressed to their essence, these essays glint with drama, grief, love, and anger, as well as innumerable other lived intensities, resulting in an anthology that is as varied as it is unforgettable, leaving the reader transformed. With contributions from Krys Malcolm Belc, Jenny Boully, Brian Doyle, Roxane Gay, Daisy Hernández, Michael Martone, Ander Monson, Patricia Park, Kristen Radtke, Diane Seuss, Abigail Thomas, Jia Tolentino, and so many more, The Best of Brevity offers unparalleled diversity of style, form, and perspective for those interested in reading, writing, or teaching the flash nonfiction form." - from the publisher

" An engaging look at the aphorism, the shortest literary form, across time, languages, and cultures Aphorisms―or philosophical short sayings―appear everywhere, from Confucius to Twitter, the Buddha to the Bible, Heraclitus to Nietzsche. Yet despite this ubiquity, the aphorism is the least studied literary form. What are its origins? How did it develop? How do religious or philosophical movements arise from the enigmatic sayings of charismatic leaders? And why do some of our most celebrated modern philosophers use aphoristic fragments to convey their deepest ideas? In A Theory of the Aphorism, Andrew Hui crisscrosses histories and cultures to answer these questions and more. With clarity and precision, Hui demonstrates how aphorisms―ranging from China, Greece, and biblical antiquity to the European Renaissance and nineteenth century―encompass sweeping and urgent programs of thought. Constructed as literary fragments, aphorisms open new lines of inquiry and horizons of interpretation. In this way, aphorisms have functioned as ancestors, allies, or antagonists to grand systems of philosophy. Encompassing literature, philology, and philosophy, the history of the book and the history of reading, A Theory of the Aphorism invites us to reflect anew on what it means to think deeply about this pithiest of literary forms." - from the publisher

"Proverbs offer a concise record of folk wisdom and have appeared in oral tradition, literature, art, and popular culture for centuries. Written by the foremost authority on proverbs, this reference gives high school students, undergraduates, and general readers a concise yet comprehensive overview of proverbs in world culture. The volume begins with definitions and classifications of proverbs, followed by discussions of several notable examples. The book then examines approaches to the study of proverbs and the place of proverbs in literature, politics, popular songs, and everyday life. It closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources and a glossary. Included are numerous illustrations. Just about everyone has heard at least one proverb, and most people have heard more. Proverbs offer a concise record of folk wisdom and have appeared in oral tradition, literature, art, and popular culture for centuries. One of the most varied and fascinating types of folklore, proverbs are studied at all levels and are of interest to a wide range of audiences. Written by the foremost authority on proverbs, this reference gives high school students, undergraduates, and general readers a concise yet comprehensive overview of proverbs in world culture. The volume begins with definitions and classifications of proverbs and a discussion of their origin and dissemination. It then discusses several representative proverbs from around the world. This is followed by a review of scholarship on proverbs. The book next looks at how several proverbs have appeared in political speeches, literature, popular culture, and everyday life. The handbook closes with a bibliography of print and electronic resources and a glossary. Included are numerous photos illustrating the role of proverbs around the world." - from the publisher

"This book examines verbal art among the Dagara people of West Africa. It provides invaluable primary material for research, and does a close analysis of folktale narration, proverb usage, riddling, chanting of dirges and popular songs by male and female praise singers, and xylophone music performance as forms of verbal art. Folktales are characterized by wit, humor, and satire, and songs within tales are a mise-en-abyme, a story within a story that entertains but also enhances the narration through the participation of the audience in the performance. Moreover, Dagara tales are didactic and moralizing as a way of controlling the behavior of individuals in society. Riddling entertains but also helps to develop the cognitive abilities of children, and demands critical and logical thinking on the part of the participating audience. Proverbs were collected in context and analyzed closely for their meaning. The study also examines closely the art of speech-making, and concludes that a good locutor knows what figures of speech to use in order to enhance communication with the audience. This study concludes that an authentic theory of Dagara-and for that matter generally African- folklore must be grounded on a thorough knowledge of the traditions, rites and rituals, and the socio-political structures that have held the society together in its historical experience. The study is an important resource for areas such as African studies, African literature and folklore, folklore in general, anthropology, culture studies, ethnomusicology, ethnic studies, and gender studies among others." - from the publisher

GUSTAVUS AUTHOR!

