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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (Bloomsbury Handbooks)
Sylvia Plath is one of the most widely recognised and inspiring poets of the 20th century. With chapters written by more than 25 leading and emerging international scholars this is the most up-to-date and in-depth reference guide to 21st century scholarship on her life and work.The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath covers the full range of contemporary scholarship on Plath's work, including such topics as:· New insights from the publication of Plath's letters· Current scholarly perspectives: feminist and gender studies, race, medical humanities and ecocriticism· Plath's poetry, the major novel, The Bell Jar, and Plath's writing for children· Plath's literary contexts, from Ovid and Robert Lowell to Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing and Stevie Smith· Plath's broadcasting work for the BBCThe book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key primary and secondary writing by and on the author.
Chapters into Verse: Volume 1: Genesis to Malachi
For generations, poets have turned to the Bible for insight and inspiration. What did so many creative minds find in scripture? Is the Bible still a vital source of poetic inspirations? Chapters Into Verse is the first comprehensive collection ever made of poems written in English inspired by the Bible. A groundbreaking anthology, it introduces readers to a distinct heritage of English poetry: the scriptural tradition. Though frequently ignored and sometimes suppressed, this tradition rivals the classical and is every bit as venerable. Drawing a unique map of the history of English poetry, the two volumes of Chapters Into Verse survey and define the literary legacy of the Scriptures from the fourteenth century to the present. Each volume is arranged in scriptural order, and each poem is preceded by the biblical passage that inspired it. Thus readers can conveniently witness the various ways sacred text has sparked the imagination of poets throughout the ages. In Volume I, which covers Genesis to Malachi, almost every book of the Old Testament is represented. The collection features verses both famous and unfamiliar, from Milton's Paradise Lost and Lord Byron's Hebrew Melodies to Christopher Smart's hymns and Mary Herbert's psalms. The editors have included poems by virtually all the prominent religious poets--among them, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Edward Taylor, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Included, too, are devotional and visionary works from a wide range of vintage poets--Robert Burns, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning. Proving that the Bible is just as powerful a source of inspiration today as it was in the past, the collection assembles a mixed congregation of modern and contemporary poets, such as Marianne Moore, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Countee Cullen, e.e. cummings, William Butler Yeats, Robert Lowell, Hugh McDiarmid, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Charles Reznikoff, A.D. Hope, Geoffrey Hill, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Ashbery, and Derek Walcott. Of enduring interest to readers of both scripture and literature, this anthology illuminates key passages of the Old Testament. The measured speech and inspired leaps of poetry offer a spirited alternative to the textual exegesis usually supplied by prose commentary. As such, Chapters Into Verse is truly a poets' Bible. In selection after selection, readers will encounter an astonishing variety of religious experiences, as a host of poets from many eras and many backgrounds respond to Holy Scripture spiritually, profoundly, and imaginatively.
Classic Chinese Poems of Mourning and Texts of Lament: An Anthology
Bathed with the blood and tears of countless poets and authors and naturally expressing the most heartfelt emotions of ancient peoples, poems of mourning and texts of lament stand out in classical Chinese literature as brilliant and unique. Composed and celebrated over 3000 years, they are central to the Chinese literary tradition but have been largely unknown to English readers. Including over 100 major pieces by leading literary figures from 800 BCE – 1800, this is the first English anthology of classic Chinese poems of mourning and texts of sacrificial offering. With annotated translations by leading scholars and reading guides accompanying each piece, this book reveals a powerful literary heritage to students and serious readers of Chinese literature, history and civilization.
The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803–1829: with a Study of the Creative Exchange between Wordsworth and Beaumont (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850 #14)
Sir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that – in influence, creativity, and affection – rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.
Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry, 1400-1700
In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers. With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the three main languages—Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish—and lyrical styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential details of the poets’ lives, and a general introduction by the volume editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography containing the most important editions and translations from all three of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool for both specialists and students in comparative literature.
