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Presents a critique of Dylan Thomas' poem 'The Hand That Signed the Paper.' Origin of the poem; Depiction of politics in the poem; Themes and motives; Language and imagery.

This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a 'mother tongue' (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works of Anita Bharti and Meena Kandasamy, contemporary Dalit women authors who write in Hindi and English, respectively. Thus, this paper extends the definition of the vernacular beyond the confines of linguistic and regional specificity, allowing for a feminist reclamation of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For almost 100 years, the Monthly Review documented literary history in Britain through its efforts to review every published text. Appearing monthly from 1749 to 1844, the periodical sheds light not only on texts published during this time, many of which are now "lost" to scholarly analysis, but also on the original critical discourse surrounding these texts. Analysis of the Monthly Review presents an opportunity to discern influential trends in publishing and literary criticism, yet close examination of the periodical proves formidable due to its size. In this paper, we use statistical topic modeling to "read" the over 140,000 pages of the Monthly Review, revealing prominent themes and discourses in the corpus. In particular, we highlight the periodical's presentation of genre differences and its privileging of specific discourses and frameworks of critical evaluation, all of which served to shape contemporary readers' perceptions of the rapidly expanding literary sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" within the rhetorical context of pro-imperialist British newspapers in the 1898-9 period demonstrates that the poem itself is both product and cause of the relationship these publications were constructing between Great Britain and its erstwhile colony. "The Times" (London), the "Spectator," "The Economist," and the "Daily Mail" all supported US imperialism, but they also perceived the necessity for Great Britain to control a potential rival. To facilitate a mentoring relationship they constructed a set of arguments concerning US responsibilities in the aftermath of its victory over Spain in 1898—9 and suggested that the USA should model its colonial policies after Britain's own imperial administration. Kipling's poem comes directly out of these arguments; moreover, once published, the papers instantly recycled it to support their points. Together with the newspapers' arguments, the poem constituted a clear intervention into debates over the course of US imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the discussion of Bungakuron in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993). It focuses on Soseki's collaboration with Masaoka Shiki to revive haiku and the links that Soseki found between the haiku-related genre of shaseibun (literary sketches) and the grotesque, loosely plotted realism of Laurence Sterne. Like Bakhtin, Soseki recognizes something in early novelistic forms that would later be disciplined out. Furthermore, this paper argues that in the preface to Bungakuron Soseki provides both an encomium to his dead friend Masaoka and a prescient announcement of the 'end of literature', perceived 100 years early from his vantage point as a non-Western subject witnessing the 'end of empire' in London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to poetry when it is reframed within a work of prose? This paper analyzes William Hazlitt's prose style, with particular attention to moments in which he reframes poetry by extracting it from the patterns of rhyme and meter and placing it within the rhythms of his essays. In doing so, Hazlitt stylistically challenged the boundaries of genre; simultaneously, the content of his essays defined prose as a hybrid form, built through a process of mining other texts for quotations. This paper also makes an argument for the crucial role material culture played in Hazlitt's writing style. It demonstrates how Hazlitt's participation in friendship albums and commonplace books informed what he called a “familiar style” of writing. Ultimately, this paper sheds light on understudied manuscripts and analyzes their role in shaping the Romantic-essay form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes a set of 9,035 salaryman senryū poems over an eighteen-year period (1990-2007) in order to track salaryman reactions to workplace transition from an organizational behavioralist perspective. Major findings include: (i) the number of submissions and votes for the major poetry competition, Salaryman Senryū, have been falling since 1994, suggesting a decline in shared salaryman mentality; (ii) there has been a shift in the relative importance of broad themes, so that the workplace as a category of senryū poems is of less centrality in 2007 than it was in 1990; (iii) within the workplace category, (negative) interpersonal relations, especially with supervisors, still dominate; and (iv) workstyle is also a strong subtheme, with workers showing more interest in work processes than actual work conditions. The analysis also shows that the years 1996 and 1997 are a watershed where poems shift from a more jocular to strident tone. The overall implication of the study is a potential breach of the social contract between Japanese employers and regular employees, which will require the assiduous application of supportive employment practices (SEP) in order to ensure a high level of employee performance and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our project was initiated by a simple, straightforward desire: to write on water, to put a poem on a pond. In this essay, I will discuss the subsequent 'writing on water' projects undertaken in conjunction with university classes offered on visual and concrete poetry, its history and application. Here, the students and I were together presented with the challenge of imagining (and manifesting) alternative forms of text, alternative means and methods (other than upon paper or computer screen) of inscribing language onto the environment. The poetic and pedagogical repercussions from these projects proved quite illuminating, as language itself was materially and conceptually re-enlivened, re-imagined as liquid resonance, as floating form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an introduction to the June 2008 issue, describing the archaeological discovery of the Chinese manuscript "Confucius's Comments on the Poetry," from the Warring States period.

