This volume investigates the various ways in which writers comment on, present, and defend their own works, and at the same time themselves, across early modern Europe. A multiplicity of self-commenting modes, ranging from annotations to explicatory prose to prefaces to separate critical texts and exemplifying a variety of literary genres, are subjected to analysis. Self-commentaries are more than just an external apparatus: they direct and control reception of the primary text, thus affecting notions of authorship and readership. With the writer understood as a potentially very influential and often tendentious interpreter of their own work, the essays in this collection offer new perspectives on pre-modern and modern forms of critical self-consciousness, self-representation, and self-validation. Contributors are Harriet Archer, Gilles Bertheau, Carlo Caruso, Jeroen De Keyser, Russell Ganim, Joseph Harris, Ian Johnson, Richard Maber, Martin McLaughlin, John O’Brien, Magdalena Ożarska, Federica Pich, Brian Richardson, Els Stronks, and Colin Thompson.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesises existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the volumes. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry features a history of the birth moment of modern 'English' poetry in greater detail than previous studies. It examines the literary transitions, institutional contexts, artistic practices, and literary genres within which poets compose their works. Each chapter combines an orientation to its topic and a contribution to the field. Specifically, the volume introduces a narrative about the advent of modern English poetry from Skelton to Spenser, attending to the events that underwrite the poets' achievements: Humanism; Reformation; monarchism and republicanism; colonization; print and manuscript; theatre; science; and companionate marriage. Featured are metre and form, figuration and allusiveness, and literary career, as well as a wide range of poets, from Wyatt, Surrey, and Isabella Whitney to Ralegh, Drayton, and Mary Herbert. Major works discussed include Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare's Sonnets.

‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’. This original edited volume takes William Blake’s aphorism as a basis to explore how British Romantic literature creates its own sense of time. It considers Romantic poetry as embedded in and reflecting on the march of time, regarding it not merely as a reaction to the course of events between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, but also as a form of creative engagement with history in the making. The authors offer a comprehensive overview of the question of time from a literary perspective, applying a diverse range of critical approaches to Romantic authors from William Blake and Percy Shelley to John Clare and Samuel Rodgers. Close readings uncover fresh insights into these authors and their works, including Frankenstein, the most familiar of Romantic texts. Revising current thinking about periodisation, the authors explore how the Romantic poetics of time bears witness to the ruptures and dislocations at work within chronological time. They consider an array of topics, such as ecological time, futurity, operatic time, or the a-temporality of Venice. As well as surveying the Romantic canon’s evolution over time, these essays approach it as a phenomenon unfolding across national borders. Romantic authors are compared with American or European counterparts including Beethoven, Irving, Nietzsche and Beckett. Romanticism and Time will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Romantic Studies. It will be of further interest to philosophers and historians working on the connections between philosophy, history and literature during the nineteenth century.