Dylan Thomas (New Casebooks)
A collection of essays on one of the twentieth century's most popular yet critically neglected authors, this book explores the full range of Thomas's work. It uses approaches - such as marxism, feminism and deconstruction - previously neglected by critics and focuses on his complex relationships with surrealism, modernism, Wales, popular culture, the USA and his own contemporaries. In doing so, it restores Thomas to his rightful place as a major twentieth century literary figure and cultural icon.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Writings (21st-Century Oxford Authors)
This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to study Barrett Browning's work within the rich context of her life and writing career. The revaluation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work by feminist scholars has made her an established author in university syllabuses in Britain and in America. Yet the reception of Barrett Browning as a writer within an explicitly female tradition has tended to limit the appreciation of her wider contribution to English literary culture in the nineteenth century, just as her popular image as a ringleted romantic heroine served sentimentally to eclipse her role as a literary pioneer. This edition complements or corrects these emphases by being the first edition dedicated to witnessing the progress and growth of the poet's creative direction—from her juvenilia through to her major achievements and beyond. The selection of works presented here appear in the order in which they were originally published, enabling students and readers to experience the contours of Barrett Browning's poetic career. Thus, following selections from published juvenilia, The Battle of Marathon (1820) and 'An Essay on Mind' and Other Poems (1826) and from 'Prometheus Bound' and Miscellaneous Poems (1833), there are more extensive selections from 'The Seraphim' and Other Poems (1838), from Poems 1844 and from Poems 1850 including the full text of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Substantial excerpts from Casa Guidi Windows (1851) is followed by the full text of Aurora Leigh (1857) and by selections from the posthumous Last Poems (1862). These individual sections are supplemented by careful selections (also chronologically ordered) from the correspondence, including the courtship letters with Robert Browning, and, where applicable, from poetry unpublished in the nineteenth century. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Barrett Browning, and a Chronology.
Forms of Late Modernist Lyric
What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation – the elegy, the ode, the hymn – have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question – Jorie Graham, Frank O’Hara, Michael Haslam, J. H. Prynne, Claudia Rankine, and others – have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial phase in the evolving history of lyric.CONTRIBUTORS: Ruth Abbott, Edward Allen, Gareth Farmer, Fiona Green, Drew Milne, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sophie Read, Matthew Sperling, Esther Osorio Whewell, John Wilkinson
Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet
Frank O’Hara’s writing is central to any consideration of 20th century American poetry. This collection of essays, the first to be dedicated to O’Hara in nearly two decades, asks why O’Hara remains so important to 21st century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O’Hara’s distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. Frank O’Hara Now offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.
Ghalib: The Poet and his Age (Routledge Revivals)
First published in 1972, Ghalib presents aspects of Ghalib, the last great literary figured produced by Mughal India before the empire was swept away by the British after the Revolt of 1857, as he appears though the eyes of well-known British and other European scholars. The book gives a picture of Ghalib’s own personality as it emerges in passages from his own Persian and Urdu letters and prose writings. Percival Spear, who lived in Delhi for many years, describes the Delhi scene of Ghalib’s day. P. Hardy writes of his relations with the British, and finally, two essays, by A. Bausani and Ralph Russell respectively, give an account of his Persian and Urdu poetry. His book will be of interest to students of literature, poetry, South Asian studies and history.
Greek Epigram from the Hellenistic to the Early Byzantine Era
Greek epigram is a remarkable poetic form. The briefest of all ancient Greek genres, it is also the most resilient: for almost a thousand years it attracted some of the finest Greek poetic talents as well as exerting a profound influence on Latin literature, and it continues to inspire and influence modern translations and imitations. After a long period of neglect, research on epigram has surged during recent decades, and this volume draws on the fruits of that renewed scholarly engagement. It is concerned not with the work of individual authors or anthologies, but with the complexities of epigram as a genre, and provides a selection of in-depth treatments of key aspects of Greek literary epigram of the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Byzantine periods. Individual chapters offer insights into a variety of topics, from the dynamic interactions between poets and their predecessors and contemporaries, and the relationship between epigram and its sociopolitical, cultural, and literary background from the third century BCE up until the sixth century CE, to its interaction with its origins, inscribed epigram more generally, other literary genres, the visual arts, and Latin poetry, as well as the process of editing and compilation that generated the collections that survived into the modern world. Through the medium of individual studies the volume as a whole seeks to offer a sense of this vibrant and dynamic poetic form and its world, which will be of value to scholars and students of Greek epigram and classical literature more broadly.