Undermining the narrow critical approaches which neglect the potential intersection between modernism and postcolonialism, this paper explores the attempt by contemporary Arab poets to engage Western modernist heritage in order to articulate domestic narratives integral to the geopolitics of the Arab region in the postcolonial era. In an attempt to redefine tradition and deviate from fossilised inherited legacies and tyrannical regimes, postcolonial Arab writers, led by the Iraqi poet, Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati, pursue solace and redemption in Western modernism, developing Western forms into a poetics of resistance and protest. Through textual apprenticeship, assimilated from Western literature and culture, they combine modernism and postcolonialism into a nexus incorporating Western techniques while emphasising variants and displacements between their nationalist perspective and that of their Western forebears. Convinced of the role played by the West in the shaping of modern Arabic cultural traditions, Al-Bayati reconstructs colonial modernism as a narrative of liberation, engaging in dialogues with Western pioneering writers and masterpieces. Transforming Western modernist strategies into a revolutionary construct, Al-Bayati aims to challenge internal oppression and external hegemony. Through tran-cultural entanglement and textual appropriation of Western narratives he provides diversity and insight into postcolonial Arabic poetry, intensifying the awareness of other traditions and reconstructing his own heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose a reading of Coleridge and Hölderlin using Stanley Cavell’s philosophical theory of acknowledgment and avoidance as an interpretive rubric. I argue that recognition (acknowledgment) of the skeptical limits of reason and the imagination allow Hölderlin, through his poetical theory, philosophy and practice, to overcome the epistemological limits of the romantic imagination; this factor is instanced in his poetry. On the other hand, Coleridge's work remains trapped within skeptical limits because of his “avoidance” of this ontological recognition, which is due to his continued desire for an intellectual intuition. I further my argument by using the hermeneutics of Heidegger as a secondary tool in reading both poets and in helping to illuminate their relative poetic and philosophical positions. Both poets ultimately recognize the limits of our imaginative autonomy; however, they articulate these limits in very different ways – ways that are useful keys in unlocking the work of Coleridge and Hölderlin. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the engagement of Australian poet A. D. Hope with Russian literature and argues for its centrality in Hope's thinking in the last three decades of his poetry. The author discusses Hope's essays, epistolary correspondences, and the notebooks archived at the National Library of Australia to trace Hope's familiarity with the Russian language, his translation projects, and the Russian essays Hope includes in his book "The New Cratylus: Notes on the Craft of Poetry."

