This book is the first book devoted entirely to Hughes as an environmental activist and writer. Drawing on the rapidly-growing interest in poetry and the environment, the book deploys insights from ecopoetics, ecocriticism and Anthropocene studies to analyse how Hughes’s poetry reflects his environmental awareness. Hughes’s understanding of environmental issues is placed within the context of twentieth-century developments in ‘green’ ideology and politics, challenging earlier scholars who have seen his work as apolitical. The unique strengths of this book lie in its combination of cutting-edge insights on ecocriticism with extensive work on the British Library’s new Ted Hughes archive. It will appeal to readers who enjoy Hughes’s work, as well as students and academics.

The fourteen contributors to this new collection of essays begin with Ted Hughes’s proposition that ‘every child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error.’ Established Hughes scholars alongside new voices draw on a range of approaches to explore the intricate relationships between the natural world and cultural environments — political, as well as geographical — which his work unsettles. Combining close readings of his encounters with animals and places, and explorations of the poets who influenced him, these essays reveal Ted Hughes as a writer we still urgently need. Hughes helps us manage, in his words, ‘the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live’.

Despite the fame Ted Hughes’s poetry has achieved, there has been surprisingly little critical writing on his children’s literature. This book identifies the importance of Hughes’s children’s writing from an ecocritical perspective and argues that the healing function that Hughes ascribes to nature in his children’s literature is closely linked to the development of his own sense of environmental responsibility. This book will be the first sustained examination of Hughes’s greening in relation to his writing for children, providing a detailed reading of Hughes’s children’s literature through his poetry, prose and drama as well as his critical essays and letters. In addition, it also explores how Hughes’s children’s writing is a window to the poet’s own emotional struggles, as well as his environmental consciousness and concern to reconnect a society that has become alienated from nature. This book will be of great interest to not only those studying Ted Hughes, but also students and scholars of environment and literature, ecocriticism, children’s literature and twentieth-century literature.

Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table examines early draft manuscripts and published poems by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in order to uncover the compositional approaches that they held in common. Both poets not only honed the minutiae of individual poems but also reworked the shape of overall sequences in order to cultivate unique theories of an ars poetica. The book incorporates drafts of their work from Indiana University’s Lilly Library, Emory University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Smith College’s Mortimer Rare Book Room, and the British Library. After assessing the writing and revision strategies that the poets’ early drafts reveal, the book investigates the material that they borrowed from one another and then reimagined through two major sequences: Plath’s Ariel and Hughes’s Crow. The book enhances its analysis of the poets’ shared techniques by discussing several pairs of poems from Ariel and Hughes’s Birthday Letters that respond to one another. Its final chapter also includes an evaluation of some of Hughes’s unpublished journal entries and unpublished letters that comment on his last collection’s public reception. In the conclusion, the author chronicles Hughes’s and Plath’s own remarks on their writing process as further evidence of their ars poetica.

Anthropocene Poetry: Place, Environment and Planet argues that the idea of the Anthropocene is inspiring new possibilities for poetry. It can also change the way we read and interpret poems. If environmental poetry was once viewed as linked to place, this book shows how poets are now grappling with environmental issues from the local to the planetary: climate change and the extinction crisis, nuclear weapons and waste, plastic pollution and the petroleum industry. This book intervenes in debates about culture and science, traditional poetic form and experimental ecopoetics, to show how poets are collaborating with environmental scientists and joining environmental activist movements to respond to this time of crisis. From the canonical work of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, to award-winning poets Alice Oswald, Pascale Petit, Kei Miller, and Karen McCarthy Woolf, this book explores major figures from the past alongside acclaimed contemporary voices. It reveals Seamus Heaney’s support for conservation causes and Ted Hughes’s astonishingly forward-thinking research on climate change; it discusses how Pascale Petit has given poetry to Extinction Rebellion and how Karen McCarthy Woolf set sail with scientists to write about plastic pollution. This book deploys research on five poetry archives in the UK, USA and Ireland, and the author’s insider insights into the commissioning processes and collaborative methods that shaped important contemporary poetry publications. Anthropocene Poetry finds that environmental poetry is flourishing in the face of ecological devastation. Such poetry speaks of the anxieties and dilemmas of our age, and searches for paths towards resilience and resistance.

Ranging from early medieval times to the present, this diverse collection explores the myriad ways in which literary texts are informed by their historical contexts. The thirty-one chapters draw on varied themes and perspectives to present stimulating new readings of both canonical and non-canonical texts and authors. Written in a lively and engaging style, by an international team of experts, these specially commissioned essays collectively represent an incisive contribution to literary studies; they will appeal to scholars, teachers and graduate and undergraduate students. The book is designed to complement Paul Poplawski's previous volume, English Literature in Context, and incorporates additional study elements designed specifically with undergraduates in mind. With an extensive chronology, a glossary of critical terms, and a study guide suggesting how students might learn from the essays in their own writing practices, this volume provides a rich and flexible resource for teaching and learning.

Read an interview with Norbert Bachleitner. In this 200th volume of Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft the editors Norbert Bachleitner, Achim H. Hölter and John A. McCarthy ‘take stock’ of the discipline. It focuses on recurrent questions in the field of Comparative Literature: What is literature? What is meant by ‘comparative’? Or by ‘world’? What constitute ‘transgressions’ or ‘refractions’? What, ultimately, does being at home in the world imply? When we combine the answers to these individual questions, we might ultimately reach an intriguing proposition: Comparative Literature contributes to a sense of being at home in a world that is heterogeneous and fractured, rather than affirming a monolithic canon marked by territory and homogeneity. The volume unites essays on world literature, literature in the context of the history of ideas, comparative women and gender studies, aesthetics and textual analysis, and literary translation and tradition.

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author's ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes's poetic process. Hughes's extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book's unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes's techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes's changing ideas about how poetry 'ought' to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes's major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes's poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century's most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.

The interconnected themes of land and labour were a common recourse for English literary writers between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the twenty-first they have become pressing again in the work of nature writers, environmentalists, poets, novelists and dramatists. Written by a team of sixteen subject specialists, this volume surveys the literature of rural working lives and landscapes written in English between 1500 and the present day, offering a range of scholarly perspectives on the georgic tradition, with insights from literary criticism, historical scholarship, classics, post-colonial studies, rural studies and ecocriticism. Providing an overview of the current scholarship in georgic literature and criticism, this collection argues that the work of people and animals in farming communities, and the land as it is understood through that work, has provided writers in English with one of their most complex and enduring themes.

The book provides a comprehensive view of the environmental discourses that are found in the literary representations of the natural world. The book presents an in-depth analysis of the symbolic manifestations of the outer world in various genres of literature such as nature novels and nature or ecological writings. It deeply captures the mutual interactions that occur between the human and the non-human world that tend to influence each other’s actions and processes. By exploring the ecocritical leanings and tracing all the phases of Anthropocene, the book takes its readers for a deep excursion into the beauteous, dynamic, natural, and overtly spiritual world of Nature as exhibited in the writings such as Thoreau’s Walden, Khushwant Singh’s Nature Watch, and Starhawk’s The Earth Path which is contrasted against the eco-catastrophic world of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. An insightful and analytical journey into the world of more unique portrayals of the ecological world that tend to strike a balance between two distinct worlds: the real and the imaginative, the spiritual and the material as well as the natural and the man-made (as reflected in the nature novels: George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Khushwant Singh’s I Shall not Hear the Nightingale, Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing, and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia: A Novel. The book, thus, with its underpinning wisdom will be an interesting and more enlightening read for the critics, academicians, and researchers.