Byron was -- to echo Wordsworth -- half-perceived and half-created. He would have affirmed Jean Baudrillard's observation that "to seduce is to die to reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion." But among the readers he seduced, in person and in poetry, were women possessed of vivid imaginations who collaborated with him in fashioning his legend. Accused of "treating women harshly," Byron acknowledged: "It may be so -- but I have been their martyr. My whole life has been sacrificed to them and by them." Those whom he spell bound often returned the favor in their own writings tried to remake his public image to reflect their own.Through writings both well known and generally unknown, James Soderholm examines the poet's relationship with five women: Elizabeth Pigot, Caroline Lamb, Annabella Milbanke, Teresa Guiccioli, and Marguerite Blessington. These women participated in Byron's life and literary career and the manipulation of images that is the Byron legend.Soderholm argues against the sentimental depictions of biographers who would preserve Byron's romantic aura by diminishing the contributions of these women to his social, sexual, and literary identity. By restoring the contexts in which literary works charm or bedevil particular readers, the author shows the consequences of Byron's poetic seductions during and after his life.

From 1800 to 1922 the Irish Question was the most emotional and divisive issue in British politics. It pitted Westminster politicians, anti-Catholic British public opinion, and Irish Protestant and Presbyterian champions of the Union against the determination of Ireland's large Catholic majority to obtain civil rights, economic justice, and cultural and political independence.In this completely revised and updated edition of The Irish Question, Lawrence J. McCaffrey extends his classic analysis of Irish nationalism to the present day. He makes clear the tortured history of British-Irish relations and offers insight into the difficulties now facing those who hope to create a permanent peace in Northern Ireland.

In her fourth novel of the Kentucky frontier, Giles combines her fascination for the past with her gift for storytelling.Had it not been for the loyalty of men like Giles's fictional hero, Major Cassius Cartwright, General James Wilkinson's 1783 attempt to create a Spanish empire in the West might have succeeded. Interwoven with the Spanish Conspiracy are tales of struggles with Indians, of the birth of a Green River Valley town, and of the two women Cass loves: Rachel, a gentle Quaker, and Tattie, a fiery waif he rescues from Philadelphia slums. Like Giles's earlier historical novels, The Land Beyond the Mountains is an engaging story of adventure and romance. First published in 1958, this reprint gives Giles fans another lively piece of Kentucky's frontier history.Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.

Geoffrey Becker’s Dangerous Men was selected by Charles Baxter as the winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His manuscript was selected from nearly three hundred submitted by published writers.In these tightly drafted stories, Becker creates a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and odd stettings, with tantalizing emphasis on lonliness, loss, and the ever-present struggle to find one’s place in the world. \u201cIt was wrong to think that our presence would linger on, though it was to this notion that I realized I’d been grasping all along,\u201d the music-student narrator of \u201cDangerous Men\u201d says after an evening involving drugs, a fight, and a car accident, \u201cthe idea that in some way we were etching ourselves onto the air, leaving shadows that would remain forever.\u201dMany of the pieces incorporate music into the storyline. Music is a gathering point in his characters’ misfit lives. In \u201cMagister Ludi,\u201d a seventeen-year-old girl meets up with an older local guitarist whom her younger brother has invited over to their house when their parents are gone, and plays him for her own ends: \u201cShe makes Riggy drive right through the center of town, hoping that someone will see them - one of her friends, or one of her parents’ friends even, it doesn’t matter. She just likes the idea of being spotted in this beat-up car alongside someone so disreputable.\u201dIn \u201cErin and Malcom,\u201d a bass player with an injured hand who still lives with his estranged wife, a singer, and her pet ferret, finds out how out of tune his life really is: \u201cSomething has gone wrong - he could see it in the way she looked at him over her morning bowl of cereal, and the way she didn’t as she peeled herself out of her Lycra pants and leopard shirts at night.\u201dYet , even when the music seems quiet, there are tales of choice and happenstance. \u201cEl Diablo de La Cienega,\u201d set in New Mexico, is about a boy who accepts the challenge of a mysterious figure to a game of basketball, for very high stakes indeed. Charles Baxter - one of America’s great story writers - calls the story \u201ca small masterpiece. It has formal perfection, like a folktale. I thought it was wonderful.\u201dWith leaps from the funny to the sad and the revelatory, these amazing stories explore dreams and longing with remarkable insight and imagination. These are stories you will not forget.

Language scholars have traditionally agreed that the development of the English language was largely unplanned. John H. Fisher challenges this view, demonstrating that the standardization of writing and pronunciation was, and still is, made under the control of political and intellectual forces. In these essays Fisher chronicles his gradual realization that Standard English was not a popular evolution at all but was the direct result of political decisions made by the Lancastrian administrations of Henry IV and Henry V. To achieve standardization and acceptance of the vernacular, these kings turned to their Chancery scribes, who were responsible for writing and copying legal and royal documents.Chaucer, a relative of the king, began to be labeled by the government as a master of the language, and it was Henry V who inspired the fifteenth-century tradition of citing Chaucer as the "maker" of English. An even more important link between language development and government practice is the fact that Chaucer himself composed in the English of the Chancery scribes.Fisher discusses the development of Chancery practices, royal involvement in promoting use of the vernacular, Chaucer's use of English, Caxton's use of Chancery Standard, and the nineteenth-century phenomenon of a standard, or "received," pronunciation of English. This engaging and clearly written work will change the way scholars understand the development of English and think about the intentional shaping of our language.