This paper examines postcolonial subjectivity through modernist and postcolonial theories of the lyric. I suggest that an aesthetic consideration of the lyric form and subjectivity might foreground how the postcolonial lyric cherishes the concept of a bounded self while simultaneously reshaping boundaries. Such a consideration might move beyond subjectivity and identity formation by reading lyric poetry's intervention in modernity as critique rather than self-expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the question of representing cultural otherness in relation to Asian diasporic poetry. Since western cultural exoticism has developed a global epistemological frame in which Asian cultural identities are often preconditioned to express western perspectives, Asian diasporic poets have to represent their cultural differences in new ways, disrupting the existing paradigm of interpretation and power relations. What Asian diasporic poetry shows is an interrogative mode of cross-cultural negotiation in which various ideological appropriations and cross-cultural exoticizations are dislocated from their original meanings to take on new implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poring over good translations of poetry is a special pleasure. It takes us almost uniquely close to the poem and offers insight into the intricate choices of phrasing and rhythm its composition involved. Translating Goethe's poems is also a special problem, because of the simplicity and directness of his diction. The paper looks at the detail of some of John Whaley's versions and celebrates some of his most successful versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Jane Hirshfield's having published 11 books of poetry and having received six awards for poetry, there is a dearth of published criticism on her work. Most of the existing literature consists of online tributes and interviews with the poet, with barely any scholarly consideration. In light of this academic lacuna, we offer a two-fold framework for reading and exploring her poetry. Our foci are the expression of Zen Buddhism and feminist concerns in her poetry. These two themes, although apparently divergent, intersect in Hirshfield's representation of desire. Desire plays a central role in Zen Buddhism, which theorises it as a central, but problematic, feature of human existence. Desire traps the desiring subject in sensory reality, which is, by its nature, always already contingent. Feminist thinking also foregrounds desire, insisting on women as desiring subjects, and on the complexity of the desiring relation, imbued with overtones of power and domination. Our article explores the representation of desire and relations of desire in a selection of Hirshfield's poems, demonstrating the centrality and relevance of our twin foci. We offer these here as preliminary tools for reading Hirshfield's poetry, in the hope of stimulating further research into her work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a case for greater inclusion of poetry as distinctive data within interpretive consumer research. It considers that alternative means of representation provide insight into difficult to access consumption fields. The poetic voice allows the emergence of an emic language of experience as the subject engages in self-reflexivity expressed in ways unconstrained by typical research norms. The article also considers some of the methodological choices inherent in engaging with poetic data and illustrates the research value by considering poems that unpack hidden and mundane consumption and consumer resistance. It shows how intimate experiences can be accessed and interrogated using poetic analysis, how poetry can capture the minutia of mundane consumption while laying bare the poet's reflexivity about its meaning, and how the reclamation of a dead art-form can become an active form of rejection and consumer resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary works that appeared in almost every issue of the Revolution, the organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and in the Woman's Journal, the organ of the American Woman Suffrage Association, enrich our understanding of these two organizations. Contextualized readings of the fiction and poetry reveal that these pieces played an integral, polemical role within the journals as they articulated and advocated each organization's particular view of new womanhood and the changes needed to advance women. These literary works also elucidate how the two group's disparate views on divorce and the reforms most needed to improve women's position within marriage were crucial in defeating a call for union in 1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and the Mukden Incident (1931), Japan’s mounting colonial presence manifested itself in the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company as well as in the Japanese forces’ skirmishes for control of the region. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900-1990) would draw on his memories of Manchuria, where he lived until attending college in Kyoto, to situate hyperobjects and colonial minutiae in counter-hegemonic anticolonial and antiwar prose poems. His subtractive poetic configurations - not Surrealist but certainly building on Dada precedents - isolate incongruous elements (evental traces) in Alain Badiou’s sense of being faithful to a critique of the ethics of a colonial apparatus. Having grown up within the colonial enterprise himself, and subject to high-minded Japanese media representations and instilled imperial affects, Kitagawa positions himself against the machinic drive for colonial profits and the abuse of labour and prostitutes. This article thus situates aesthetic strategies for displacing imperial affect as projected onto spaces of Japanese expansion so as to document radically anticolonial subject possibilities among Japanese nationals themselves. As postcolonial artefacts, these prose poems suggest the contradictions of European modernity writ in the Japanese rhetoric of cosmopolitan East Asian development and liberation as cultural production that aestheticises colonial extraction of labour and raw materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the inter-relationship of journalism and poetry in the nineteenth century, when poems on topical issues regularly appeared in newspapers alongside prose reports of the same events. Poems and news reports