Here at last is the definitive Keats—an edition of John Keats’s poems that embodies the readings the poet himself most probably intended. The culmination of a tradition of literary and textual scholarship, it is the work of the one scholar best qualified to do the job.

Largely because of the wealth and complexity of the manuscript materials and the frequency with which first printings were based on inferior sources, there has never been a thoroughly reliable edition of Keats. Indeed, in The Texts of Keats’s Poems Jack Stillinger demonstrated that fully one third of the poems as printed in current standard editions contain substantive errors. This edition is the first in the history of Keats scholarship to be based on a systematic investigation of the transmission of the texts. The readings given here represent in each case, as exactly as can be determined, the version that Keats preferred. The chronological arrangement of the poems and the full record of variants and manuscript alterations (presented in a style that will be clear to the general reader as well as useful to the scholar) display the development of Keats’s poetic artistry. Notes at the back provide dates of composition, relate extant manuscripts and early printings, and explain the choices of texts.

The London Times said of Stillinger’s earlier study of the texts: “Thanks to Mr. Stillinger a revolution in Keats studies is at hand.” Here is the crucial step in that revolution.

C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis) is one of the most important Greek poets since antiquity. He was born, lived, and died in Alexandria (1863–1933), with brief periods spent in England, Constantinople, and Athens. Cavafy set in motion the most powerful modernism in early twentieth-century European poetry, exhibiting simple truths about eroticism, history, and philosophy—an inscrutable triumvirate that informs the Greek language and culture in all their diachrony. The Cavafy Canon plays with the complexities of ironic Socratic thought, suffused with the honesty of unadorned iambic verse.

Based on a fifty-year continuous scholarly and literary interaction with Cavafy’s poetry and its Greek and western European intertexts, John Chioles has produced an authoritative and exceptionally nuanced translation of the complex linguistic registers of Cavafy’s Canon into English.

Taras Ševčenko (1814–1861) is the central figure in modern Ukrainian literature, but despite the enormous attention that has been devoted to his person, his work, and his role in Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian national renascence, the core of the Ševčenko phenomenon—the symbolic nature of his poetry—has received little systematic analysis.

As this book argues, myth serves as the underlying code and model of Ševčenko’s poetic universe. Examining the structures and paradigms of Ševčenko’s mythical thought provides answers for various crucial and heretofore intractable questions, such as those concerning the relation of his Ukrainian poetry to his Russian prose, his sense of a transcendent “curse” and “guilt” in the Ukrainian past and present, the interrelation of his revolutionist fervor with his apparent providentialism, or of the tension between the nativism and the universalism of his poetry.

Moreover, it is through the structures of his mythical thought that we can understand Ševčenko’s “prophecy,” in effect, his millenarian vision. In this framework, too, the author focuses on the religious tenor of Ševčenko’s poetry, in which he is both expiator and carrier of the Word, and, finally, on the reception—indeed the cult of Ševčenko among generations of Ukrainians.

The Poetic Edda comprises a treasure trove of mythic and spiritual verse holding an important place in Nordic culture, literature, and heritage. Its tales of strife and death form a repository, in poetic form, of Norse mythology and heroic lore, embodying both the ethical views and the cultural life of the North during the late heathen and early Christian times.

Collected by an unidentified Icelander, probably during the twelfth or thirteenth century, The Poetic Edda was rediscovered in Iceland in the seventeenth century by Danish scholars. Even then its value as poetry, as a source of historical information, and as a collection of entertaining stories was recognized. This meticulous translation succeeds in reproducing the verse patterns, the rhythm, the mood, and the dignity of the original in a revision that Scandinavian Studies says "may well grace anyone's bookshelf."

For more than half a century, Chinese-Western comparative literature has been recognized as a formal academic discipline, but critics and scholars in the field have done little to develop a viable, common basis for comparison between these disparate literatures. In this pioneering book, Cecile Chu-chin Sun establishes repetition as the ideal perspective from which to compare the poetry and poetics from these two traditions.