For many years young writers experimenting with forms and aesthetics in the early decades of this century, small journals known collectively as "little" magazines were the key to recognition. Joyce, Stein, Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, and scores of other iconoclastic writers now considered central to modernism received little encouragement from the established publishers. It was the avant-garde magazines, many of them headed by women, that fostered new talent and found a readership for it. Jayne Marek examines the work of seven women editors -- Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, H.D., Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), and Marianne Moore -- whose varied activities, often behind the scenes and in collaboration with other women, contributed substantially to the development of modernist literature. Through such publications as Poetry, The Little Review, The Dial, and Close Up, these women had a profound influence that has been largely overlooked by literary historians. Marek devotes a chapter as well to the interactions of these editors with Ezra Pound, who depended upon but also derided their literary tastes and accomplishments. Pound's opinions have had lasting influence in shaping critical responses to women editors of the early twentieth century. In the current reevaluation of modernism, this important book, long overdue, offers an indispensable introduction to the formative influence of women editors, both individually and in their collaborative efforts.

A compelling collection by one of the pioneers of revisionist approaches to the history of literacy in North America and Europe, The Labyrinths of Literacy offers original and controversial views on the relation of literacy to society, leading the way for scholars and citizens who are willing to question the importance and function of literacy in the development of society today.

Alcools, first published in 1913 and one of the few indispensable books of twentieth- century poetry, provides a key to the century's history and consciousness. Champion of "cubism", Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) fashions in verse the sonic equivalent of what Picasso accomplishes in his cubist works: simultaneity. Apollinaire has been so influential that without him there would have been no New York School of poetry and no Beat Movement. This new translation reveals his complex, beautiful, and wholly contemporary poetry. Printed with the original French on facing pages, this is the only version of this seminal work of French Modernism currently available in the United States.

Disfortune is not in the mainstream of American poetic speech, nor is it easily placed into any of the well-known poetic speech-camps that have arisen on its margins. Terse, haunting lyrics expose the irreducible contradictions of living, wherein "the talking-singing, the whole talking-/singing ball of yarn, begins to unravel." Deceptively casual in tone, these poems offer startling confrontations with "the unoriginal/oblivion," with "the contrived delicacy/of what is emptied and kept. " Joe Wenderoth sees "fortune" as the mute history of events proceeding toward the ultimate security; his poems arise from "disfortune," from the need "Just to sing the song that's kept you/quiet/all this time." This book is a rare occurrence, marking not only a new intimacy with the world, but also a remembering of the determined motion of intimacy itself.

Twentieth-century Spanish poetry has received comparatively little attention from critics writing in English. Andrew Debicki now presents the first English-language history published in the United States to examine the sweep of modern Spanish verse. More important, he is the first to situate Spanish poetry in the context of European modernity, to trace its trajectory from the symbolists to the postmodernists. Avoiding the rigid generational schemes and catalogs of names found in traditional Hispanic literary histories, Debicki offers detailed discussions of salient books and texts to construct an original and compelling view of his subject. He demonstrates that contemporary Spanish verse is rooted in the modem tradition and poetics that see the text as a unique embodiment of complex experiences. He then traces the evolution of that tradition in the early decades of the century and its gradual disintegration from the 1950s to the present as Spanish poetry came to reflect features of the postmodern, especially the poetics of text as process rather than as product.By centering his study on major periods and examining within each the work of poets of different ages, Debicki develops novel perspectives. The late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, were not merely the setting for a new aestheticist generation but an era of exceptional creativity in which both established and new writers engendered a profound, intertextual, and often self-referential lyricism. This book will be essential reading for specialists in modern Spanish letters, for advanced students, and for readers inter-ested in comparative literature.

Over the past decade, Billy Collins has emerged as the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, garnering critical acclaim and broad popular appeal. Gerald Stern describes his poetry as "heartbreakingly beautiful." John Updike proclaims his poems "consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "This special, limited edition celebrates Billy Collins's years as U.S. Poet Laureate. The Art of Drowning—one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation and popularity during the 1990s—is distinctive in its variety of interests and the generous hospitality of its voice. Ranging from an analysis of Keats's handwriting to the art form of the calendar pinup, the subjects of his poems inspire imaginative play. Whether reading him for the first time or the fiftieth, this collector's edition is a must-have for anyone interested in the poet the New York Times calls simply "the real thing."

Women's contribution to rhetoric throughout Western history, like so many other aspects of women's experience, has yet to be fully explored. In pathbreaking discussions ranging from ancient Greece, though the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to modern times, sixteen closely coordinated essays examine how women have used language to reflect their vision of themselves and their age; how they have used traditional rhetoric and applied it to women\u2019s discourse; and how women have contributed to rhetorical theory. Language specialists, feminists, and all those interested in rhetoric, composition, and communication, will benefit from the fresh and stimulating cross-disciplinary insights they offer.

Although Kathleen Norris’s best-selling Dakota: A Spiritual Geography has brought her to the attention of many thousands of readers, she is first and last a poet. Like Robert Frost, another poet identified with a particular landscape, she can reveal the miraculous in the ordinary, and she writes with clarity, humor, and deep sympathy for her subjects.

City of Salt, Gregory Orr’s sixth book of poems, is largely autobiographical and presents moments of intense emotion which are anchored in clearly dramatized events. These are poems of elegy and celebration, and of occasions where the two modes fuse in acts of redemptive imagination.

First published in 1934 and revised in 1962, this book gathers journalist and historian Joel Augustus Rogers' columns from the syndicated newspaper feature titled Your History. Patterned after the look of Ripley's popular Believe It or Not the multiple vignettes in each episode recount short items from Rogers's research. The feature began in the Pittsburgh Courier in November 1934 and ran through the 1960s.

Powerful meditations on the nature and limits of human understanding.