addressing the Cotton Famine of the 1860s are examined through the dual lenses of literary analysis and field theory, to query how journalism—and the idea of journalism—might be expanded, challenged, or developed by exchanges with poetry, or, in the Bourdieusian sense, how poems might modify the journalistic field. The article argues that nineteenth-century newspaper poems built on and extended the journalism-as-educative paradigm, seeking to move readers from reflection to action, and contributing significantly to the “crusadism” of the late nineteenth-century press. Nineteenth-century newspaper poetry worked with, but distinctly from, journalism to act on and mobilise the reader, and it also critically reflected on the journalism on which it drew and within which it was embedded. The ways nineteenth-century poetry worked to change the way the function of journalism was conceptualised suggest provocative implications for the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay analyses how Shakespeare's sonnets theorise readerly agency. It begins with a brief analysis of English sonnet culture's development from its Continental roots, showing how English sonnets were initially perceived as documents of socially elite circles. By the 1590s, however, as English sonnets became widely popular, they exhibited a complex tension between elite social status and what many believed to be vulgar, empty popularity. By the time Shakespeare wrote his, much of the initial burst of popularity had waned. Belated as they are, Shakespeare's sonnets comment productively on the importance of popularity and the role of ‘ordinary’ readers in constructing cultural value. Many scholars have argued that an inability to control readership—and keep poetry out of the hands of low-status readers—was a source of anxiety to writers in this period. However, this essay claims that Shakespeare's sonnets regularly suggest that the very lack of control over readership is what gives sonnets their cultural value. Although sonnets may have originated in socially elite spaces, Shakespeare suggests that their cultural power comes not from those elite communities, but from widespread circulation to common readers, whose varied readings shape the poems and their afterlives. Shakespeare's sonnets thus claim a cultural status for common readers that can be distinguished from the social status of elite communities in which sonnets were often understood to circulate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the comparison between formal and sociological criticism in South African poetry. It states that there is a lack of importance shown to poetry, which is performed and occasionally paraded at book fairs and literary festivals. The article presents comments from some known South African poets, including Rob Berold, Pumla Gqola and Mzi Mahola.

This article explores the overall meaning of Sappho's "Brothers' Poem" by elucidating its web of interwoven verbal repetitions. "The gods", Sappho seems to say, "reward those who have moderate wishes, think in longer time frames by trying to exploit all their resources and understand the law of natural alternation, regulated by Zeus, by bringing about an even more spectacular reversal of fortune". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a brief commentary on some of the themes of the previous essays in this journal by way of a classic Renaissance Italian poem about masculinity and its various ‘mutations’, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although the figure of the 'diva' is usually regarded as a nineteenth-century construct, Isabella Andreini (1562-1604), the revered actress, poet, and woman of letters who performed and wrote more than two centuries earlier, may claim the title of the first diva of the Italian stage and page. In this article I argue that a strong and, to date, unexplored, connection exists between Andreini's lyric poetry and her stage work. The 'mad-hotness' for which Andreini became well known in her performances (especially her celebrated Pazzia di Isabella) permeates her madrigals as well. The lover in her madrigals, who may be a man, a woman or ambiguously gendered, feels hatred and madness, may have erotic fantasies, and is constantly burning with desire. Andreini's poetic madrigals move beyond standard Petrarchan topoi such that the ethereal 'Laura' comes down to earth and corporal, sensual and erotic aspects of love and death are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Milton famously rejected rhyme in Paradise Lost, the Genesis poem by his contemporary Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, is in rhymed couplets. This article asks how Hutchinson used the couplet, how her couplets were read by the seventeenth-century readers who encountered her work, and whether the manuscript of her poem can be treated as evidence of how poetic regularity and irregularity were coded with political and gendered meanings in the seventeenth century, and how differently they are so today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samih al-Qasim was one of Palestine's best-loved and most prolific poets. His work exemplifies the poetry of resistance that for decades emanated from inside the territories occupied by Israel in 1948. Samih and I were born in the same village and we grew up together in families that had been close friends over several generations. This tribute is a personal reflection on the life and work of a man who was equal parts poetry and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to reflect the narrative of discrimination in the writing of Israeli Palestinian women poets through the motif of Silence. This narrative emerges from the analysis and categorization of this motif in some 200 poems, written in Arabic and translated into Hebrew, thus revealing the poets' attitudes to social and political issues. This article shows that the poets' identity is perceived as the marginalized ‘other’ in Israeli society, not only in terms of nationality and ideology but also in terms of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In her poems, Indian-born, American-educated and German-based poet Sujata Bhatt examines the relationships between literature, diaspora and memory. Specifically, she employs a variety of personae (lyrical voices) that bridge continents, languages and identities. In her most recent poetry collection,Pure Lizard[Bhatt, S. 2008.Pure Lizard. Manchester: Carcantet], Bhatt