Unleashing the Muse: A Beginner's Guide to Writing Prompts Struggling to overcome writer's block and unleash your creative potential? Unleashing the Muse: A Beginner's Guide to Writing Prompts is your key to unlocking a world of inspiration! This comprehensive guide equips you with the tools and techniques to transform simple prompts into captivating stories, poems, and artistic masterpieces. Whether you're a budding writer or a seasoned artist seeking fresh ideas, Unleashing the Muse will show you how to: Tap into the Power of Prompts: Explore the diverse world of writing prompts and discover how they can spark new ideas, challenge your perspective, and propel you on your creative journey. Craft Compelling Characters and Worlds: Learn to breathe life into your characters, creating relatable heroes and villains. Build immersive settings that draw your readers into the heart of your story. Master the Art of Plotting: Unleash the secrets of constructing captivating plots with clear conflicts, rising tension, and satisfying resolutions that leave your audience wanting more. Go Beyond the Written Word: Discover how prompts can ignite creativity in various artistic disciplines. From songwriting and music composition to visual arts, crafting, and more, the possibilities are endless. Embrace the Revision Process: Gain valuable revision techniques to transform rough drafts into polished works you can share with confidence. Packed with inspiring examples, engaging exercises, and practical advice, Unleashing the Muse is your roadmap to a life brimming with creative expression. Learn to use prompts to unlock a wellspring of ideas and transform them into captivating stories, poems, and artistic expressions that will enthrall and resonate. Are you ready to unleash your muse and embark on a creative adventure?

Dr Dike Okoro, Sam Walton Fellow and finalist for the 1994 Iliad Poetry Award, teaches advanced reading and writing poetry and literature courses at Northwestern University, Evanston, USA. He received his PhD in English (with research specialization in African Diaspora literatures) from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, an M.A. in African American literature and an M.F.A. in poetry, both from Chicago State University. He is the editor and author of six books, including Speaking for the Generations: An Anthology of Contemporary African Short Stories, Echoes from the Mountain: New and Selected Poems by Mazisi Kunene A Long Dream: Poems by Okogbule Wonodi. His poems, essays, short stories, chapters and articles have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity explores the connections among the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa as an icon of the gendered gaze. An analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and the prose of Mary Shelley reveals that these Romantic-era writers equate the enraptured state that produces spontaneous literary creation with the mesmeric trance. These writers employ Medusan imagery to portray both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject, a conflation of subject/object positions that complicates issues of agency, subjectivity, and gender. Images of Medusan mesmerism ultimately work to deconstruct Romantic ideological dichotomies of self/other, female/male, muse/artist, and sublime/beautiful. In contrast to a traditional, masculinized Romantic discourse that emphasizes self-possession, this study uncovers a feminized, improvisational, Romantic discourse, characterized “Other-possession,” an assumption of the mesmerized subject position that enhances subjective fluidity. This study interrogates the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity through an examination of Romantic poetry, prose, and theory that utilizes mesmeric and Medusan metaphors to suggest creative inspiration.Building on recent scholarship about improvisational poetics, the subversive potential of mesmerism, and Medusa as a feminist icon, this work suggests that the mesmeric Medusan muse not only enables creativity for women writers but also provides a mirror in which they view (and through which they give voice to) their own societal oppression. The mesmeric Medusan muse in Romantic-era literature—from the Ancient Mariner and the Frankenstein monster to the tragic, abandoned Sapphic poetess—often represents the face of oppression, an unwelcome and monstrous truth in nineteenth-century British society. For women writers in particular, braving the stare of the Medusan muse enhances empathy, and therefore inspiration and literary productivity.

Oswyn Murray charts the shifting uses of the ancient past, showing how three centuries of scholars interpreted ancient Greece in the light of contemporary political interests. Rich in stories and portraits of influential thinkers, The Muse of History is a powerful reminder that the meaning of the past is always made in and for the present.

Essays over het snijvlak tussen compositieleer, analyse, betekenisgeving en de relatie tussen taal en muziek.