As we enter a new millennium ruled by technology, will poetry still matter? The Song of the Earth answers eloquently in the affirmative. A book about our growing alienation from nature, it is also a brilliant meditation on the capacity of the writer to bring us back to earth, our home. In the first ecological reading of English literature, Jonathan Bate traces the distinctions among "nature," "culture," and "environment" and shows how their meanings have changed since their appearance in the literature of the eighteenth century. An intricate interweaving of climatic, topographical, and political elements poetically deployed, his book ranges from greenhouses in Jane Austen's novels to fruit bats in the poetry of Les Murray, by way of Thomas Hardy's woodlands, Dr. Frankenstein's Creature, John Clare's birds' nests, Wordsworth's rivers, Byron's bear, and an early nineteenth-century novel about an orangutan who stands for Parliament. Though grounded in the English Romantic tradition, the book also explores American, Central European, and Caribbean poets and engages theoretically with Rousseau, Adorno, Bachelard, and especially Heidegger. The model for an innovative and sophisticated new "ecopoetics," The Song of the Earth is at once an essential history of environmental consciousness and an impassioned argument for the necessity of literature in a time of ecological crisis.

Recession is a time for asking fundamental questions about value. At a time when governments are being forced to make swinging savings in public expenditure, why should they continue to invest public money funding research into ancient Greek tragedy, literary value, philosophical conundrums or the aesthetics of design? Does such research deliver "value for money" and "public benefit"? Such questions have become especially pertinent in the UK in recent years, in the context of the drive by government to instrumentalize research across the disciplines and the prominence of discussions about "economic impact" and "knowledge transfer". In this book a group of distinguished humanities researchers, all working in Britain, but publishing research of international importance, reflect on the public value of their discipline, using particular research projects as case-studies. Their essays are passionate, sometimes polemical, often witty and consistently thought-provoking, covering a range of humanities disciplines from theology to architecture and from media studies to anthropology.    

Product Description: A fascinating portrait of a typical English parish church also famous as the baptism site and burial place of the world's most celebrated dramatist.

The story of a recently discovered portrait of a young William Shakespeare traces its origins and history to discuss how it came into being, its possession by the same family for more than four hundred years, the painstaking forensic study that confirmed its age, and the plausibility of its authenticity. 20,000 first printing.

This fascinating book by one of Britain's most acclaimed young Shakespeare scholars explores the extraordinary staying-power of Shakespeare's work. Bate opens by taking up questions of authorship, asking, for example, Who was Shakespeare, based on the little documentary evidence we have? Which works really are attributable to him? And how extensive was the influence of Christopher Marlowe? Bate goes on to trace Shakespeare's canonization and near- deification, examining not only the uniqueness of his status among English-speaking readers but also his effect on literate cultures across the globe. Ambitious, wide-ranging, and historically rich, this book shapes a provocative inquiry into the nature of genius as it ponders the legacy of a talent unequalled in English letters. A bold and meticulous work of scholarship, The Genius of Shakespeare is also lively and accessibly written and will appeal to any reader who has marveled at the Bard and the enduring power of his work.

An authoritative, modernized edition of the complete works of the great Elizabethan dramatist offers the complete texts of every comedy, tragedy, and history play, along with key facts about each work, a plot summary, major roles, sources, textual history, glossaries, and other helpful textual notes. 100,000 first printing.

Collects Andrew Marvell's poems and includes a chronology, appendices, notes, and suggestions for further reading.

The first literary biography of the 'poets' poet' chornicles his birth into poverty, his work as an agricultural laborer, his relationship with John Keats, and his career as a writer. 10,000 first printing.

Product Description: Covering 400 years of dramatic history--from the vital, competitive theater of Shakespeare's own lifetime to the wealth of interpretations, both classical and experimental, of the present day--this volume is the only modern stage history of its kind...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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