uses intertextual and intermedial poetic strategies to explore and convey the heterogeneity of the Indian diasporic experience. Echoing Stuart Hall's notion of diaspora, I argue that Bhatt's recent poetry collection explores a poetics of diasporic transformation by renegotiating and appropriating W.E.B. Du Bois's term, ‘double consciousness’, as she draws on the idea of the individual who is characterized by several, albeit warring, identities. In this light, I will analyse the ways in which Bhatt's writings as well as her larger poetic project both overcome and re-enact the unsettling predicament of her own as well as her personae's displaced cultural identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An argument is presented that Delmore Schwartz's celebrations of his European literary heritage accentuate the ways in which he might be regarded as a specifically American poet: he cannot help but Americanize his European sources. These engagements also, however, unsettle the notion of a purely American poetry since they suggest that American writing can only be understood in relation to English and European traditions. Taking his concept of 'international consciousness' as its premise, the study examines how Schwartz's allusions simultaneously serve to align his poetry with European works and to distance it from them. It also assesses Schwartz's admiration for the international perspectives of modernist mentors (particularly T. S. Eliot), observing how this aspect of their work influences his own. A reading of 'The Ballad of the Children of the Czar', a poem in which Schwartz characteristically sets individual experience against a worldwide stage, is also given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a brief history of a widely published canon debate in nineteenth century Orissa, this article describes how anxieties about the quality of ‘traditional’ Oriya literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Oriya public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of a new, modernized Oriya-language canon. A public controversy about the status of Oriya literature was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular pre-colonial Oriya poet. The critic argued that Bhanja’s writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. By unpacking the terms of this criticism and Oriya responses to it, I reveal how at the heart of these discussions were concerns about community building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Oriya language. Ultimately, this article offers a longer, regional history to the emerging concern of post-colonial scholarship with relationships between publication histories, readerships, and broader ideas of community – local, Indian, and global. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Avraham Chalfi's poetry contains some of the main themes of the mystical experience, namely, the attempt “to see God in his Beauty” and the quest to gain an intimate communion with the Divine.1 Uncovering the intertextual references and the repertoire of his allusions positions this poetry within the ever-evolving mystical-religious discussion. Chalfi's theology transforms the Jewish mystical tradition into a critical, at times even fierce, encounter with God and turns fundamental elements, such as ascent to the Pardes and the respective roles of the mystic and God, on their heads. Exploring Chalfi's mystical poems expands our awareness of the theological elements embedded in a variety of modern secular Hebrew poems and their contribution to the evolution and diversification of the canon of Jewish thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to demonstrate a nuanced and complex version of Jin Shengtan's (1608-61) interpretation of Du Fu's (712-70) poetry and examine how he maneuvers the self into a dialogue with the hermeneutic past. As a well-known critic in the seventeenth-century China, Jin Shengtan distinguishes himself through his innovative reading strategies (especially application of the fenjie approach) as well as strong attack on a common claim in previous hermeneutics about inexplicable nature of Du Fu's poems. At the same time, however, the way Jin manifests such creativity often involves a seemingly self-effacing submission to certain canonical rules of reading Du Fu shaped by the earlier hermeneutics. To defend familiar canonical reading rules, Jin risks the very painful consequence of letting his self be engulfed in the past; but at the same time the dissociation of the self through his readiness toward 'obedience' to the past, paradoxically, powerfully reinforces the sense of self since in many cases he forces himself to be more creative in order to conform to these rules. Through successes and failures in his confrontation with the past, Jin celebrates a paradoxical self who is connecting and breaking with the past at the same time. Such hermeneutic phenomenon draws our attention to the function of hermeneutic continuity and helps us appreciate the dynamics under the surface of the historically constructed 'ahistoricity' of Du Fu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of what Mayakovsky, Auden, Jarrell and other modern poets have written about their editing practices reveals a tension between the modernist proclamation that 'there are no rules' (Mayakovsky) and the fact that poets nonetheless need to find some sort of critical standard by which to edit their own work. In the case of an extreme egomaniac like Mayakovsky, one might be tempted to equate that critical standard with the massive law of his own ego - were it not that some part of him clearly finds its productions at times wanting. But if so, where does that critical voice come from? Upon what does it base its judgements? The psychoanalytic theory of the super-ego is key to my argument, which poses a challenge not merely to New Criticism's ideas about objective judgement, but also to the Freudian, and now common-sense, equation between the artist's work and the freedom of unconscious utterance. It suggests that such freedom comes by way of the critical voice in one's own head. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers poetry criticism of the poem "Autispeak" by Jim Sinclair. It presents interpretation of every line in the poem. It notes that enthusiasm affects our expressions. It says that autistic shapes are interpreted as the shape of enthusiasm. It states that language is the essence of being human.

