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Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

by Matthew Carbery

Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem reads major figures including Charles Olson, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe and Rachel Blau DuPlessis within a new approach to the long poem tradition. Through a series of contextualised close readings, it explores the ways in which American poets developed their poetic forms by engaging with a variety of European phenomenologists, including Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Consolidating recent materials on the role of Continental Philosophy in American poetics, this book explores the theoretical and historical contexts in which avant-garde poets have developed radically new methods of making poems long. Matthew Carbery offers a timely commentary on a number of major works of American poetry whilst providing ground-breaking research into the wider philosophical context of late twentieth-century poetic experimentation.

Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight

by J. Booth

James Booth reads Philip Larkin's mature poetry in terms of his ambiguous self-image as lonely, anti-social outsider, plighted to his art, and as nine-to-five librarian, sharing the common plight of humanity. Booth's focus is on Larkin's artistry with words, the 'verbal devices' through which this purest of lyric poets celebrates 'the experience. The beauty.' Featuring discussion for the first time of two recently discovered poems by Larkin, this original and exciting new study will be of interest to all students, scholars and enthusiasts of Larkin.

Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer

by Stephen Cooper

Overturning many of the established perspectives on Larkin's poetry and prose, Cooper's book presents new evidence from a range of previously unpublished sources, and is the first full-length critical work to analyse Larkin's early fiction, as well as advancing new readings of The Less Deceived', The Whitsun Weddings' and High Windows'. Critics have tended to label Larkin's poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkin's artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems' commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. This study makes available to scholars paintings by Larkin's friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writer's concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s. This is a fresh and revealing study on Larkin's artistic subversion; stylistic and thematic, it reveals the underlying themes of Larkin's entire oeuvre.

Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer

by Stephen Cooper

Overturning many of the established perspectives on Larkin's poetry and prose, Cooper's book presents new evidence from a range of previously unpublished sources, and is the first full-length critical work to analyse Larkin's early fiction, as well as advancing new readings of The Less Deceived', The Whitsun Weddings' and High Windows'. Critics have tended to label Larkin's poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkin's artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems' commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. This study makes available to scholars paintings by Larkin's friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writer's concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s. This is a fresh and revealing study on Larkin's artistic subversion; stylistic and thematic, it reveals the underlying themes of Larkin's entire oeuvre.

Philip Larkin (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism)

by Robert Evans

Philip Larkin is widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the twentieth century. As such, there is a vast amount of literary criticism surrounding his work. This Readers' Guide provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the key reactions to Larkin’s poetry. Using a chronological structure, Robert C. Evans charts critical responses to Larkin’s work from his arrival on the British literary scene in the 1950s to the decades after his death. This includes analyses of critical material from around the world, making this an excellent guide for all students of Larkin.

Philip Larkin: Letters To Monica (Faber Poetry Ser.)

by Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin met Monica Jones at University College Leicester in autumn 1946, when they were both twenty-four; he was the newly-appointed assistant librarian and she was an English lecturer. In 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet's death in 1985.This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones's death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkin's life and the convolutions of their relationship.

Philip Larkin: The Poems (Analysing Texts)

by Nicholas Marsh

Controversy rages around Larkin's character and life. This book takes a fresh look at his poems through close analysis, discussion of Larkin's major concerns and demonstrating how to approach these enigmatic works. It provides background information including an account of his life, discussion of cultural context and major critical views

Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life

by Sir Andrew Motion

Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life won the Whitbread Award for Biography in 1993 and was championed as 'an exemplary biography of its kind' (The Times). With a new introduction written by the author, this edition offers an engrossing portrait of one of the twentieth century's most popular, and most private, poets. 'There will be other lives of Larkin, but Motion's, like Forster's of Dickens, will always have a special place.' John Carey, Sunday Times'Larkin lived a quietly noble and exemplary version of the writer's life; Motion - affectionate but undeceived about the man's frailties, a diligent researcher and a deft reader of poetry - has written an equally exemplary 'Life' of him.' Peter Conrad, Observer'Honest but not prurient, critical but also compassionate, Motion's book could not be bettered.' Alan Bennett, London Review of Books

Philip Larkin (The Critics Debate)

by Stephen Regan

Following the recent publication of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, this study draws on a previously unavailable range of work extending from 1938 to 1983. In the course of its survey, the book exposes the limitations of narrowly thematic and formalist criticism, but it treats with equal scepticism the fashionable tendency to regard Larkin as a 'symbolist' poet. In his appraisal Stephen Regan argues strongly for the importance of reading the poems historically and contextually. The emphasis here is on the post-war cultural milieu of Larkin's work and its complex engagement with questions of individual freedom and social commitment.

