In Rising, poet Jane Beal goes in search of America. She sings the Cherokee Creation story, imagining dialogue between Sky-Woman and First Man. She remembers being a child and exchanging her blood with a Cherokee friend, and then, years later, the birth of that friend's son, Usquaniqdi, whose name means "miracle." In her poems, she gives voice to women from American history such as the mother Pocahontas, the midwife Martha Ballard, and the preacher Sojourner Truth. She enters into conversa...

Who is the Pearl-poet? How do ideas about his life and interpretations of his poems shape our understanding of his work in late-medieval England—and beyond? In Becoming the Pearl-Poet: Perceptions, Connections, Receptions, readers can explore the world of this extraordinary, fourteenth-century writer. In Part I, “Perceptions,” five scholars give insightful literary analyses of the narrative poems attributed to the poet: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knig...

This book enhances our understanding of the exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, Middle English dream vision poem Pearl. Situating the study in the contexts of medieval literary criticism and contemporary genre theory, Beal argues that the poet intended Pearl to be read at four levels of meaning and in four corresponding genres: literally, an elegy; spiritually, an allegory; morally, a consolation; and anagogically, a revelation. The book addresses cruxes and schola...

The moving, richly allegorical poem Pearl was likely written by the anonymous poet who also penned Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In it, a man in a garden, grieving the loss of a beloved pearl, dreams of the Pearl-Maiden, who appears across a stream. She teaches him the nature of innocence, God's grace, meekness, and purity. Though granted a vision of the New Jerusalem by the Pearl-Maiden, the dreamer is pained to discover that he cannot cross the stream himself and joi...

Will King Arthur ever return to England? He already has.In the midst of war-torn Britain, King Arthur returned in the writings of the Oxford Inklings. Learn how J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield brought hope to their times and our own in their Arthurian literature.Although studies of the "Oxford Inklings" abound, astonishingly enough, none has yet examined their great body of Arthurian work. Yet each of these major writers tackled serious and relevant quest...

When Romantic Religion was first published thirty-five years ago, no one dreamed that Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia would one day be boxoffice hits and that their authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, would be household names. R.J. Reilly's remarkably readable and perceptive book about the two writers and their two brilliant friends, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams, was soon treasured by fans as the best book on their circle of writer-philos...

Enjoying poetry and novels can seem irrelevant and out of touch in a world of texting, tweeting, and blogging. But even in this technological age literature matters.Seasoned professor Louis Markos invites us into the great literary conversation that has been taking place throughout the ages and illuminates the wisdom to be found therein. He offers both a guide to studying and understanding literature, especially poetry, and an inspiring look at what it mea...

The medieval period was one of extraordinary literary achievement sustained over centuries of great change, anchored by the Norman invasion and its aftermath, the re-emergence of English as the nation's leading literary language in the fourteenth century and the advent of print in the fifteenth. This Companion spans four full centuries to survey this most formative and turbulent era in the history of literature in English. Exploring the period's key authors - Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-...

Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Onc...

This magisterial work, long awaited and long the subject of passionate speculation, is an unprecedented exploration of modern poetry and poetics by one of America’s most acclaimed and influential postwar poets. What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. developed into an expansive and unique quest to arrive at a poetics that would fuel Duncan’s great work in the 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the work of H.D., Ezra Pound, D...

Indispensable to an understanding of Medieval and Renaissance texts and a topic of controversy for the Romantic poets, allegory remains a site for debate and controversy in the twenty-first-century.In this useful guide, Jeremy Tambling:presents a concise history of allegory, providing numerous examples from Medieval forms to the present dayconsiders the relationship between allegory and symbolismanalyses the use of allegory in modernist d...

The Arma Christi, the cluster of objects associated with Christ’s Passion, was one of the most familiar iconographic devices of European medieval and early modern culture. From the weapons used to torment and sacrifice the body of Christ sprang a reliquary tradition that produced active and contemplative devotional practices, complex literary narratives, intense lyric poems, striking visual images, and innovative architectural ornament. This collection displays the fascinating range of int...