Sun contends that repetition is at the heart of all that defines the lyric as a unique art form and, by closely examining its use in Chinese and Western poetry, she demonstrates howone can identify important points of convergence and divergence. Through a representative sampling of poems from both traditions, she illustrates how the irreducible generic nature of the lyric transcends linguistic and cultural barriers but also reveals the fundamental distinctions between the traditions. Most crucially, she dissects the two radically different conceptualizations of reality—mimesis and xing—that serve as underlying principles for the poetic practices of each tradition.

Skillfully integrating theory and practice, The Poetics of Repetition in English and Chinese Lyric Poetryprovides a much-needed model for future study of Chinese and English poetry as well as lucid, succinct interpretations of individual poems.

The transparent beauty and effortless grace of George Herbert's poetry have made it seem almost devoid of art. In this comprehensive reading of Herbert, Helen Vendler reveals the complexity inherent in the apparent simplicity of his lyrics. Herbert appears here, both in introspective and in devotional verse, as a poet of universal feeling whose work can be given a human interpretation independent of any religious conviction.

Very nearly all of Herbert's poems are treated in this finely written, forcefully argued study. By looking at the poet's less successful attempts as well as at his best work, Vendler is able to trace his surest line of development in the various modes and forms in which he worked. Comparisons with the work of his adapters and imitators make apparent the perfection and finish of his lines, their interior intellectual and psychological harmony.

In the twentieth century, the pioneering work of such art historians as Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind heightened our awareness of the relationship between Renaissance literature and the visual arts. By focusing on that relationship in the work of such poets as Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Edmund Waller, and Robert Herrick, Norman K. Farmer, Jr., convincingly shows that they and other writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England wrote with a lively and creative sense of the visual—a sense richly informed by the theory and practice of Renaissance art.

Farmer begins by describing the powerful visual matrix that underlies the narrative structure of Sidney's New Arcadia. He compares the role of the visual in the poetry of Donne and Ben Jonson, and demonstrates how works by both Thomas Carew and Lord Herbert exhibit poetic invention according to familiar Renaissance pictorial themes. Herrick's Hesperides is shown to be the major seventeenth-century poetic application of the Horatian idea ut pictura poesis.

A special feature of this gracefully written and enlightening volume is Farmer's discussion of Lady Drury's oratory at Hawstead Hall. Published here for the first time are photographs of this uniquely decorated oratory, in which themes from a variety of English and Continental emblem books were painted on the walls of a room apparently designed for private meditation.

Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in Poets of Reality, none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figures—Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams—who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which “reality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.”

A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines.

Born eighty years ago in Lithuania, Czeslaw Milosz has been acclaimed “one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest” (Joseph Brodsky). This self-described “connoisseur of heavens and abysses” has produced a corpus of poems, essays, memoirs, and fiction of such depth and range that the reader's imagination is moved far beyond ordinary limits of consciousness. In The Poet's Work Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn follow Milosz's wanderings in exile from Poland to Paris to Berkeley as they chart the singular development of his art. Relating his life and his works to the unfolding of his thought, they have crafted a lucid reading of Milosz that far surpasses anything yet written on this often enigmatic poet.

The Poet's Work is not only a solid introduction to Milosz; it is also a unique record of the poet's own interpretations of his work. As colleagues of Milosz at Berkeley, Nathan and Quinn had long, detailed discussions with the poet. It is this spirit of collaboration that brings a sense of immediacy and authority to their seamless study. Nathan and Quinn reveal as never before why Milosz is a true visionary, a poet of ideas in history. And they show how the influence of Blake, Simone Weil, Dostoevsky, Lev Shestov, and Swedenborg, together with Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Robinson Jeffers, has enriched his vision. Milosz's lifelong experience of totalitarian regimes that exalt science and technology over individual needs and aspirations, his acute sense of alienation as an émigré, and his humanistic zeal and belief in the primacy of living have brought a prismatic quality to his poetry.

At seventy, Milosz spoke of himself as an “ecstatic pessimist.” In their sensitive mapping of his art, Nathan and Quinn skillfully demonstrate that Milosz's global influence has been achieved by the ever-shifting balance he strikes between ecstasy and pessimism. Irony and humor are never far from this book, which not only communicates Milosz's polyphonic message but also evokes his uniquely humane sensibility. The Poet's Work is an illuminating introduction to Milosz that will inform and engage scholars and general readers for years to come.