Greek Lyric Poetry: Includes Sappho, Archilochus, Anacreon, Simonides and many more (Oxford World's Classics)
The Greek lyric, elegiac, and iambic poets of the two centuries from 650 to 450 BC - Archilochus and Alcman, Sappho and Mimnermus, Anacreon, Simonides, and the rest - produced some of the finest poetry of antiquity, perfect in form, spontaneous in expression, reflecting all the joys and anxieties of their personal lives and of the societies in which they lived. This new poetic translation by a leading expert captures the nuances of meaning and the whole spirit of this poetry as never before. It is not merely a selection but covers all the surviving poems and intelligible fragments, apart from the works of Pindar and Bacchylides, and includes a number of pieces not previously translated. The Introduction gives a brief account of the poets, and explanatory Notes on the texts will be found at the end. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Harold Bloom's Shakespeare
Harold Bloom's Shakespeare examines the sources and impact of Bloom's Shakespearean criticism. Through focused and sustained study of this writer and his best-selling book, this collection of essays addresses a wide range of issues pertinent to both general readers and university classes: the cultural role of Shakespeare and of a new secular humanism addressed to general readers and audiences; the author as literary origin; the persistence of character as a category of literary appreciation; and the influence of Shakespeare within the Anglo-American educational system. Together, the essays reflect on the ethics of literary theory and criticism.
Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate (Clemson University Press: Beat Studies)
Who was Harold Norse? Despite publishing over a dozen volumes of poetry between the early 1950s and the new millennium, until now, the Brooklyn-born Norse has been relegated to a footnote in accounts of twentieth century literary history. Harold Norse: Poet Maverick, Gay Laureate is the first collection of essays devoted to this enigmatic poet and visual artist. As this volume explores, Norse, who developed his craft while living in Europe during the 1950s and 1960s, is an important figure in the development of mid-twentieth century poetics. During the 1950s and 1960s, Norse was a notable figure in the plethora of little poetry magazines published in the USA and Europe through to skirmishes with respectability and acceptance (Penguin and City Lights). Norse is a key figure in the development of the cut-up process made famous by his friend, William S. Burroughs. His correspondence with his mentor, the poet William Carlos Williams, captures his poetic shifts from formalism to the development of his Brooklyn idiom, while his gripping autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, documents his transatlantic networks of writers and artists, among them James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. And after returning to the US in the late 1960s, Norse emerged as leading figure in Gay Liberation poetry.List of contributors: Jan Herman, Erik Mortenson, A. Robert Lee, Fiona Paton, Daniel Kane, Steven Belletto, Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, Ronna C. Johnson, Kurt Hemmer, Chad Weidner, Benjamin J. Heal, Tate Swindell, Andrew McMillan, Douglas Field, Jay Jeff Jones, Todd Swindell, andJames Grauerholz.
Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems
The ‘country house poem’ was born in the seventeenth century as a fruitful way of flattering potential patrons. But the genre’s popularity faded – ironically, just as ‘country house society’ was emerging. It was only when the power and influence of the landed classes had all but ebbed away that poets returned to the theme, attracted perhaps by the buildings’ irresistible dereliction, but equally by their often very personal histories. This is the first complete anthology of modern country house poems, and it shows just how far (as Simon Jenkins points out in his Foreword) poems can ‘penetrate the souls of buildings’. Over 160 distinguished poets representing a diversity of class, race, gender, and generation offer fascinating perspectives on stately exteriors and interiors, gardens both wild and cultivated, crumbling ruins and the extraordinary secrets they hide. There are voices of all kinds, whether it’s Edith Sitwell recreating her childhood, W. B. Yeats and Wendy Cope pondering Lissadell, or Simon Armitage’s labourer confronting the Lady who’s ‘got the lot’. We hear from noble landowners and loyal (or rebellious) servants, and from many an inquisitive day-tripper. The book’s dominant note is elegiac, yet comedy, satire, even strains of Gothic can be heard among these potent reflections. Hollow Palaces reminds us how poets can often be the most perceptive of guides to radical changes in society. The book is illustrated by Rosie Greening.
International Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology of Lost Voices
Ranging far beyond the traditional canon, this ground-breaking anthology casts a vivid new light on poetic responses to the First World War. Bringing together poems by soldiers and non-combatants, patriots and dissenters, and from all sides of the conflict across the world, International Poetry of the First World War reveals the crucial public role that poetry played in shaping responses to and the legacies of the conflict. Across over 150 poems, this anthology explores such topics as the following: · Life at the Front · Psychological trauma · Noncombatants and the home front · Rationalising the war · Remembering the dead · Peace and the aftermath of the war With contextual notes throughout, the book includes poems written by authors from America, Australia, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, and South Africa.
Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850 #6)
In late December 1817, when attempting to name “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature,” John Keats coined the term “negative capability,” which he glossed as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Since then negative capability has continued to shape assessments of and responses to Keats’s work, while also surfacing in other contexts ranging from contemporary poetry to punk rock. The essays collected in this volume, taken as a whole, account for some of the history of negative capability, and propose new models and directions for its future in scholarly and popular discourse. The book does not propose a particular understanding of negative capability from among the many options (radical empathy, annihilation of self, philosophical skepticism, celebration of ambiguity) as the final word on the topic; rather, the book accounts for the multidimensionality of negative capability. Essays treat negative capability’s relation to topics including the Christmas pantomime, psychoanalysis, Zen Buddhism, nineteenth-century medicine, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Describing the “poetical Character” Keats notes that “it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated.” This book, too, revels in such multiplicity.
Lord Byron: Selected Writings (21st-Century Oxford Authors)
This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers readers a generous selection of the poetry upon which Byron's fame depended and his reputation now rests. It presents the poems in the chronological order in which they were published, working in almost every case from their first appearances in print. The Selected Writings include the entirety of Byron's two best-known works, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan, but the decision to work book-by-book means that they are presented not as unified works but as evolving serial publications, interspersed with other works published between installments or sequels. Alongside these two major works, wider representation is given to Byron's lyric poetry than has been typical in modern editions. Furthermore, in keeping with the 21st Century Oxford Authors series, the works are reproduced in something close to their original printed forms. Prioritizing the event of publication over that of composition, this volume offers a version of Byron close to how he would have been known to his original public. With extensive annotations, it emphasizes the social processes by which literary works come to exist in the world, particularly their publication and reception histories. The result is a fresh view of Byron's literary achievement and an impetus to further reading in the works of this extraordinary creative figure.
Love and Poetry in the Middle East: Love and Literature from Antiquity to the Present
Love has been an important trope in the literature of the region we now call the Middle East, from ancient times to modern. This book analyses love poetry in various ancient and contemporary languages of the Middle East, including Akkadian, ancient Egyptian, Classical and Modern Standard Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish and Kurdish, including literary materials that have been discovered and highlighted for the first time. Together, the chapters reflect and explore the discursive evolution of the theme of love, and the sensibilities, styles and techniques used to convey it. They chart the way in which poems in ancient poetry give way to complex and varied reflections of human sentiments in the medieval languages and on to the modern period which in turn reflects the complexities and nuances of present times. Offering a snapshot of the diverse literary languages and their relationship to the theme of love, the book will be of interest to scholars of Near and Middle Eastern Literature and Culture.
Love Songs of Chandidas: The Rebel Poet-Priest of Bengal (Routledge Revivals)
First published in 1967, Love Songs of Chandidās provides an informative introduction which makes vividly clear the importance of Chandidās to the Indian peasant masses. As the author tells us, the traveller through the Birbhum area of Bengal hears Chandidās everywhere, in the villages, in the fields, on the roads. Night after night, the people gather in the temple courtyards or on the village greens to listen to professional ‘Kirtan’ singers sing his songs of the divine love of Radha and Krishna. The influence of Chandidās on contemporary Bengali literature is equally important, his songs having enriched the work of great poets such as Rabindranath Tagore, Govindadas, and many others. The author also discusses the interesting topic of the Sahaja (‘spontaneity’) movement in Indian faith and literature, as manifested in the songs of Chandidās, and the worship of love-making, divine and human, as an important aspect of this faith. This book will be of interest to students of literature, music, history, cultural studies and South Asian studies.
