Gathered together for the first time, the essays in this volume were selected to give scholars ready access to important late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture. Included are Charles J. Rzepka's award-winning essays on Keats's 'Chapman's Homer' sonnet and Wordsworth's 'Michael' and his critical intervention into anachronistic new historicist readings of the circumstances surrounding the composition of "Tintern Abbey." Other Romantic period essays provide innovative interpretations of De Quincey's relation to theatre and the anti-slavery movement. Genre is highlighted in Rzepka's exploration of race and region in Charlie Chan, while his interdisciplinary essay on The Wizard of Oz and the New Woman takes the reader on a journey that encompasses the Oz of L. Frank Baum and Victor Fleming as well as the professional lives of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. Taken together, the essays provide not only a career retrospective of an influential scholar and teacher but also a map of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present. As Peter Manning observes in his foreword, "this collection shows that even in diverse essays the force of a curious and disciplined mind makes itself felt."

Charles J. Rzepka's important contributions to scholarship on the Romantic period and twentieth-century literature and culture are gathered together for the first time. Included are award-winning essays on Keats and Wordsworth, critical studies of De Quincey, and Austen; and interventions into popular culture and detective fiction. Together, the essays are both a career retrospective and a roadmap of the innovations and controversies that have influenced literary studies from the early 1980s to the present.

Glossator 8 (2013)Kafka's Zurau Aphorisms -- Michael CiscoSensuous and Scholarly Reading in Keats's 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' -- Thomas DayNotes to Stephen Rodefer's Four Lectures (1982) -- Ian HeamesOrnate and Explosive Grief: A Comparative Commentary on Frank O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings" and "To Hell With It", Incorporating a Substantial Gloss on the Serpent in the Poetry of Paul Val�ry, and a Theoretical Excursus on Ornate Poetics -- Sam LadkinOn In Memory of Your Occult Convolutions -- Richard Parker

The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

Compelling treatment of a question pervading literature from antiquity: when is hope a good thing and when is it not?

Humans have always been fascinated by drugs and altered states. Despite the risk of addiction, many have used drugs as technologies to induce moments of meaning-making transcendence. Beginning at the close of the eighteenth century, this book traces the quest for transcendence and meaning through drugs in the West through the modern period.

Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a new interpretation of Derrida’s writings on the gift, Adam R. Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry’s most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination, in genius, inspiration, and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones. By way of his original reading of Derrida’s work in Given Time and ‘Economimesis’, Rosenthal offers a novel account of ‘gift poetics’ and a new understanding of what makes poetry ‘poetry’.

This book explores John Keats’s reading practices and intertextual dialogues with other writers. It also examines later writers’ engagements with Keats’s poetry. Finally, the book honors the distinguished Keats scholar Jack Stillinger and includes an essay surveying his career as well as a bibliography of his major publications. The first section of the volume, “Theorizing Keats’s Reading,” contains four essays that identify major patterns in the poet’s reading habits and responses to other works. The next section, “Keats’s Reading,” consists of six essays that examine Keats’s work in relation to specific earlier authors and texts. The four essays in the third section, “Reading Keats,” consider how Keats’s poetry influenced the work of later writers and became embedded in British and American literary traditions. The final section of the book, “Contemporary Poetic Responses,” features three scholar-poets who, in poetry and/or prose commentary, discuss and exemplify Keats’s impact on their work.

Historians and literary scholars tend to agree that British intellectual culture underwent a fundamental transformation between 1770 and 1845. Yet they are unusually divided about the nature of that transformation and whether it is best understood as an epistemic rupture from, or a continuous dialogue with, the long eighteenth century. Rethinking British Romantic History, 1770-1845 rethinks the ways in which we understand the historical writing and the historical consciousness of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain by arguing that British historicism developed largely in quasi and para-historical genres such as memoir, biography, verse, fiction, and painting, rather than in works of 'real' history. In a number of inter-related essays on changing generic forms, styles, methods, and standards, the collection demonstrates that the aesthetic developments associated with British literary 'Romanticism' not only intersected in mutually dependent ways with concurrent experiments and innovations in historical writing, but that these intersections forced an epistemological crisis-a deeply felt tension about the role of feeling and imagination in historical writing-that is still resonating in historiographical debates today. In exploring this theme, the volume also seeks to consider wider questions about the philosophy of history and literature, including questions of truth, evidence, professionalization, disciplinary strategies, and methodology. At its heart is the idea that literary texts and other artistic representations of history can have historical value, and should therefore be taken seriously by practitioners of history in all its forms.