If a river runs through it, somewhere there is bound to be a bridge. Little in the landscape remains untouched by human hands, and every touch, from the simplest ditch to the most intricate monument, reveals a political decision or design. This is how Martin Warnke, one of Germany's leading art historians, looks at landscape in this book, which leads to a new way of seeing nature as we have appropriated, represented, and transformed it over time. Covering nearly a thousand years and most of western Europe, The Political Landscape provides a compelling summary history of modern humanity's ill-fated attempt to master nature.

Warnke finds evidence of the politicized landscape everywhere, on nature's own ground and in art, artifacts, and architecture, in features defined by the demands of conquest and defense, property rights and picturesque improvement, trade, tradition, communication, and commemoration. Whether considering the role of landscape in battle depictions, or investigating monumental figures from the Colossus of Rhodes to Mount Rushmore, or asking why gold backgrounds in paintings gave way to mountains topped with castles, Warnke reconfigures our idea of landscape, its significance, and its representations. The book sharpens our perceptions of nature in art and as art--a nature charged with symbol and meaning as a result of interventions by turns enlightened, insensitive, or, as now, dangerously corrosive.

The story of Paris in the 1930s seems straightforward enough, with the Popular Front movement leading toward the inspiring 1936 election of a leftist coalition government. The socialist victory, which resulted in fundamental improvements in the lives of workers, was then derailed in a precipitous descent that culminated in France's capitulation before the Nazis in June 1940. Yet no matter how minutely recounted, this "straight story" clarifies only the political activity behind which turbulent cultural currents brought about far-reaching changes in everyday life and the way it is represented.

In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film—technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Céline), artists (Renoir, Dalí), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises.

Their analysis takes them to expositions and music halls, to upscale architecture and fashion sites, to traditional neighborhoods, and to overseas territories, the latter portrayed in metropolitan exhibits and colonial cinema. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.

We assume that words are posted (mailed or, in another sense, positioned) to communicate with others, to bridge distance and “wish you were here.” But Vincent Kaufmann discovers in his chosen letter writers the urgency not to communicate, to keep their correspondents away and, as it were, posted. The writer avoids real-life dialogue by way of letters, which then become proving grounds for the work to come. Whatever their intellectual, biographical, or aesthetic value—compare Flaubert’s passionate dogmatizing to Baudelaire’s peevish nagging for money—letters teach writers how to appreciate the sound of their own voice and how to make a workable literary space. Distance gives the relentless letter writer the chance to become a writer. Kaufmann, with Lacan, says that what characterizes the literary text is the ability to get beyond a particular other to address the Other, which must be no one in particular.

Kaufmann features several European writers, all of them avidly concerned about the destination of speech when it passes into writing. Among them: Kafka, obsessions spilling over, adoring his fiancee for her emptiness; Proust, master of suffering, with his interminable health bulletins, cancellations, and condolences; Flaubert, an extraordinary letter writer, abandoning his mistress for the more seductive Emma Bovary; Baudelaire, determined in squalor, writing letters almost exclusively about his debts, as if to practice the art of escape and defiance; Mallarmé, patron saint of littérateurs, whose vaunted Book disappears into salons and letters; Artaud, speaker in tongues, who wildly searched for authenticity through letters.

Unending attention has been devoted to these important writers, but they seem new again when viewed in Kaufmann’s epistolary mirror. What they share is a taste, or need, for distance and perversion; we see them becoming “inhuman” in order to textualize their lives. They are all modernists, and the definition of Modernism is thereby deepened. This book—rich in anecdote and humor—escorts literary theory into the no-man’s-land stretching between the life and the word.

A pathbreaking work of scholarship that will reshape our understanding of the Harlem Renaissance, The Practice of Diaspora revisits black transnational culture in the 1920s and 1930s, paying particular attention to links between intellectuals in New York and their Francophone counterparts in Paris. Brent Edwards suggests that diaspora is less a historical condition than a set of practices: the claims, correspondences, and collaborations through which black intellectuals pursue a variety of international alliances.

