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  The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others,

  Bonnie Costello

  (From the publishers site)

  The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long ...Read More

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  Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic

  Vidyan Ravinthiran

  (from the publishers site)

  Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as—among ...Read More

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  Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry

  Ann Keniston

  (from the publishers site)

  From Sylvia Plath’s depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering “bits” to AIDS elegies’ assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostly form and Susan Howe’s insistence that the past can be conveyed only through juxtaposed “scraps,” the condition of being too late is ...Read More

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  Seamus Heaney's Regions

  Richard Rankin Russell

  (from the publishers site)

  In Seamus Heaney’s Regions, Richard Rankin Russell argues that Heaney’s regions—the first, geographic, historical, political, cultural, linguistic; the second, a future where peace, even reconciliation, might one day flourish; the third, the life beyond this one—offer the best entrance into and a unified understanding of Heaney’s ...Read More

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  Musings on Mortality: Tolstoy to Primo Levi

  Victor Brombert

  (from the publishers site)

  Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi—these are the writers whose works Brombert plumbs, illuminating their views on the meaning of life and the human condition. But there is more to their work, he shows, ...Read More

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  The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930

  Meredith Martin

  (from the publishers site)

  Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and ...Read More

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  The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton

  Richard Strier

  (from the publishers site)

  Who during the Renaissance could have dissented from the values of reason and restraint, patience and humility, rejection of the worldly and the physical? These widely articulated values were part of the inherited Christian tradition and were reinforced by key elements in the Renaissance, especially the ...Read More

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  The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination

  Mark Payne

  (from the publishers site)

  How can literary imagination help us engage with the lives of other animals? The question represents one of the liveliest areas of inquiry in the humanities, and Mark Payne seeks to answer it by exploring the relationship between human beings and other animals in writings from ...Read More

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  The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950

  Robert H. Brinkmeyer

  (from publishers site)

  In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white ...Read More

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  Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun's Priest's Tale

  Peter W. Travis

  (from publishers site)

  Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is one of the most popular of The Canterbury Tales. It is only 646 lines long, yet it contains elements of a beast fable, an exemplum, a satire, and other genres. There have been countless attempts to articulate the “real” meaning of ...Read More

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  Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance

  Jeff Dolven

  (from publishers site)

  We take it for granted today that the study of poetry belongs in school—but in sixteenth-century England, making Ovid or Virgil into pillars of the curriculum was a revolution. Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance explores how poets reacted to the new authority of humanist pedagogy, and ...Read More

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  Power, Plain English, and the Rise of Modern Poetry

  David Rosen

  This book offers a radically new account of Modern poetry and revises our understanding of its relation to Romanticism. British poets from Wordsworth to Auden attempted to present themselves simultaneously as persons of power and as moral voices in their communities. The modern lyric derives its characteristic complexities—psychological, ethical, formal—from ...Read More

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  Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style

  Constance W. Hassett

  (from publishers site)

  Although the cultural and literary influence of Christina Rossetti has recently been widely acknowledged, the belatedness of this critical attention has left wide gaps in our understanding of her poetic contribution. Often focusing solely on her early work and neglecting her later volumes, many critics minimized her ...Read More

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  Emerson

  Lawrence Buell

  “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote—and in this book, the leading scholar of New England literary culture looks at the long shadow Emerson himself has cast, and at his role and significance as a truly American institution. On the occasion of Emerson’s ...Read More

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  Fetching the Old Southwest Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain

  James H. Justus

  For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow ...Read More

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  Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

  Marjorie Perloff

  (from publishers site)

  Marjorie Perloff is one of the foremost critics of contemporary American poetry writing today. Her works are credited by many with creating and sustaining new critical interest not only in the work of major modernist poets such as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Williams but also in the ...Read More

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  Randall Jarrell and His Age

  Stephen Burt

  Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was the most influential poetry critic of his generation. He was also a lyric poet, comic novelist, translator, children's book author, and close friend of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, and many other important writers of his time. Jarrell won the 1960 National Book Award for ...Read More

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  Shakespeares Language

  Frank Kermode

  The true biography of Shakespeare - and the only one we really need to care about - is in the plays. Sir Frank Kermode, Britain's most distinguished literary critic, has been thinking about them all his life. This book is a distillation of that lifetime's thinking. The great English tragedies ...Read More

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  The Rebuke of History

  Paul V. Murphy

  In 1930, a group of southern intellectuals led by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren published I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. A stark attack on industrial capitalism and a defiant celebration of southern culture, the book has raised the hackles ...Read More

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  The Practice of Reading

  Denis Donoghue

  This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly theorizing about them. He shows what serious reading entails by discussing texts that ...Read More

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  Eliot's Dark Angel

  Richard Schuchard

  (from the publishers site)

  Schuchard's critical study draws upon previously unpublished and uncollected materials in showing how Eliot's personal voice works through the sordid, the bawdy, the blasphemous, and the horrific to create a unique moral world and the only theory of moral criticism in English literature. The book also ...Read More

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  The Work of Poetry

  John Hollander

  New and classic essays by one of America's most distinguished contemporary poet-critics, The Work of Poetry surveys an extraordinary range of poets, from Dante to May Swenson, and George Meredith to Marianne Moore, as well as works from the Psalms to A Child's Garden of Verses. By turns generous and uncompromising, Hollander champions the enduring force of poetry against the incursion of fashionable writing. This is an elegant, uncompromising affirmation of the extraordinary powers of poetic imagination from a poet whose poems have been hailed by J.D. McClatchy as "ways of thinking on paper."

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  Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism (Minds of the New South)

  Mark Royden Winchell

  An account of the influence of Cleanth Brooks, a literary critic, and a survey of literary criticism in 20th-century America. The book explains how Brooks helped to steer literacy study away from historical and philological scholarhips by emphasizing the text's autonomy.

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  The Fable of the Southern Writer

  Lewis P. Simpson

  (from Library Journal)

  "With a breadth and depth unsurpassed by any other cultural historian of the South, Lewis Simpson examines the writing of southerners Thomas Jefferson, John Randolph, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Arthur Crew Inman, William Styron, and Walker Percy. Simpson offers challenging essays of easy erudition blessedly free of academic jargon.... [They] do not propose to support an overall thesis, but simply explore the southern writer's unique relationship with his or her region, bereft of myth and tradition, in the grasp of science and history."