Byron's Letters and Journals: 'Alas! the love of women' : 1813-1814


Book Description

The third volume starts with Byron at the first crest of his fame following the publication of Childe Harold. It includes his literary letters to Tom Moore, frank and intimate ones to Hobhouse, pungent ones to Hanson and Murray, and his lively and amusing missives to Lady Melbourne, his confidante through all his love affairs.




Along Heroic Lines


Book Description

A selection of new and revised essays from eminent scholar and critic Professor Christopher Ricks. Christopher Ricks brings together new as well as substantially augmented critical essays across a wide range. Several derive from his term as the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, when his inaugural lecture engaged with the illuminatingly puzzled relations between poetry and prose. Comparison and analysis (the tools of the critic, as T.S. Eliot insisted) are enlivened by imaginative pairings: of Samuel Johnson with Samuel Beckett, of Norman Mailer with Dickens, of Shakespeare with George Herbert, or of secret-police surveillance in Ben Jonson's Rome with that of Carmen Bugan's Romania. Along Heroic Lines devotes itself to the heroic and to 'heroics' (Othello cross-examined by T.S. Eliot; Byron and role-playing; Ion Bugan, political protest and arrest). This knot is in tension with the English heroic line (Dryden's heroic triplets, Henry James's cadences, Geoffrey Hill's concluding book of prose-poems and how they choose to conclude). All alert to the balance and sustenance of alternate tones that prose and poetry can achieve in harmony.







It Ended Badly


Book Description

A history of heartbreak-replete with beheadings, uprisings, creepy sex dolls, and celebrity gossip-and its disastrously bad consequences throughout time Spanning eras and cultures from ancient Rome to medieval England to 1950s Hollywood, Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly guides you through the worst of the worst in historically bad breakups. In the throes of heartbreak, Emperor Nero had just about everyone he ever loved-from his old tutor to most of his friends-put to death. Oscar Wilde's lover, whom he went to jail for, abandoned him when faced with being cut off financially from his wealthy family and wrote several self-serving books denying the entire affair. And poor volatile Caroline Lamb sent Lord Byron one hell of a torch letter and enclosed a bloody lock of her own pubic hair. Your obsessive social media stalking of your ex isn't looking so bad now, is it? With a wry wit and considerable empathy, Wright digs deep into the archives to bring these thirteen terrible breakups to life. She educates, entertains, and really puts your own bad breakup conduct into perspective. It Ended Badly is for anyone who's ever loved and lost and maybe sent one too many ill-considered late-night emails to their ex, reminding us that no matter how badly we've behaved, no one is as bad as Henry VIII.




Borrowed Imagination


Book Description

The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources examines masterpieces of English Romantic poetry and shows the Arabic and Islamic sources that inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Byron when composing their poems in the eighteenth, or early nineteenth century. Critics have documented Greek and Roman sources but turned a blind eye to nonwestern materials at a time when the romantic poets were reading them. The book shows how the Arabic-Islamic sources had helped the British Romantic Poets not only in finding their own voices, but also their themes, metaphors, symbols, characters and images. The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources is of interest to scholars in English and comparative literature, literary studies, philosophy, religion, government, history, cultural, and Middle Eastern studies and the general public.







The Diaries of Elizabeth Inchbald


Book Description

An energetic woman, Inchbald achieved fame as an actress, novelist, playwright and critic. This work includes her eleven surviving diaries, which record Inchbald's social contacts and professional activities, itemize her day-to-day expenditure, and chart the development of affairs such as the Napoleonic Wars and the trial of Queen Caroline.




Byron's Letters and Journals


Book Description

Alongside Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron possesses a star-quality unlike other classic British authors. His life as poet, philanderer, homosexual, and freedom fighter is legendary, and this new selection from his powerful letters and journals tells the story from the inside, in Byron's own racy and passionate style. Though Byron is chiefly known as a poet, his letters and journals are one of the glories of English prose literature, and one of the greatest British acts of autobiography, alongside Pepys' Diary and Boswell's Journal. This new selection, taken from the authoritative and unbowdlerized edition prepared by Leslie Marchand in the 1970s, not only provides the cream of his informal prose; it amounts to a biography in Byron's own words. No other English writer lived so remarkable an existence, from rented rooms in Aberdeen to a Nottinghamshire peerage, from European fame to English infamy, and notorious Italian exile to a glorious death in the Greek War of Independence.The letters and journals are selected, introduced, and annotated to provide a running narrative of the life and career of his remarkable man in his own unmistakable words.




British Women Poets of the Romantic Era


Book Description

This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.