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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2018

        Poetry about Yongzhou

        by Liu Aicai

        The lyric poetry describes and praises Yongzhou, a city of Hunan province that is noted for its profound history and breathtaking landscape. The book combines poems composed by the author and various pictures to lead readers to appreciate the beauty of Yongzhou.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        February 2024

        Sir Philip Sidney: The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

        The New Arcadia, Second Revised Edition

        by Victor Skretkowicz, Elisabeth Chaghafi, J. B. Lethbridge

        Shipwrecks, gory battle scenes, cross-dressing, toxic relationships, abduction, torture (psychological and physical), comical country bumpkins, and, of course, love and poetry -Sir Philip Sidney's witty pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia is the classic that has it all in terms of entertainment factors. Modern readers mostly know Arcadia in its complete 'old' version, but it is the New Arcadia (published in 1590) that was the most influential and most widely imitated literary text of the sixteenth century. While preserving the basic plot - a ruler attempts to escape an alarming oracle by moving his family to the countryside and engaging in shepherd-cosplay until the arrival of two foreign princes triggers a chain of events leading to the fulfilment of the oracle - this version adds further narrative strands and introduces ambitious revisions that showcase Sidney's stylistic brilliance as a prose writer.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        November 2024

        Geoffrey Hill and the ends of poetry

        by Tom Docherty

        The idea of the end is an essential motivic force in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016). This book shows that Hill's poems are characteristically 'end-directed'. They tend towards consummations of all kinds: from the marriages of meanings in puns, or of words in repeating figures and rhymes, to syntactical and formal finalities. The recognition of failure to reach such ends provides its own impetus to Hill's poetry. This is the first book on Hill to take account of his last works. It is a significant contribution to the study of Hill's poems, offering a new thematic reading of his entire body of work. By using Hill's work as an example, the book also touches on questions of poetry's ultimate value: what are its ends and where does it wish to end up?

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2019

        Pastoral poetry of the English Renaissance

        An anthology

        by J. B. Lethbridge, Sukanta Chaudhuri

        Renaissance pastoral poetry is gaining new interest for its distinctive imaginative vein, its varied allusive content, and the theoretical implications of the genre. This is by far the biggest ever anthology of English Renaissance pastoral poetry, with 277 pieces spanning two centuries. Spenser, Sidney, Jonson and Drayton are amply represented alongside their many contemporaries. There is a wide range of pastoral lyrics, weightier allusive pieces, and translations from classical and vernacular pastoral poetry; also, more unusually, pastoral ballads and poems set in all kinds of prose works. Each piece has been freshly edited from the original sources, with full apparatus and commentary. This book will be complemented by a second volume, to be published in 2017, which includes a book-length introduction, textual notes and analytic indices.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2009

        John Ashbery and American Poetry

        by David Herd

        starting point. David Herd sets out to provide readers with a new critical language through which they can appreciate the beauty and complexity of Ashbery's writing. Presenting the poet in all his forms -avant-garde, nostalgic, sublime and camp - the book argues that the perpetual inventiveness of Ashbery's work has always been underpinned by the poets desire to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion. Tracing Ashbery's development in the light of this idea, and from its origins in the dazzling artistic environment of 1950's New York, the book evaluates his poetry against the aesthetic, literary and historical backgrounds that have informed it. The story of a brilliant career, and a history of the period in which that career has taken shape, John Ashbery and American Poetry provides a compelling account of Ashbery's importance to Twentieth Century Literature. ;

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2023

        Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

        Emotions, ethics, dreams

        by Megan Leitch

        Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

      • Trusted Partner
        Fiction
        January 2009

        Library of Chinese Classics :The Romance of West Chamber

        by Wang Shifu

        The "West Chamber" of Wang Shih-fu in the Yuan Dynasty was a masterpiece of Chinese classical opera and a masterpiece of Chinese literature. The theme of the drama is the love story of the young scholar Zhang Huan and the late Ying-Ying, the daughter of the 19-year-old Cui Xianguo. The whole play is divided into five (screen) twenty (field). The first Zhang Ying and Ying Ying in the temple at first sight. The second to write Zaibing siege filled homes, Zhangsheng rescue, Mrs. Cui allow her daughter Yingying with Zhangsheng wife, then eat their own words. The third one to write a pair of lover Acacia sponge. The fourth the first Valentine's tryst Valentine's Day; the second letter of Mrs. Choi to Changsheng Beijing exam, the high school after the wedding; the third Valentine's leave, Zhang went to Beijing to attend the meeting; the fourth fold of the lover dream phase Will be done. The fifth to write a couple reunion. In short, "The Romance of the West Chamber" wrote the contradiction between love and family honor. The result was that Zhang Sheng would try high school, winning the honor and winning the love.

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        Yalda’s Night

        by Ghada Al-Absi

        The life of poet Hafez Al-Shirazi forms the background from which this novel draws its great ideas about life, love and poetry. And although this book is based on the visions of this great poet, it is not a heterosexual biography of his life but rather an imagined novel inspired by his poetry.   The events of the novel take place in one night when Hafez dies, only to be born again. Throughout the long night, the author reviews stories, conflicts and milestone events in history, and Hafez has the chance to meet the poles of Sufi love in multiple chronological paths within the novel. He contemplates the black death and is defeated by the Farsi language with his early failures in poetry, but he finds salvation in the Arabic language by memorising the entire Qur’an. As a result, Shams Al-Din chooses another name inspired by him: Hafez, who the world will embrace until the Shiraz baker becomes a minister, on a human journey in which the Shirazi tests and loses everything successively.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        April 2022

        The narrative grotesque in medieval Scottish poetry

        by Caitlin Flynn

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        Picture books, activity books & early learning material

        El espacio entre la hierba

        by María José Ferrada, Andrés López

        This book object, composed of 30 cards, invites the reader to stop in the poetry that surrounds us.