"An aphorism is 'a short pithy statement or maxim,' but beneath this definition lies a wealth of wit and insight to which neither the word nor a brief description can do justice. This anthology demonstrates just how rewarding an art form the aphorism can be, and just how brilliantly the aphorist can illuminate the hidden truth, or lay bare the ironies of existence. Specific sections on desires and longings, self-doubt, fame and reputations, happiness and sorrow, cover the whole range of aphoristic literature. This book brings together the most diverse figures--the classic aphorists, like La Rochefoucauld; the philosophers, from the Greeks to Samuel Johnson to Virginia Woolf--as well as statesmen, scientists, boulevardiers, Olympians, and gadflies. John Gross draws on their wisdom and wit to produce an anthology that will be referred to time and time again."

"Contains over twenty thousand quotations, arranged alphabetically by author. Includes special categories within the regular text as well as a keyword index and cross-references." - from the publisher

"The Quotable Woman, Revised Edition gathers great quotations from thousands of women throughout history, from Eve to the present day. It is a treasure trove of both familiar and unexpected quotations on nearly every subject imaginable-from friendship, love, politics, and religion to education, the arts, and women's role in society. Contributors are presented in chronological order by the year of their birth, then alphabetically within each year. Indexes allow readers to find quotations by subject and contributors by name, occupation/profession, and nationality/ethnicity." - from the publisher

"A collection of over five hundred quotations in which famous writers from throughout time comment on writing, reading, literacy, libraries, censorship, publishing, and other book-related topics."

“Mark Twain once noted that Adam had a unique advantage--’When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.’ But once our primordial ancestors began quoting one another--perhaps to show off their keen humor and erudition--the habit became part of what makes us human. And though we often quote sage advice and learned homilies, by far our favorite quote is the one that makes us, and our audience, laugh. Now, in The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations , noted writer and satirist Ned Sherrin has gathered nearly 5,000 quotations in a rollicking collection drawn from an international cast of humorists and pundits, ranging from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde to Groucho Marx, Monty Python, and Roseanne. Arranged in themes, from Actors and Acting (including Dorothy Parker’s famous barb on Katherine Hepburn’s Broadway debut, ‘She ran the whole gamut of the emotions from A to B’) to Parents (P. J. O’Rourke, ‘Because of their size, parents may be difficult to discipline properly’), to Youth (Georges Courteline, ‘It’s better to waste one’s youth than to do nothing with it at all’), Sherrin has left no turn unstoned to collect the sharpest, the wittiest, the wryest in quips, put-downs, and one-liners. Here is Senator Wyche Fowler’s come-back when asked if he had smoked marijuana in the permissive sixties (‘Only when committing adultery’), William Faulkner on Henry James (‘One of the nicest old ladies I ever met’), George Bush on boredom (‘What’s wrong with being a boring sort of guy?’), S. J. Perelman on God (‘Whom you doubtless remember as that quaint old subordinate of General Douglas MacArthur’), and Adlai Stevenson on Republicans (‘If they will stop telling lies about Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them’). The wits of stage and screen are here--including Woody Allen (‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work...I want to achieve it by not dying’), Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Mae West, Will Rogers, and George Bernard Shaw--as are the literary wags from Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow to Evelyn Waugh and Gore Vidal (on Eisenhower in 1964, ‘reading a speech with his usual sense of discovery’). Each quotation comes with details of who said it, where, and when, while separate keyword and author indices mean the reader will never have to wonder ‘whose line is it anyway?’ With quotations courtesy of comedians and playwrights, novelists and producers, cartoonists and moguls, soldiers and lawyers, and displaying all shades of humor, from dry to sly, subtle to wacky, and even unintended, The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations will be the perfect resource for public speakers, writers and anyone else who enjoys a sparkling line, a clever pun, or a wickedly clever riposte: after all, says W. Somerset Maugham, ‘Impropriety is the soul of wit.’” - from the publisher

