The image of Pushkin’s shining white teeth occupies an important place in the Russian cultural imagination (Veresaev, Tynianov, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, etc.). In his recollections about Pushkin, one ...of his acquaintances noted that the poet took special care of his teeth. This was an attempt to look like Lord Byron, whom he adored and meticulously imitated at that time. This article demonstrates that in European culture of the nineteenth century, Byron’s teeth served as a synecdoche of the ideal Romantic body. Teeth were a telling feature of his iconic image, along with his Greek handsomeness, curly hair, long neck, small arms, proverbial lameness, asymmetrical eyes and the three wrinkles crossing his high forehead. In this cultural context, Byron’s physical appearance manifested for Pushkin the Romantic conflict between light and darkness, body and soul—a conflict that was literally embodied in the English poet’s controversial figure. The article argues that it is in this spiritual-odontological sense that Pushkin brushed his teeth à la Lord Byron. In other words, to become the Pushkin whom we know, the young poet tried to become Byron in flesh and spirit.
Johnson in Japan Ogawa, Kimiyo; Suzuki, Mika; Clingham, Greg ...
2020, 2020-10-16
eBook
The study and reception of Samuel Johnson’s work has long been embedded in Japanese literary culture. The essays in this collection reflect that history and influence, underscoring the richness of ...Johnson scholarship in Japan, while exploring broader conditions in Japanese academia today. In examining Johnson’s works such as the Rambler (1750-52), Rasselas (1759), Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-81), and Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), the contributors—all members of the half-century-old Johnson Society of Japan—also engage with the work of other important English writers, namely Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Matthew Arnold, and later Japanese writers, including Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). If the state of Johnson studies in Japan is unfamiliar to Western academics, this volume offers a unique opportunity to appreciate Johnson’s centrality to Japanese education and intellectual life, and to reassess how he may be perceived in a different cultural context.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
The correspondence of John Dryden is the definitive
edition of the letters of the most important playwright and poet of
the late seventeenth century. He defined an age and his newly
transcribed ...disparate correspondence is placed in the context of
contemporaneous and current debates about literature, politics and
religion. It is also the most important account of the relationship
between an author and his bookseller of the time. The illustrated
correspondence contains a full biographical, textual
introduction and calendar of letters. It is transcribed
diplomatically and structured chronologically, with contextualising
sections about particular correspondences. The readership will be
undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students and academics
with an interest in seventeenth century literature, politics,
religion and culture. The editor won the MLA Morton N. Cohen Award
for a Distinguished Edition of Letters.
ABSTRACT
This article introduces a previously unknown manuscript copy of a satirical book-list in Latin by John Donne, known as the Catalogus librorum satyricus or The Courtier’s Library. The ...manuscript (which we call WA2) was discovered at Westminster Abbey in autumn 2016, and is the earliest surviving witness of the Catalogus. A transcription of the new copy is supplied, with textual and bibliographical observations, an examination of its provenance, and the history of the work’s publication in print and manuscript; we also speculate on WA2’s arrival into the Abbey. The article argues for an original composition date of late summer 1603 to late autumn 1604, the most precise yet proposed for this work. It includes a new translation of Donne’s only surviving Latin letter, to Sir Henry Goodere, which refers directly to the Catalogus. This letter is used to explicate the place of the Catalogus in Donne’s life and writing, and to clarify issues of dating and circulation. The discovery of WA2 also provokes the reappraisal of another Catalogus manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge (CT2). Previous scholars have identified this as an authorial revision and linked it to Donne’s association with the Drury family in 1610–1611. The textual and circumstantial evidence of WA2 is marshalled to reject not only this later date and the Drury association, but the notion that Donne himself made the revision recorded in CT2.
Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English ...poets really were. It includes a study of Anglo-Saxon words for 'poet' and the first list of named poets in Anglo-Saxon England. Its survey of known poets identifies four social roles that poets often held - teachers, scribes, musicians and courtiers - and explores the kinds of poetry created by these individuals. The book also offers a new model for understanding the role of social groups in poets' experience: it argues that the presence or absence of a poetic community affected the work of Anglo-Saxon poets at all levels, from minute technical detail to the portrayal of character. This focus on poetic communities provides a new way to understand the intersection of history and literature in the Middle Ages.
The first comprehensive biography of an extraordinary English poet and composer whose life was haunted by fighting in the First World War and, later, confinement in a mental asylum Ivor Gurney ...(1890–1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the First World War and composed some of the greatest works in the English song repertoire, such as "Sleep." Yet his life was shadowed by the trauma of the war and mental illness, and he spent his last fifteen years confined to a mental asylum. In Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy presents the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary and misunderstood artist.A promising student at the Royal College of Music, Gurney enlisted as a private with the Gloucestershire regiment in 1915 and spent two years in the trenches of the Western Front. Wounded in the arm and subsequently gassed during the Battle of Passchendaele, Gurney was recovering in hospital when his first collection of poems, Severn and Somme, was published. Despite episodes of depression, he resumed his music studies after the war until he was committed to an asylum in 1922. At times believing he was Shakespeare and that the "machines under the floor" were torturing him, he nevertheless continued to write and compose, leaving behind a vast body of unpublished work when he died of tuberculosis. Drawing on extensive archival research and spanning literary criticism, history, psychiatry and musicology, this compelling narrative sets Gurney's life and work against the backdrop of the war and his institutionalisation, probing the links between madness, suffering and creativity.Facing death in the trenches, Gurney hoped that history might not "forget me quite." This definitive account of his life and work helps ensure that he will indeed be remembered.
Fifteen enlightening chapters by leading international biographers, critics and poets examine letter writing among poets in the last two hundred years. They range from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats ...and Shelley in the nineteenth-century to Eliot, Yeats, Bishop and Larkin in the twentieth. In doing so, they respond to the following questions. Who are the great letter writers of the past? Why is reading other people’s mail so addictive? What is the relationship between letter writing and other literary genres such as poetry? Divided into three sections—Contexts and Issues, Romantic and Victorian Letter Writing, and Twentieth-Century Letter Writing—the volume demonstrates that real letters still have an allure that virtual post struggles to replicate.
This study is a comparative descriptive investigation of the representation of death in the Holy Quran and the poetry of the English poet John Donne. It focuses on the concept of death as a real and ...ultimate truth. The study considers death as a thematic contemplation that every Man is worried about. Death in the Holy Quran and Donne’s poetry has been previously studied from different individual viewpoints, but none has adopted it comparatively from a thematic perspective. This study also adopts many echelons of the religious themes presented by these works in the treatment of death such as the truth of death, submission and forgiveness, and resurrection in both Islamic and Christian religions. The study signifies the similarities and differences in the discussion and analysis part. It concludes that despite the cultural, religious beliefs, and time and place differences, the Holy Quran and Donne’s poetry share some thematic and religious factors that lead towards religious perception of death including evidences of the reality of death, mortality of people, and the resurrection after death.
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