Lydia, a Poem from the Appendix Vergiliana: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary (Pseudepigrapha Latina)
This volume offers the first comprehensive literary and philological commentary on the Lydia, in any language. At its core is a freshly edited Latin text of the poem, which systematically reconsiders the paradosis as well as earlier textual scholarship and endorses numerous improvements against current editions. Besides scrutinizing all the textual problems and adopted solutions, the commentary provides a thorough linguistic exegesis of the text as well as a wide-ranging discussion of the poem's rich intertextuality, both Latin and Greek. The Lydia's literary side is also the main focus in the introduction, which challenges the established communis opinio that views the Lydia as a dateless anonymous imitation of Virgilian bucolic, by situating it in the literary context of the Late Republic: it highlights, for the first time, the centrality of Greek bucolic, in particular of Bion's Lament for Adonis and the anonymous Lament for Bion, in the Lydia's literary genealogy and tentatively revives the old attribution to Valerius Cato, as well as exploring the poem's relationship with its better-known sibling, the Dirae. The work is complete with an English translation, aimed to serve as a guide to the Latin text for readers without a solid background in the ancient language.
Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives
This volume consists of fourteen original essays that showcase the latest thinking about John Milton's emergence as a popular and canonical author. Contributors consider how Milton positioned himself in relation to the book trade, contemporaneous thinkers, and intellectual movements, as well as how his works have been positioned since their first publication. The individual chapters assess Milton's reception by exploring how his authorial persona was shaped by the modes of writing in which he chose to express himself, the material forms in which his works circulated, and the ways in which his texts were re-appropriated by later writers. The Milton that emerges is one who actively fashioned his reputation by carefully selecting his modes of writing, his language of composition, and the stationers with whom he collaborated. Throughout the volume, contributors also demonstrate the profound impact Milton and his works have had on the careers of a variety of agents, from publishers, booksellers, and fellow writers to colonizers in Mexico and South America.
Marianne Moore and the Archives (Clemson University Press w/ LUP)
The essays that comprise Marianne Moore and the Archives: From Material Culture to the Digital Humanities use new archival research to explore the work of this major American modernist poet, providing innovative approaches to Moore’s career as it is documented in her archives. The volume represents new interpretations of archival materials found at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where Moore’s collection is held. This volume is also the first that draws upon the Marianne Moore Digital Archive (MMDA), a major project that is digitizing, transcribing, and annotating Moore’s notebooks for use by scholars, students, and non-academics to make these materials more widely accessible.
Metaphysical Poets
The aim of the series from which this book is taken is to delineate various critical approaches to specific literary texts. This is a study of the work of the Metaphysical poets through an analysis of style that is both formalist and historical.
Migration and Mutation: New Perspectives on the Sonnet in Translation (Literatures, Cultures, Translation)
Spanning four centuries from the Renaissance to today's avant-garde, Migration and Mutation explores how the sonnet has evolved in and out of translation. Contributors examine little-studied translation trajectories in the early modern period, such as the pivotal role of France between Italy and England or the first German sonnets and their Italian, French, Dutch and Scottish origins. Essays then shed new light on major European sonneteers In the 19th and 20th centuries, including Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Rilke and Pessoa, alongside lesser-known contemporaries and with novel approaches. And finally, contributors explore how translation and adaptation create metaphorical space in the 21st century.Migration and Mutation also pays attention to the political or subversive dimension of the sonnet, with essays on women, gay or postcolonial reclaimings of the sonnet and recent experiments such as post-Soviet Sonnets on shirts by Genrikh Sagpir. It takes the sonnet out of the confines of enclosed national traditions bringing it into renewed contact with mostly European, but also other, cultures.