"This perenially popular book of advice on how to achieve personal and professional success is valued for its timeless insights on how to make one's way in the world. Written in the seventeenth century by a Spanish Jesuit scholar, the teachings are strikingly modern in tone and address universal concerns such as friendship, morality, effective leadership, and how to manage one's emotions. The Art of Worldly Wisdom is for anyone seeking to combine ethical behavior with worldly success." - publisher description

"Deceptively brief and insidiously easy to read, La Rochefoucauld's shrewd, unflattering analyses of human behavior have influenced writers, thinkers, and public figures as various as Voltaire, Proust, de Gaulle, Nietzsche, and Conan Doyle. This is the fullest collection of La Rochefoucauld's writings ever published in English, and includes the first complete translation of the Réflexions diverses (Miscellaneous Reflections). This edition includes an excellent introduction that surveys La Rochefoucauld's life, the genesis of his work, its form and content, and its influence, as well as comprehensive explanatory notes. A table of alternative maxim numbers and an extensive and invaluable index of topics help the reader to locate any maxim quickly and to appreciate the full range of La Rochefoucauld's thought on any of his favorite themes, such as self-love, vice and virtue, love and jealousy, friendship and self-interest, passion and pride." - from the publisher description of the Oxford World Classics edition

"German scientist and man of letters Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an 18th-century polymath: an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practicing critic both of art and literature. He is most celebrated, however, for the casual notes and aphorisms that he collected in what he called his Waste Books. With unflagging intelligence and encyclopedic curiosity, Lichtenberg wittily deflates the pretensions of learning and society, examines a range of philosophical questions, and tracks his own thoughts down hidden pathways to disconcerting and sometimes hilarious conclusions. Lichtenberg’s Waste Books have been greatly admired by writers as very different as Tolstoy, Einstein, and André Breton, while Nietzsche and Wittgenstein acknowledged them as a significant inspiration for their own radical work in philosophy. The record of a brilliant and subtle mind in action, The Waste Books are above all a powerful testament to the necessity, and pleasure, of unfettered thought." - publisher description of the NYRB Classics edition

"Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Puig was a Spanish writer, dramatist and avant-garde agitator. He strongly influenced surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel. Ramón Gómez de la Serna was especially known for 'Greguería', a short form of poetry that roughly corresponds to the one-liner in comedy." - from Wikipedia

"[Le bouquin de la bande dessinée] presents a complete and structured state of knowledge and thought on comics. For the first time, all the codes of comics and their place in cultural history are fully covered. The artistic vitality of comics is widely recognized today, particularly in France. Its creators are considered on an equal footing with artists of all disciplines. Many of them also broaden their field of activity to other forms, such as the novel, the cinema, the poster or the scenography of exhibitions. Inducted into the “ninth art” at the end of the 1960s, comics have also given rise, particularly over the past twenty years, to an increasingly abundant critical literature. However, it lacked a work of great synthesis to take stock of all the concepts relating to this mode of expression which, to be popular and finally legitimized, remains sometimes difficult to apprehend in its specificity, halfway between the arts of the book and the visual arts. The present Book of comics. Aesthetic and thematic dictionary fills this gap, addressing the genre in all its aspects, both as art, as language, as literature and as culture in its own right. Not only does it present a complete and structured state of knowledge and thought on comics, but it ventures to clear some new paths, outlining a real poetics. With nearly one hundred and fifty entries which are as many searched articles, this dictionary will satisfy the curiosity of amateurs, neophytes or enthusiasts, and will be an irreplaceable tool for researchers and teachers. A state of knowledge and thought on comics in the form of contributions explaining usual terms (album, bubble, hero, etc.) or techniques (inking, color, lettering, etc.), genres (animals, autobiography, western, etc.), supports (original page , fanzines, etc.) as well as notions relating to aesthetics or cultural history." - Google translation from French of publisher description

"The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel provides the complete history of the graphic novel from its origins in the nineteenth century to its rise and startling success in the twentieth and twenty-first century. It includes original discussion on the current state of the graphic novel and analyzes how American, European, Middle Eastern, and Japanese renditions have shaped the field. Thirty-five leading scholars and historians unpack both forgotten trajectories as well as the famous key episodes, and explain how comics transitioned from being marketed as children's entertainment. Essays address the masters of the form, including Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Marjane Satrapi, and reflect on their publishing history as well as their social and political effects. This ambitious history offers an extensive, detailed and expansive scholarly account of the graphic novel, and will be a key resource for scholars and students." - from the publisher

