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In a sustained new reading of John Gower's major English poem, Confessio Amantis (1390-3), Elliot Kendall shows how deeply the great household shaped the way Gower and his contemporaries (including Chaucer, Clanvowe, chroniclers, and parliamentary petitioners) imagined their world.

An interdisciplinary reassessment of Milton's poetry in light of the literary and conceptual problem posed by the poet's attempt to put into words that which is unsayable and beyond representation. Situates Milton's emerging poetics of ineffability in the context of the intellectual cross-currents of Renaissance humanism and Protestant theology.

Frank Shovlin presents a unique examination of Irish literature through the middle decades of the twentieth century by considering the role of literary magazines in the development of a range of writers from AE (George William Russell), to John Hewitt. He draws on a wealth of new material and argues for the importance of these in keeping Irish cultural life vibrant in these neglected years.

This book analyses the relationship between Conrad's work and three major subjects: the philosophy of history, nationalism (in Europe and Latin America), and Conrad's interest in French Romanticism and Napoleon Bonaparte. As well as discussing more well-known works, Niland re-evaluates the long-neglected late novels The Rover and Suspense.

This text examines Hazlitt's "metaphysics". Studying his development of the power principle as a counter to the pleasure principle of the Utilitarians, it examines his philosophy of discourse, his account of imaginative structure and of genius, and asserts the tenacity of this principle.

Marianne Moore's poetry offers a rich site from which to analze a tradition of American orientalism which focused upon China. This text examines why she chose to participate in that tradition and analyzes why her borrowing of Chinese models was so critical to the formation of her verse.

A study of the cultural and economic status of playwriting between 1660 and 1710. The author argues that this period saw the move towards modern attitudes of dramatic art - which require authors to be the sole begetters of their works - and explores developments in the theatrical marketplace.

Sieges were a popular subject in medieval romances. This book is a full-length study of this important theme in medieval literature. It shows how writers used descriptions of sieges to explore such subjects as military strategy, heroism, chivalry and attitudes to the past.

Pain is not the same for everybody. Victorian novels were awash with suffering, but this book also explores late Victorian discussions of fire-walking, tattooing and flogging, and in doing this shows the ways in which the experience was affected by class, gender, race, and criminality.

Previous histories of the Abbey Theatre have repeated W.B. Yeats's assertion that there was no censorship of the theatre in Ireland. This book utilizes new source material to prove that censorship did occur and that Yeats was willing to sacrifice artistic freedom when he saw the chance to ensure the longevity of the Abbey Theatre and his legacy.

What did Coleridge know about medicine and how did it influence the development of his critical thought? Aiming to answer this question, this book deals with Coleridge's career between 1795 and 1806. It supplies an account of his activities in 'philosophic medicine', showing how these paved the way for his conversion to German idealist philosophy.

By demonstrating that many of the concepts and styles associated with Modernism were actually derived directly from cultures such as Japan, China, Korea, India, Egypt, Assyria, West Africa, and the Pacific Islands, this book provides an entirely new way of looking at the evolution of Modernist art and literature in the West.

This book brings new perspectives to the study of sensation fiction in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines alongside their fiction to explore the self-conscious and complex ways they used sensation to re-work contemporary notions of female agency.

This study considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry. It argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in the period highlights anxieties about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. It covers key poems by authors such as Tennyson and the Brownings, and contextualizes them with reference to lesser-known works.

K. P. Clarke explores how Chaucer's work was affected by the tradition of commentary on or glossing of vernacular poetry, and how this context affected the layout and therefore the reading of texts within specific manuscripts. He seeks to understand Chaucer's Italian sources, such as Dante and Boccaccio, as they were read by Chaucer himself.

Focusing on Second Generation New York School poetry from 1960 to the present day, this volume explores the poets who lived and wrote from or about New York, the forms of their poems, and the a relationship between the structures they inhabited and the structures they created.

John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge created the pulp fiction of the later sixteenth century. Their pamphlets combined sensational plots, adventurous heroines, and self-conscious narrators. This book examines how they dealt with the constraints of mass market authorship, and replaces their narratives at the heart of Elizabethan literature.

Presenting the playwright, Dekker, as a bold, pugnacious writer who experimented with form in order to articulate his militant Protestant ideas, this critique is centred on "The Whore of Babylon". The plays are perceived as blending satire, hagiography and propaganda.

The funeral elegy is a quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book charts the history of the elegy from the mid-16th century up to the 1630's, examines a series of detailed studies of the works of major elegists, and shows it as a kind of laboratory in which writers could put theories of composition into practice.

This is an innovative study of the use by the poet Shelley, conventionally regarded as an atheist, of ideas and imagery from the Scriptures in expressing his world view.

During the 19th century, the study of language shared with geology certain metaphors to describe theories of change. This book looks at three authors whose handling of language and dialect speech demonstrates different angles of approach, and puts fiction into dialogue with science.

This book is a fascinating in-depth study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902-1971). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenges conventional readings of her as an eccentric, and offers new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.

The Literary Underground in the 1660s sheds new light on a world of political opposition and sedition. It tells the story of three oppositional writers, Andrew Marvell, George Wither, and Ralph Wallis, and their contributions to the restoration literary underground.

Focusing on the writing of John Thelwall, Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, he Majesty of the People examines how theories about the role of the intellectual or the writer were developed as part of the 1790s' contestation of the concept of the majesty of the people.

Visionary Philology combines nuanced and incisive close reading of the poetry of Geoffrey Hill with detailed scholarship and fresh archival work, examining Hill's work in relation to the history of language and of the study of language.

Committed Styles offers a new understanding of the literature of the 1930s and its relationship to modernism, exploring the tensions between formal experimentation and political vision that lie at the heart of the politicised literature of the 1930s.

Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, identifying mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric and charting them against key intersections in the two men's lives.

Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth is a study of the cultural connections between two of the nineteenth century's most influential figures, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth.

A study of how three modernist poets (Yeats, Jones, & Eliot) at the height of their careers drew on their religious beliefs to transform some of their greatest poems into maps of the relationship between history and eternity.

Kelsey Jackson Williams presents the first full account of the manuscript notebooks of the antiquary John Aubrey (1626-1697), which cover everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. He reshapes our understanding of Aubrey, and of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.