In The Companion to Keats, leading scholars discuss Keats's work in several fascinating contexts: literary history and key predecessors; Keats's life in London's intellectual, aesthetic and literary culture; the relation of his poetry to the visual arts; the critical traditions and theoretical contexts within which Keats's life and achievements have been assessed. These specially commissioned essays examine Keats's specific poetic endeavours, his striking way with language, and his lively letters as well as his engagement with contemporary cultures and literary traditions, his place in criticism, from his day to ours, including the challenge he poses to gender criticism.
Shakespeare and Judicial Rhetoric illustrates Shakespeare's creative processes by revealing some of the intellectual materials out of which some of his most famous works were composed. Focusing on the narrative poem Lucrece, on four of his late Elizabethan plays -- Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Hamlet -- and on three early Jacobean dramas, Othello, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, Quentin Skinner argues that there are major speeches, and sometimes sequences of scenes, that are crafted according to a set of rhetorical precepts about how to develop a persuasive judicial case, either in accusation or defence.
Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity
This reading of Wordworth's poetry by leading critic David Simpson centres on its almost obsessive representation of spectral forms and images of death in life. Wordsworth is reacting, Simpson argues, to the massive changes in the condition of England and the modern world at the turn of the century: mass warfare; the increased scope of machine-driven labour and urbanisation; and the expanding power of commodity form in rendering economic and social exchange more and more abstract, more and more distant from human agency and control.
Latino/a literature is one of the fastest developing fields in the discipline of literary studies. It represents an identity that is characterized by fluidity and diversity, often explored through divisions formed by language, race, gender, sexuality, and immigration. This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture.
Literature and journalism have been intimate companions in American letters for three centuries. This collection of essays, the first of its kind, will explore the variety of ways that the two fields have intersected in the lives and works of American writers. Here, leading scholars examine poetry in Civil War-era newspapers, truth and falsehood in the age of yellow journalism, and the value of newspapers as a source for literary scholarship, as well as the specific experiences and contributions of Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Colbert, and other American authors and journalists.