"The Graphic Novel offers an examination and analysis of the contemporary graphic novel as literature. Specific attention will be paid to the use of narrative genre in the graphic novel (e.g. the superhero graphic novel, the crime narrative graphic novel, the horror graphic novel, and the realistic/fantastic graphic novel). Attention will also be paid to the most important and most frequently discussed graphic novels published during the past three decades, including Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, The Crow by J. O'Barr, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller, The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, Road to Perdition by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner, Maus by Art Spiegelman. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, and Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth (et al)." - from the publisher

"Comics, graphic novels, sequential art have gained unprecedented legitimacy. The articles collected in this volume provide an overview of this wildly diverse, increasingly popular, and widely accepted form of literature." - from the publisher

"Graphic Novels Core Collection highlights 3,500 recommended fiction and nonfiction graphic novels, including content descriptions and quotes from selected reviews. The graphic novels in this collection cover a wide variety of genres including adventure, biography, fantasy, superhero, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, and more."

"This is the first global history of comics around the world from the late 1960s to the present day. Comics, manga, bandes dessinées, fumetti, tebeo, historietas, no matter the name, they have been a powerful medium across four continents for decades. This is the history of comics around the world from the late 1960s to the dawn of the 21st century. This is a richly illustrated narrative of extraordinary scope. Examples from all over the world include everything from Crumb and Kirby to RAW; from Metal Hurlant to Marjane Satrapi to nouvelle manga; from both the American mainstream and underground to the evolving and influential British scene. The images here are bright and colorful, dark and brooding, arresting and pleasant, all at the same time. The authors are the first to write a broadly comprehensive history of this most accessible, democratic, and occasionally subversive modern popular art form, displaying an intimate familiarity with schools and styles, writers, artists, and companies across countries and generations. In showing us both post-apocalyptic dreamscapes and portraits of the everyday, this book looks at this thirty-plus year period through a very unique lens." - from the publisher

"Over the past century, fans have elevated comics from the back pages of newspapers into one of our most celebrated forms of culture, from Fun Home, the Tony Award-winning musical based on Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking graphic memoir, to the dozens of superhero films that are annual blockbusters worldwide. What is the essence of comics' appeal? What does this art form do that others can't? Whether you've read every comic you can get your hands on or you're just starting your journey, [this book] has something for you. Author Hillary Chute chronicles comics culture, explaining underground comics (also known as "comix") and graphic novels, analyzing their evolution, and offering fascinating portraits of the creative men and women behind them. Chute reveals why these works--a blend of concise words and striking visuals--are an extraordinarily powerful form of expression that stimulates us intellectually and emotionally. Focusing on ten major themes--disaster, superheroes, sex, the suburbs, cities, punk, illness and disability, girls, war, and queerness--Chute explains how comics gets its messages across more effectively than any other form. "Why disaster?" explores how comics are uniquely suited to convey the scale and disorientation of calamity, from Art Spiegelman's representation of the Holocaust and 9/11 to Keiji Nakazawa's focus on Hiroshima. "Why the suburbs?" examines how the work of Chris Ware and Charles Burns illustrates the quiet joys and struggles of suburban existence; and "Why punk?" delves into how comics inspire and reflect the punk movement's DIY aesthetics--giving birth to a democratic medium increasingly embraced by some of today's most significant artists. Featuring full-color reproductions of more than one hundred essential pages and panels, including some famous but never-before-reprinted images from comics legends, Why Comics? is an indispensable guide that offers a deep understanding of this influential art form and its masters." - from the publisher

"The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics' interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the 'epic of epics'--and to the past 60 years of American culture--from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale. The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain, smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Every schoolchild recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. 18 of the 100 highest-grossing movies of all time are directly based on parts of it. And not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing--nobody's supposed to. So, of course, that's what Wolk did: he read all 27,000 comics that make up the Marvel universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it: seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a coherent whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk's hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a funhouse-mirror history of the past 60 years, from the atomic night-terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day--a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it's also ludicrously fun. Looking over close to sixty years of Marvel's comics, Wolk sees fascinating patterns--the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story's progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way they all feed into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it's also a revelation for readers who don't know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels." - from the publisher

