Each volume of Poetry for Students provides analysis of approximately 20 poems that teachers and librarians have identified as the most frequently studied in literature courses. Some of the poems covered in this volume include:
"Omen" by Edward Hirsch
"If" by Rudyard Kipling
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe
"Pineapples and Pomegranates" by Paul Muldoon
"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" By Walt Whitman
Shakespeare's Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies
Philippa Berry draws on feminist theory, postmodern thought and queer theory, to challenge existing critical notions of what is fundamental to Shakespearean tragedy. She shows how, through a network of images clustered around feminine or feminized characters, these plays 'disfigure' conventional ideas of death as a bodily end, as their figures of women are interwoven with provocative meditations upon matter, time, the soul, and the body. The scope of these tragic speculations was radical in Shakespeare's day; yet they also have a surprising relevance to contemporary debates about time and matter in science and philosophy.
Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre
In Shakespearean studies, the category of the festive has been applied by critics only to the comedies. In this groundbreaking and provocative work, Naomi Conn Liebler introduces the category of festive tragedy. Shakespearean tragedy is, she argues, a celebration of communal survival, demonstrating what happens when a community violates or neglects the ritual structures that define and preserve it
Shakespeare's Fight with the Pirates and the Problems of the Transmission of His Text
Originally delivered in November 1915 as a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge, this close textual analysis of Shakespeare overturned the conventional methods of Shakespearean bibliography. In this careful study, Pollard, a bibliographer and literary scholar, called into question the long-held assumption that the early Quartos were of little bibliographical value because of the errors, mis-spellings and mis-lineations. By emphasizing the efforts made to impede printing piracy in early modern England, Pollard argued that the Quartos are much closer to Shakespeare's manuscripts than previous scholarship had allowed.
Taking seriously the commonplace that a man is known by the company he keeps—and particularly by the company he keeps over his lifetime—one can learn more about just about anyone by learning more about his friends. By applying this notion to Shakespeare, this book offers insight into the life of the most famous playwright in history, and one of the most elusive figures in literature. The book consists of sketches of Shakespeare's contact and relationships with the people known to have been close friends or acquaintances, revealing aspects of the poet's life by emphasizing ways in which his life was intertwined with theirs.
