A close poetic ally of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, the British poet Basil Bunting is best known for his use of specific musical form in poetry. Several of his works, including his long poem Briggflatts, are in the form of the sonata. Although his language is plain, unvarnished English, his influences and models extend to Classical, Persian, and ......
The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency
Arguably the single most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of formal organization and a characteristically ......
When Sartre referred to Georges Bataille as a ''new mystic,'' he meant the label as an insult. Sartre considered mysticism to be a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy -- especially dangerous where the writings of mystics adapt philosophical terminology for different purposes. In Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, Peter Connor ......
Pulitzer Prize-winner and former poet laureate of the United States Rita Dove has written prolifically since the early 1970s. In this, the first full-length critical study of her entire body of work by an American scholar, Malin Pereira traces the development of Dove's literary voice, looking at the ways she combines racial specificity with the ......
Historians have generally come to accept the idea of a ''long eighteenth century,'' one that extended from circa 1660 to 1830. In The Global Eighteenth Century, editor Felicity Nussbaum and the contributing authors take this idea one step further, positing an eighteenth century that is ''wide'' as well as long, reaching beyond Europe into the ......
Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and ......
Oaths, vows, contracts, and promises are among the most momentous actions human beings can perform, in art as well as life. Although virtually ignored by literary theorists, these obligations motivate plots, test characters, provide rhetorical occasions, structure ironies, and open thematic horizons. According to William Kerrigan, they had ......
Philology-the discovery, editing, and presentation of historical texts-was once a firmly established discipline that formed the core study for students across a wide range of linguistic and literary fields. Although philology departments are steadily disappearing from contemporary educational establishments, in this book Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ......
At the turn of the sixteenth century, with the Italian Renaissance at its cultural high point, Italians rediscovered and reinvented an old art formancient Latin comedies, rewritten and updated in Italian. These playswitty, ribald, tightly plotted, and characterized by clever reversals of gender roles and social stereotypesquickly captured the ......