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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2023

        The gift of narrative in medieval England

        by Nicholas Perkins

        This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.

      • Trusted Partner
        May 2018

        Children's fascination with Tang poetry and Tang history

        by Pao Ba

        This is an interesting speech of Tang poetry written by a father to his children. With vivid, funny and modern language, the author introduces Tang poetry which is suitable for primary school students to read and recite. The book is also equipped with the historical background related to poetry, the personality and experience of poets, so that children can enjoy the beauty of poetry in a relaxed and interesting atmosphere, and quickly master and learn the essence of Chinese classical culture

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        Poetry

        The Penultimate Cup

        by Moncef Ouhaibi

        A 420-page collection of poetry by Tunisian Moncef Ouhaibi, The Penultimate Cup covers a wide variety of topics. Rich in artistic, philosophical, literacy and historic values, Ouhaibi’s poems offer readers rich experiences, not just poetically but with the imparting of crucial knowledge, too, as his writing is steeped in his own extensive personal experiences.   The Penultimate Cup begins with an autobiographical piece entitled "The Family," in which the poet chronicles his ancestral home and gives an account of his family life and childhood before poetry. "The Family" becomes a venue where his family members—those who influenced him the most—arrive in succession: his father, the village chief; his grandfather, the astrologer; his uncle, the chess player, his mother and the rest, while the places where he lived fashion the corners of the poem like furniture: the house, the jungle behind it, the sky above the Roman Amphitheater. Ouhaibi’s poetry combines several art genres, with few of the poems relying on narratives to merge reality with fiction. Poetic imagery is in abundance, his words transform into virtual art, music and philosophical ideas. "The Scream" poem for example, relates not to the sound of a person in pain but his image, which reminds the reader of the famous painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. “Oh Youssef,” writes Ouhaibi, “take my hand, while I scream like Munch in the wilderness”. Once Ouhaibi has established his distinctive style, he takes us deeper into his world, through a myriad of imagery; portraits painted with words. The author says that poetry should be attributed to the language itself, not geography, and in his work we see a host of cities and countries being constantly featured alongside his beloved hometown of Kairouan, making it easy to grasp the deep connection he has with the land.   The nearly 60 poems in this collection are eloquent in expression, spanning events from the past, present to the future, sharing a contemporary voice that takes readers on a journey to numerous ancient cities and lands and referencing the works of other poets, artists and novelists, such as Rodin, Darwish, Valéry and the aforementioned Munch.

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        Literature & Literary Studies
        December 2000

        Contemporary British poetry and the city

        by Peter Barry, Kim Latham

        Though poets have always written about cities, the commonest critical categories (pastoral poetry, nature poetry, Romantic poetry, Georgian poetry, etc.) have usually stressed the rural, so that poetry can seem irrelevant to a predominantly urban populati. Explores a range of contemporary poets who visit the 'mean streets' of the contemporary urban scene, seeking the often cacophonous music of what happens here. Poets discussed include: Ken Smith, Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, Sean O'Brien, Ciaran Carson, Peter Reading, Matt Simpson, Douglas Houston, Deryn Rees-Jones, Denise Riley, Ken Edwards, Levi Tafari, Aidan Hun, and Robert Hampson. Approaches contemporary poetry within a broad spectrum of personal, social, literary, and cultural concerns. Includes 'loco-specific' chapters, on cities including Hull, Liverpool, London, and Birmingham, with an additional chapter on 'post-industrial' cities such as Belfast, Glasgow and Dundee. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        August 2021

        Spenser and Donne

        Thinking poets

        by Yulia Ryzhik

        The names Edmund Spenser and John Donne are typically associated with different ages in English poetry, the former with the sixteenth century and the Elizabethan Golden Age, the latter with the 'metaphysical' poets of the seventeenth century. This collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge this dichotomous view and to engage critically with both poets, not only at the sites of direct allusion, imitation, or parody, but also in terms of common preoccupations and continuities of thought, informed by the literary and historical contexts of the politically and intellectually turbulent turn of the century. Juxtaposing these two poets, so apparently unlike one another, for comparison rather than contrast changes our understanding of each poet individually and moves towards a more holistic, relational view of their poetics.

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        THE POET OF MIRRORS

        Bee’del of Delhi

        by Vraje Abrahim

        Mirza Abdolqader Azimabadi—penname “Bee’del”— was born in Putna, India in 1644 CE and died in Delhi in 1721. He spoke Bengali, wrote poetry in Persian (Farsi), and was familiar with Arabic, Urdu, Bengali and Sanskrit. One of the most prolific and regarded poets of his day, his style is considered the glory of Persian poetry of Central Asian/Indian origin. Among many ethnic groups outside the present borders of Iran, whose culture/mysticism and literature is influenced by the Iranian culture and language, Bee’del is classified alongside Ha’fez—an honor conferred on very few. As he became familiar with the teachings of the Sufis, he continued to frequent their gatherings throughout life. Their literature influenced both his work and his growing involvement in things of the spirit. Bee’del’s relevance to our times is obvious—his message is informed by a universal regard for the inner life and potential of humans, regardless of geography, ethnicity or religion. As a Sufi poet, Bee’del urges us to attend to our most important task—experiencing, as opposed to reading/hearing about, one’s inner Origin/Essence—and thus realize the true purpose of our existence.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2018

        European Erotic Romance

        by Victor Skretkowicz, J. B. Lethbridge

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