Philip Larkin: Five Studies

by M. Rowe

Exploring the complex relationship between aesthetic experience and personal identity in Larkin's work, this book gives close and original readings of three major poems ('Here', 'Livings' and 'Aubade'), and two neglected but important themes (Larkin and the supernatural, Larkin and Flaubert).

Philip Larkin and His Audiences

by G. Steinberg

Philip Larkin, one of England's greatest and most popular twentieth-century poets, is nonetheless widely regarded as a misanthropic, provincial recluse. This volume re-examines that critical view and argues that Larkin's poetry, far from demonstrating his misanthropy, highlights his profound awareness of and concern for readers.

Philip Larkin: Letters Home

by Philip Larkin

Letters Home gives access to the last major archive of Larkin's writing to remain unpublished: the letters to members of his family. These correspondences help tell the story of how Larkin came to be the writer and the man he was: to his father Sydney, a 'conservative anarchist' and admirer of Hitler, who died relatively early in Larkin's life; to his timid depressive mother Eva, who by contrast, lived long, and whose final years were shadowed by dementia; and to his sister Kitty, the sparse surviving fragment of whose correspondence with her brother gives an enigmatic glimpse of a complex and intimate relationship- But it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother in particular that shaped the writer we know so well: a number of poems written over this time are for her, and the mood of pain, shadow and despondency that characterises his later verse draws its strength from his experience of the long, lonely years of her senility. One surprising element in the volume, however, is the joie de vivre shown in the large number of witty and engaging drawings of himself and Eva, as 'Young Creature' and 'Old Creature', with which he enlivens his letters throughout the three decades of her widowhood.This important edition, meticulously edited by Larkin's biographer, James Booth, is a key piece of scholarship that completes the portrait of this most cherished of English poets.

Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work

by Dale Salwak

A collection of essays celebrating the talents of Philip Larkin, poet, critic and fiction writer who died in 1985. They range from Kingsley Amis' and Anthony Curtis' fine memoirs of Larkin's life at Oxford to William H.Pritchard's examination of some of the qualities in his poetry.

Philip Larkin Poems: Selected by Martin Amis (Poetry Ser.)

by Philip Larkin

For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis.'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom?... Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable.' - Martin Amis

Phillis Wheatley's Miltonic Poetics

by P. Loscocco

Phillis Wheatley, the African-born slave poet, is considered by many to be a pioneer of Anglo-American poetics. This study argues how in her 1773 POEMS, Wheatley uses John Milton's poetry to develop an idealistic vision of an emerging Anglo-American republic comprised of Britons, Africans, Native Americans, and women.

Philosophers' Poets (Routledge Revivals)

by David Wood

First published in 1990, Philosophers’ Poets is a collection of case studies of philosophers’ readings of poets and other distinctive writers. There are those, for example, who find in literary examples ways of exploring the concrete significance of philosophical assertions or distinctions. Others find in poetic discourse linguistic resources simply not available to philosophy, yet of vital importance to it. This is particularly true of philosophers of the limit, such as Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas and Adorno, for whom the very possibility of philosophy was in question. Despite the diversity of subjects covered, the collection maintains an integrity and identity. Above all, it shows how contemporary Continental philosophy raises the issue of philosophy and literature anew in a way that is appealing and challenging.

Philosophers' Poets (Routledge Revivals)


First published in 1990, Philosophers’ Poets is a collection of case studies of philosophers’ readings of poets and other distinctive writers. There are those, for example, who find in literary examples ways of exploring the concrete significance of philosophical assertions or distinctions. Others find in poetic discourse linguistic resources simply not available to philosophy, yet of vital importance to it. This is particularly true of philosophers of the limit, such as Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas and Adorno, for whom the very possibility of philosophy was in question. Despite the diversity of subjects covered, the collection maintains an integrity and identity. Above all, it shows how contemporary Continental philosophy raises the issue of philosophy and literature anew in a way that is appealing and challenging.

Philosophical Readings of Shakespeare: “Thou Art the Thing Itself”

by Margherita Pascucci

This book offers a close philosophical reading of King Lear and Timon of Athens which provides insights into the groundbreaking ontological discourse on poverty and money. Analysis of the discourse of poverty and the critique of money helps to read Shakespeare philosophically and opens new reflections on central questions of our own time.

Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher

by Katharina Volk And Gareth D. Williams

Ovid has long been celebrated for the versatility of his poetic imagination, the diversity of his generic experimentation throughout his long career, and his intimate engagement with the Greco-Roman literary tradition that precedes him; but what of his engagement with the philosophical tradition? Ovid's close familiarity with philosophical ideas and with specific philosophical texts has long been recognized, perhaps most prominently in the Pythagorean, Platonic, Empedoclean, and Lucretian shades that have been seen to color his Metamorphoses. This philosophical component has often been perceived as a feature implicated in, and subordinate to, Ovid's larger literary agenda, both pre- and post-exilic; and because of the controlling influence conceded to that literary impulse, readings of the philosophical dimension have often focused on the perceived distortion, ironizing, or parodying of the philosophical sources and ideas on which Ovid draws, as if his literary orientation inevitably compromises or qualifies a "serious" philosophical commitment. Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher counters this tendency by considering Ovid's seriousness of engagement with, and his possible critique of, the philosophical writings that inform his works. The book also questions the feasibility of separating out the categories of the "philosophical" and the "literary" in the first place, and explores the ways in which Ovid may offer unusual, controversial, or provocative reactions to received philosophical ideas. Finally, it investigates the case to be made for viewing the Ovidian corpus not just as a body of writings that are often philosophically inflected, but also as texts that may themselves be read as philosophically adventurous and experimental. The essays collected in this volume are intended at the individual level to address in new ways many aspects of Ovid's recourse to philosophy across his corpus. Collectively, however, they are also designed to redress what, in general terms, remains a significant lacuna in Ovidian studies.

Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher


Ovid has long been celebrated for the versatility of his poetic imagination, the diversity of his generic experimentation throughout his long career, and his intimate engagement with the Greco-Roman literary tradition that precedes him; but what of his engagement with the philosophical tradition? Ovid's close familiarity with philosophical ideas and with specific philosophical texts has long been recognized, perhaps most prominently in the Pythagorean, Platonic, Empedoclean, and Lucretian shades that have been seen to color his Metamorphoses. This philosophical component has often been perceived as a feature implicated in, and subordinate to, Ovid's larger literary agenda, both pre- and post-exilic; and because of the controlling influence conceded to that literary impulse, readings of the philosophical dimension have often focused on the perceived distortion, ironizing, or parodying of the philosophical sources and ideas on which Ovid draws, as if his literary orientation inevitably compromises or qualifies a "serious" philosophical commitment. Philosophy in Ovid, Ovid as Philosopher counters this tendency by considering Ovid's seriousness of engagement with, and his possible critique of, the philosophical writings that inform his works. The book also questions the feasibility of separating out the categories of the "philosophical" and the "literary" in the first place, and explores the ways in which Ovid may offer unusual, controversial, or provocative reactions to received philosophical ideas. Finally, it investigates the case to be made for viewing the Ovidian corpus not just as a body of writings that are often philosophically inflected, but also as texts that may themselves be read as philosophically adventurous and experimental. The essays collected in this volume are intended at the individual level to address in new ways many aspects of Ovid's recourse to philosophy across his corpus. Collectively, however, they are also designed to redress what, in general terms, remains a significant lacuna in Ovidian studies.

The Philosophy of Piers Plowman: The Ethics and Epistemology of Love in Late Medieval Thought

by David Strong

This book examines William Langland’s late medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, in light of contemporary intellectual thought. David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual’s search for truth and love. Specifically, the text ponders the intersection between reason and the will in expressing love. While scholars have consistently noted the text’s indebtedness to these higher strains of thought, this is the first book-length study in over thirty years that explores the depth of this interconnection, and the only one that considers the salience of both Scotus and Ockham. It is essential reading for medieval literary specialists and students as well as any cultural historian who desires to augment their knowledge of truth and love.

The Philosophy of Piers Plowman: The Ethics and Epistemology of Love in Late Medieval Thought - (PDF)

by David Strong

This book examines William Langland’s late medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, in light of contemporary intellectual thought. David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual’s search for truth and love. Specifically, the text ponders the intersection between reason and the will in expressing love. While scholars have consistently noted the text’s indebtedness to these higher strains of thought, this is the first book-length study in over thirty years that explores the depth of this interconnection, and the only one that considers the salience of both Scotus and Ockham. It is essential reading for medieval literary specialists and students as well as any cultural historian who desires to augment their knowledge of truth and love.

The Phoenix and the Turtle

by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's telling of the funeral arrangements for the Phoenix and the Turtledove embodies the depth of their love and the tragedy of their deaths.

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Showing 4,626 through 4,650 of 7,791 results