"In the early 1960s, Marvel Comics introduced a series of bright-costumed superhero characters -- including Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, and the Amazing Spider-Man -- that would evolve into a modern American mythology for millions of readers. Over the last half-century, these characters have been passed along among generations of editors, artists, and writers who struggled with commercial mandates, a fickle audience, and, over matters of credit and control, one another." - from the publisher

"Frederick Aldama has done it again with another timely and valuable book about comics. Picking up from his pioneering book Your Brain on Latino Comics, he has gathered an insightful group of authors in Multicultural Comics that deftly engage, the intersectionality of race and identity, image and idea, theory and methods, and comics and politics. The impressive range of critical essays covers steep theoretical and cultural ground yet sure-footedly demonstrates that the grand fantasyscapes illustrated across various comic book configurations are a site of real and imagined racial differentiation intensely dialoguing with the self, the nation, and the world." - from the publisher

"Though the field of comic book studies has burgeoned in recent years, Latino characters and creators have received little attention. Putting the spotlight on this vibrant segment, Your Brain on Latino Comics illuminates the world of superheroes Firebird, Vibe, and the new Blue Beetle while also examining the effects on readers who are challenged to envision such worlds. Exploring mainstream companies such as Marvel and DC as well as rising stars from other segments of the industry, Frederick Aldama provides a new reading of race, ethnicity, and the relatively new storytelling medium of comics themselves. Overview chapters cover the evolution of Latino influences in comics, innovations, and representations of women, demonstrating Latino transcendence of many mainstream techniques. The author then probes the rich and complex ways in which such artists affect the cognitive and emotional responses of readers as they imagine past, present, and future worlds. Twenty-one interviews with Latino comic book and comic strip authors and artists, including Laura Molina, Frank Espinosa, and Rafael Navarro, complete the study, yielding captivating commentary on the current state of the trade, cultural perceptions, and the intentions of creative individuals who shape their readers in powerful ways." - from the publisher

"What do the comic book figures Static, Hardware, and Icon all have in common? Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives an answer that goes far beyond “tights and capes,” an answer that lies within the mission Milestone Media, Inc. , assumed in comic book culture. Milestone was the brainchild of four young black creators who wanted to part from the mainstream and do their stories their own way. This history of Milestone, a “creator-owned” publishing company, tells how success came to these mavericks in the 1990s and how comics culture was expanded and enriched as fans were captivated by this new genre. Milestone focused on the African American heroes in a town called Dakota. Quite soon these black action comics took a firm position in the controversies of race, gender, and corporate identity in contemporary America. Characters battled supervillains and sometimes even clashed with more widely known superheroes. Front covers of Milestone comics often bore confrontational slogans like “Hardware: A Cog in the Corporate Machine is About to Strip Some Gears. ” Milestone's creators aimed for exceptional stories that addressed racial issues without alienating readers. Some competitors, however, accused their comics of not being black enough or of merely marketing Superman in black face. Some felt that the stories were too black, but a large cluster of readers applauded these new superheroes for fostering African American pride and identity. Milestone came to represent an alternative model of black heroism and, for a host of admirers, the ideal of masculinity. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives details about the founding of Milestone and reports on the secure niche its work and its image achieved in the marketplace. Tracing the company's history and discussing its creators, their works, and the fans, this book gauges Milestone alongside other black comic book publishers, mainstream publishers, and the history of costumed characters." - from the publisher

"Contextualizes the history of race within comic books and the fundamental whiteness observed in American superhero narratives from the late 1930s to the present"--Provided by publisher."In Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, Sean Guynes and Martin Lund bring together a series of essays that contextualize the histories and stakes of whiteness studies, superhero comics, and superhero studies for academics, fans, and media-makers alike. The volume illustrates how the American comic book superhero is fundamentally a figure of white power and white supremacy and ultimately calls for diversity in superhero comics as well as a democratized media culture. Contributors not only examine superhero narratives but also delve into the production, distribution, audience, and reception of those narratives, highlighting the imbrication of forces that have helped to create, normalize, question, and sometimes even subvert American beliefs about whiteness and race. Unstable Masks considers the co-constitutive nature of identity, representation, narrative, production and consumption, and historical and cultural contexts in forging the stereotypes that decide who gets to be a superhero and who gets to be American on the four-color pages of comic books." - from the publisher