This article deals with two young female poets from Ukraine: Bohdana Matijas from Kiev writes in Ukranian, while Elena Zaslavskaja from the eastern Ukranian city of Luhansk writes her poems in Russian. Both have won several awards and presented some of their poems in Berlin in 2009. After a short context has been outlined, some poems by both Matijas and Zaslavskaja will be analysed. The main thesis in this text is that behind obvious differences in style both poets encode male figures as ambivalent Others in their work. Analysis of the communication structure between the various lyrical speakers and their adressees reveals specific strategies for dealing with female roles in Post-Soviet Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cromwellian invasion of Ireland has not been famed for the value of its poetry, yet some of the soldiers, civil servants and divines that have been identified with and resisted the Cromwellian invasion and administration of Ireland did produce a discernable body of religiously orientated verse. This article outlines a context for this body of writing within the changing mentalities of Cromwellian Ireland, and offers a new model for the interpretation of Faithful Teate's Ter Tria (1658), alongside a reading of other principal texts, which emerged out of even as they shaped the experiences of invasion and administration in Cromwellian Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the philosophical context of poems by Katherine Philips (1632-1664). Her poems on friendship and divinity are infused with the concepts and language of the idealist tradition. It reveals the philosophical sources for her theories of the self and the soul, and draws comparisons between Philips's speculative poetry and the writings of her contemporary Anne Conway. Philips's poems explore Platonic notions of anamnesis, the utility of sight as a means of transcending the prison of the body, the nature of the soul, and the role of the divinity in maintaining the harmony of the universe. While her tributes to her friends' 'angelic natures' may reflect précieuse fashion, her descriptions of the soul draw extensively on Plato's Phaedrus, Neoplatonism and Cambridge Platonism. Like Conway, Philips offers alternatives to physical sequestration or faction through the spiritual affinities of all creatures. I argue that the 'Platonic' aspect of her poetry is not simply an outcome of repressed erotic desire, but a sophisticated engagement with the idealist tradition. This reading suggests that even in seemingly decorous or intellectually modest poetry, women writers were able to engage with some of the most significant debates of their time, including the response of a resurgent Platonic idealism to Cartesianism, materialism and mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corpus of haikai (haiku) poetic material produced from the early until the latter part of the nineteenth century in Japan has been largely dismissed as unliterary since Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). In particular scholars have avoided the study of the poetic practice known as tsukinami haikai, a form of poetic competition. By examining a specific tsukinami haikai text as well as looking at the process of tsukinami haikai competitions, I argue that they had an important pedagogical and cultural value. The poets who composed poems for tsukinami haikai competitions gained the education necessary to read Masaoka Shiki's arguments in favor of a 'literary poetry'. In addition the vocabulary that they learned from tsukinami haikai was 'universal' and thus transcended local identities. Tsukinami haikai is important for understanding the cultural history of nineteenth century Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apart from the surprising fact of being in lack of lexicographical description, line-break, a term widely used in poetic criticism, will be seen to be highly polysemous. What the term refers to, simply, is far from always clear; not only does it seem capable of changing with contexts referred to, it tends to do so in the extremely volatile fashion of attracting contrary or even contradictory referential meanings. This is the case not only in the terminological community of users as a whole but also, more notably, in individual critical texts. Rather than interpreting such terminological polysemy as a sign of critical deficiency in the observing subjects, a lacking in the very ability to make discrete observations, it is the assumption of this study that the polysemy in question may be regarded as a sign of phenomenal ambiguity in the very object observed. Upon pragmatic inspection, the often manifested confusion of terms designating concepts in the tradition of critical discourse will be seen as the expression of a fundamentally precise observation of an inherent complexity on the part of the object of criticism, the poetic phenomenon of 'line-break.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors aim to assist teachers to gain a deeper understanding of the inner lives of students especially those with special educational needs. This aim is pursued in two ways. The first is an exploration of the experience of writing poetry using the students' sentiments, actual words and phrases - a poetic engagement. The second is to argue for the transformative potential of this poetic engagement for the practitioner seeking to 'get alongside' the student. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the visual readings and interpretations in the Celadon and Amelia episode of the poem "The Seasons," by James Thompson. It stresses the ways in which the representation of the scenes changes throughout a period of nearly 80 years. The author states that the visual interpretations of the Celadon and Amelia episode proves that the narrative characterize in the painting of Richard Wilson or in the engraving of William Wollet was redeveloped and revised from 1770s.

