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If Only There Were Stations of the Air is an outcry against human vulnerability and ephemerality: our occupancy of a tiny speck in a universe incomprehensibly vast (and itself not necessarily eternal), and without the comforts of Heaven or Providence; our subjection to change, chance, contagion, catastrophe, cancer, and the loneliness and isolation of remorseless age. Yet the cry comes from the heart of love: of our blithe everyday ordinary happiness in our fragile homes and towns, of the richness of experience we have built up in our minds and hearts, of the beauty and solace of the perishable natural world; and especially, love of people and animals, living and dead-and, most of all, love of our intimate human partners whom we almost weep to have for fear of inevitable loss. The poet's voice records it all: taking quarantine comfort in the company of a bird trilling at 3 A.M.; terrified and saddened by the assault of threatening illness; calmed-when sleep doesn't come-by other human voices in their poems; soft-talking the self with the hope of survival, of living on, able to remember and commemorate.
In this inspiring collection of vibrant poems, contemporary American poets speak out on a universal theme: the unbreakable bond shared by parents and their children. With kindness, nostalgia, forgiveness and love, poets recall their parents. Book jacket.
Graced Life collects together the work of the late John Hughes, Dean of Jesus College Cambridge, who died in a car crash in 2014 aged 35. John Hughes was a rising star in the Church of England for whom all things could be seen in the light of faith as graced and caught up in the redeeming love of God.
One of the enduring traditions of Western literary history, pastoral is often mischaracterized as a catchall for literature about rural themes and nature in general. In What Is Pastoral?, distinguished literary historian Paul Alpers argues that pastoral is based upon a fundamental fiction—that the lives of shepherds or other socially humble figures represent the lives of human beings in general. Ranging from Virgil's Eclogues to Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Hardy and Frost, this work brings the story of the pastoral tradition, previously limited to classical and Renaissance literature, into the twentieth century. Pastoral reemerges ...
"Guernsey draws on D. W. Winnicott's object relations model, which focuses on self-development in a relational context, to illuminate various senses of self and Other that Herbert's poems express discursively and formally. The book will appeal not only to Herbert scholars and other Renaissance critics but also to audiences interested in psychoanalysis and how it relates to literature, religion, culture, and poetics."--BOOK JACKET.
Disciplinary Measures from the Metrical Psalms to Milton studies the relationship between English poetry and church discipline in four carefully chosen bodies of poetry written between the Reformation and the death of John Milton. Its primary goal is to fill a gap in the field of Protestant poetics, which has never produced a study focused on the way in which poetry participates in and reflects on the post-Reformation English Church's attempts to govern conduct. Its secondary goal is to revise the understandings of discipline which social theorists and historians have offered, and which literary critics have largely accepted. It argues that knowledge of the early modern culture of discipline...
Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must—or cannot—say or do. The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content.
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Revisionist Shakespeare appropriates revisionist history in order to both criticize traditional transitional interpretations of Shakespearean drama and to offer a new methodology for understanding representations of social conflict in Shakespeare's play and in Early Modern English culture. Rather than argue that Shakespearean drama allegorizes historical transitions and ideological polarization, Revisionist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare's plays explore the nature of internally contradictory Early Modern institutions and belief-systems that are only indirectly related to competing political and class ideologies. Such institutions and belief-systems include Elizabethan strategies for the management of vagrancy, the nature of Jacobean statecraft, objective and subjective theories of economic value, Protestant ethical theory, and Augustinian notions of sinful habituation. The book looks at five of Shakespeare's plays: The Tempest , Coriolanus , The Merchant of Venice , King Lear , and Hamlet .