Illustrates how war veterans have been used in British literature since the 1790s to explore being, knowing and storytelling.

Scholarship on Wordsworth has long been concerned with the relationship between his poetry and his politics. Poetics and Politics contributes significantly to the ongoing discussion by breaking through the «either-or» assumption that underwrites most theses. Dr. Liu focuses on the poetry of Wordsworth in the late 1790s and the early 1800s, exploring both his critique of a heroic model of political interventionism and his promotion of an egalitarian model of poet-reader cooperation. In the context of Wordsworth's crisis of belief, this study shows how his poetic innovations constituted his daring and brilliant revaluation of his political commitment.

This study takes a close look at the language of Sylvia Plath's poetry and prose in terms of how the poetic language works rather than why she wrote as she did. A detailed analysis of her poems, her short stories and her only novel, The Bell Jar, traces Sylvia Plath's development of a poetics of her own - from monological poems to dialogic prose - based on her own frequent remarks on the writing process in her essays, letters and journals. Sylvia Plath was a writer often torn between traditional and modernist modes of writing and a poetics of the «open hand» as she formulated it. She is presented as a poet at the crossroads to postmodern ways of thought and writing rather than as a woman helplessly caught up in her own creative and biographical problems. The versatility and dynamics of her creativity and her own reflections on these processes can be linked to notions and trends in literary theory over the past few decades.