The article examines poetry written by students and graduates of the British private schools known as endowed public schools during the late 19th and early 20th centuries prior to World War I. The poetry's themes are considered in terms of the educational philosophy of those schools, which stressed the development of moral and ethical values, with sports playing a vital role in process, over intellectual achievement and scholarship. Poetry which made the sport of cricket and its rules a metaphor for British civilization is considered. The poetry of a headmaster of a public school written to commemorate graduates who were killed during World War I is said to reflect mourning for the values of public schools, with their implicit endorsement of self-sacrifice, as much as grieving for the dead students.

This article explores images in terms of intertextuality between language, culture, proverb and poetry, which is a natural phenomenon. This may be because the Setswana language primarily functions in the realm of orality and because the language preserves extensive use of proverbs, even in everyday usage. Language carries culture (Malefo 2007; Ngugi 1986, 16) and as such there is continuity between language, proverb, oral poetry and music in Setswana. Cultural images pervade Batswana life and imagination, touching the sensations, emotions and the imagination, and hence run as a thread that connects language, proverb, oral and written poetry, history and norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisiting the poetry, fiction, and social criticism of the author, dramatist, activist and therapist Paul Goodman, this essay suggests that his work-and in particular the concept of the “unfinished situation”-has something to contribute to queer theoretical interests in extended adolescence, amateurish performances, and punk feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the dimensions of the 'environmental crisis' are clearly global, ecocriticism grows out of local systems with varying cultural valencies, meaning that an American ecocriticism will differ significantly in its material implications from, say, a Korean or a Canadian ecocriticism. The flow of environmental literature has generally been one-way, from America out, albeit with hybridized and Americanized versions of Taoist and Buddhist ecological precepts here and there, the odd nod to ecocritical communities outside the US, and numerous titles about 'expanding the boundaries', 'going further afield', and so on. Yet, there remains a clear and disproportionate imbalance weighing heavily toward celebrating American landscapes, American poetry, and American ecocriticism. This personal and polemic essay discusses colonialist implications of the fact that American geographies tend to become matters of global interest. One of the key issues that this article argues is that a continuing alliance between postcolonial and ecocritical studies can help us to look profitably at what are very important interconnections — ones with environmental effects and postcolonial implications — between discourses of nation, on the one hand, and national ecopoetics on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various published reports within the issue, including one by Simon Estok that explores the possibilities for combining ecocriticism with postcolonial studies, one by Christophe den Tandt that examines 19th century urban vitalism and one by Won-Chung Kim that discusses eco-Daoism.

Under the guise of an Arthurian metaphor, this article explores the depiction of violence and totalitarian rule, and the quest for sense and dignity in Herbert's poetry. Doing justice to his stylistic devices and his creative design, I attempt to understand the ways of epic writing. The echo of Herbert's work in Poland and other Central and East European countries demonstrates the power of words for people afflicted by a painful history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination into the literary-historical consequences of the discovery of the Chu bamboo slip manuscript of "Confucius's Comments on the Poetry," from the Warring States period. The authorship and transmission history of the manuscript is theorized, attributing the work to Zixia, and the work's implications on the criticism of Chinese literature are discussed.

The article presents an examination into the Confucian philosophy of Chinese poetry as expressed within the tale of "the Cry of the Osprey." The traditional hermeneutics of Chinese poetry criticism are compared with the analysis of the excavated bamboo manuscript of "Confucius's Comments on the Poetry," from the Warring States era, outlining various methodological challenges in the scholastic and archaeological interpretation of the work.