"Over the last 75 years, superheroes have been portrayed most often as male, heterosexual, white, and able-bodied. Today, a time when many of these characters are billion-dollar global commodities, there are more female superheroes, more queer superheroes, more superheroes of color, and more disabled superheroes--but not many more. Superwomen investigates how and why female superhero characters have become more numerous but are still not-at-all close to parity with their male counterparts; how and why they have become a flashpoint for struggles over gender, sexuality, race, and disability; what has changed over time and why in terms of how these characters have been written, drawn, marketed, purchased, read, and reacted to; and how and why representations of superheroes matter, particularly to historically underrepresented and stereotyped groups. Specifically, the book explores the production, representations, and receptions of prominent transmedia female superheroes from their creation to the present: Wonder Woman; Batgirl and Oracle; Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Star Wars' Padmé Amidala, Leia Organa, Jaina Solo, and Rey; and X-Men's Jean Grey, Storm, Kitty Pryde, Rogue, and Mystique. It analyzes their changing portrayals in comics, novels, television shows, and films, as well as how cultural narratives of gender have been negotiated through female superheroes by creators, consumers, and parent companies over the last several decades." - from the publisher

"Character guide to the women of the Marvel Universe, explaining their early lives and how they became superheroes. Explores the lives of exceptional and diverse women of the Marvel Universe. Filled with inspirational lessons and clever observations, each section digs into what these relatable women can teach us all about growth, bravery, and the true meaning of strength. Paired with over one hundred original, vibrant, and emotive illustrations, this book balances the responsibility and the fun that comes with being a hero." - from the publisher

"Explores how heteropatriarchal representations of gender are portrayed within superhero comics, film, and television. The contributors examine how hegemonic masculinity has been continually perpetuated and reinforced within the superhero genre and unpack critiques of specific superhero representations, the industry, and the fan base at large. However, possibilities of resistance and change are embedded within these problematic portrayals." - from the publisher

"Interest in comic books, graphic novels, and manga has never been greater, and fans of these works continue to grow around the world. From American superheroes like Superman and Spiderman to Japanese manga like Dragon Ball, there is a rich world of graphic storytelling that appeals to a wide range of readers—from young children just beginning to read to adults of every age who are captivated by dynamic illustrations and complex characters. Once dismissed as “just” for children, comic books are now appreciated for their vibrant art and sophisticated storylines. In Comics, Graphic Novels, and Manga: The Ultimate Teen Guide, Randall Bonser explores the history, evolution, diversification, and impact of graphic storytelling. This book looks at the origins of illustrated stories and how they evolved over the decades. A celebration and exploration of the rapidly growing world of comics, this book discusses such topics as the history of graphic storytelling, from cave drawings to zombie comics the impact of American superhero comics on popular culture diversity in comics the tools comic book and graphic novel creators use to communicate easy starting points for readers new to comics Featuring reviews of more than 90 graphic novels and popular manga series, this book provides recommendations of what teens should consider reading next. The author also provides a short course on how teens can create and distribute their own comics. For those who either want to start reading comics but aren’t sure where to start, or as a gateway for the comics enthusiast to explore a different graphic novel genre, Comics, Graphic Novels, and Manga: The Ultimate Teen Guide provides a fun and fascinating introduction to these worlds." - from the publisher

"The original three-volume anthology The Graphic Canon presented the world's classic literature -- from ancient times to the late twentieth century -- as eye-popping comics, illustrations, and other visual forms. In this follow-up, young people's literature through the ages is given new life for an adult audience by contemporary comic artists and illustrators. Fairy tales, fables, fantastical adventures, young adult novels, swashbuckling yarns, your favorite stories from childhood and your teenage years -- they're all here, in all their original complexity and strangeness, before they were censored or sanitized." - from the publisher