Edwards elucidates the workings of diaspora by tracking the wealth of black transnational print culture between the world wars, exploring the connections and exchanges among New York–based publications (such as Opportunity, The Negro World, and The Crisis) and newspapers in Paris (such as Les Continents, La Voix des Nègres, and L'Etudiant noir). In reading a remarkably diverse archive--the works of writers and editors from Langston Hughes, René Maran, and Claude McKay to Paulette Nardal, Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, George Padmore, and Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté--The Practice of Diaspora takes account of the highly divergent ways of imagining race beyond the barriers of nation and language. In doing so, it reveals the importance of translation, arguing that the politics of diaspora are legible above all in efforts at negotiating difference among populations of African descent throughout the world.

A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten—from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city’s foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde—Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia.

Considering a wide range of writers, including the city’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vítĕzslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who “wrote” Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague—more than any other major European city—has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

During his brief and sorrowful career William Collins wrote a handful of enduring poems, the most powerful and innovative verse of the Age of Sensibility. This study traces Collins' struggle to assimilate or transcend rather than to be overwhelmed by the influence of his Sublime precursor Milton. Collins' achievement is remarkably diverse, his restless experimentation a manifestation of the quest for imaginative autonomy which is the dominant impulse of all his writing. Authoritatively and eloquently, Sherwin interprets Collins' major works including the "Ode to Evening," the poem in which Milton's presence is most enriching, the "Ode on the Poetical Character," "The Passions," "Popular Superstitions Ode," and the "Ode to Fear," Collins' most haunting and painfully burdened poem.

Although Harold Bloom and other prominent theorists of literary influence have recognized that Milton is the chief "daemonic" precursor of the Sensibility poets and the Romantics, Precious Bane represents the first extensive analysis of Milton's power both to daunt and emancipate an aspirant to the Sublime tradition. Bloom writes:

"Paul Sherwin's Precious Bane is at once the definitive study of the poetry of William Collins and also the best informed, most critically acute book yet written upon the Miltonic influence on subsequent poetry. Sherwin's deep learning and original insights illuminate Milton and Keats quite as much as they do Collins and the other tragic poets of Sensibility.

"Readers who seek rich speculation and advanced knowledge on such associated critical and historical problems as Romanticism, the Sublime mode, the agonies of poetic incarnation, and the relation of psychoanalysis to literature, will find abundant recompense in Sherwin's pages. No one in the future will teach, read or write about Collins, or the burdens of Miltonic influence, without starting from Sherwin's achievement."

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel—the first book-length study of the topic—Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the long nineteenth century. Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for “somatic reading,” a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences. 

Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy that are tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting backward to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for richer and more relevant textual interpretation.

Along with the plays of William Shakespeare and the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen’s novels are among the most beloved books of Western literature. Pride and Prejudice (1813) was in Austen’s lifetime her most popular novel, and it was the author’s personal favorite. Adapted many times to the screen and stage, and the inspiration for numerous imitations, it remains today her most widely read book. Now, in this beautifully illustrated and annotated edition, distinguished scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of the novel’s enduring pleasures and provides analysis of Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, Lady Catherine, and all the characters who inhabit the world of Pride and Prejudice.

This edition will be treasured by specialists and first-time readers, and especially by devoted Austen fans who think of themselves as Friends of Jane. In her Introduction, Spacks considers Austen’s life and career, the continuing appeal of Pride and Prejudice, and its power as a stimulus for fantasy (Maureen Dowd, writing in the New York Times, can hold forth at length on Obama as a Darcy-figure, knowing full well her readers will “understand that she wished to suggest glamour and sexiness”). Her Introduction also explores the value and art of literary annotation. In her running commentary on the novel, she provides notes on literary and historical contexts, allusions, and language likely to cause difficulty to modern readers. She offers interpretation and analysis, always with the wisdom, humor, and light touch of an experienced and sensitive teacher.

In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey.

Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography. Simultaneously, the use of the Geographia as a diplomatic gift from Florence to the Ottoman Empire tells another story. This exchange expands our understanding of Mediterranean politics, European perceptions of the Ottomans, and Ottoman interest in mapping and print. The envoy to the Sultan represented the aspirations of the Florentine state, which chose not to bestow some other highly valued good, such as the city’s renowned textiles, but instead the best example of what Florentine visual, material, and intellectual culture had to offer.