Comprising work from Peter McCarey's five pamphlet collections, this poetic exploration is an exhilarating journey of language. Reflecting the author's European outlook and wide range of influences—from Russian poet Alexandr Blok to the principles of Buddhism—this account describes a sci-fi spaghetti Western, narrates the story of a shady Czech who smuggles a golem and a robot into pre-massacre Rwanda, and voyages to other unexpected places. Poetry lovers will relish this original and expe...

This is a book which regards poetry as a meeting pointand creator of overlapping communities of writers,readers, and audiences. While essays here look closelyat individual poets in the lyric tradition, includingEdward Thomas, Denise Riley, and Edwin Morgan,the author also elucidates the networks of energy andinspiration which poetry and the artist’s book catalyse.

In Vintage Living Texts, teachers, students and any lover of literature will find the essential guide to the major works of Iris Murdoch. Iris Murdoch's themes, genre and narrative techniques are put under scrutiny and the emphasis is on providing a rich source of ideas for intelligent and inventive ways of approaching the novels. Amongst many other features you'll find inspirational reading plans and contextual material, suggested complementary and comparative reading and an indispensable...

Creative writing has become a highly professionalised academic discipline, with popular courses and prestigious degree programmes worldwide. This book is a must for all students and teachers of creative writing, indeed for anyone who aspires to be a published writer. It engages with a complex art in an accessible manner, addressing concepts important to the rapidly growing field of creative writing, while maintaining a strong craft emphasis, analysing exemplary models of writing and provid...

Named after a small neighborhood in London where its members settled as young adults, the Bloomsbury Group produced an impressive body of work that yielded British Post-Impressionist painting, literary modernism, the field of macroeconomics, and a new direction for public taste in art. This Companion offers a comprehensive guide to the intellectual and social contexts surrounding Bloomsbury and its coterie, which includes writer Virginia Woolf, economist Maynard Keynes, and art critic Roge...

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, tot...

"A deeply original work . . . part of a refreshing new wave of literary criticism that is written in clear, hospitable prose, driven by genuine passion." — Irish TimesFor decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure.In Joyce's Ghosts, Luke Gibbons mounts a power...

Derek Mahon is one of the leading poets of his time, both in Ireland and beyond, famously offering a perspective that is displaced from as much as grounded in his native country. From prodigious beginnings to prolific maturity, he has been, through thick and thin, through troubled times and other, a writer profoundly committed to the art of poetry and the craft of making verse. He has also been no-less a committed reviser of his work, believing the poem to be more than a record in verse, b...

Radio Drama brings together the practical skills needed for radio drams, such as directing, writing and sound design, with media history and communication theory.Challenging the belief that sound drama is a 'blind medium', Radio Drama shows how experimentation in radio narrative has blurred the dividing line between fiction and reality in modern media. Using extracts from scripts and analysing radio broadcasts from America, Britain, Canada and Australia, the book e...

Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life offers a bold new assessment of the role of the domestic sphere in modernist literature, architecture, and design. Elegantly synthesizing modernist literature with architectural plans, room designs, and decorative art, Victoria Rosner's work explores the collaborations among modern British writers, interior designers, and architects in redefining the form, function, and meaning of middle-class private life. Drawing on a host of previo...

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the mod...

This book is a re-examination of the fertile years of early modernism immediately preceding the First World War. During this period, how, where, and under whose terms the avant-garde in Britain would be constructed and consumed were very much to play for. It is the first study to look in detail at two little magazines marginalised from many accounts of this competitive process: Rhythm and the Blue Review. By thoroughly examining not only the content but the interrelated n...