"And Never Know the Joy" : Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry promises the reader much to enjoy and to reflect on: riddles and sex games; the grammar of relationships; the cunning psychology of bodily fantasies; sexuality as the ambiguous performance of words; the allure of mu…
Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. By attending to the ways in which bi…
The Oxford Handbook of The Elegy examines the mourning and memorialization that lies at the very centre of literary culture. For all of its pervasiveness, however, the "elegy" remains remarkably ill-defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessim…
Unstated meaning has always been a feature of poetry, but it is in our own century that it has established itself not only as the prevailing mode of expression but also as the central concern of analytic criticism. Although a variety of terms, such as Ambiguity, Irony and Gestur…
Examining a wide range of ekphrastic poems, Kennedy argues that contemporary British poets writing out of both mainstream and avant-garde traditions challenge established critical models of ekphrasis with work that is more complex than representational or counter-representationa…
