April 3, 2013

"Stewart ranges over thousands of years of poetic production in multiple languages in order to consider the importance of poetry as a central act of human making. She studies the way in which poems mediate between individual and social existence, and argues for the importance of how poetry encodes forms of sensory experience. This book contains thrilling meditations on the creation and reception of poetry, reconsiderations of many of the key philosophical statements on poetry from Plato to Hegel and beyond, and rich readings of poets from Ancient Greece through the twentieth centu

"This short book contains the texts of lectures that Fillmore delivered in Santa Cruz in 1971, which have become milestones in linguistics. Fillmore gives a comprehensive view of deictic forms—those words whose meaning depends on context, such as there, now, or you—and his book pulls off the difficult trick of being both path-making for scholars in the field and accessible to non-specialists. Fillmore is interested primarily in deixis as a linguistic phenomenon, but it also plays a crucial, if knotty, role in literary forms of all sor

"This volume includes essays by one of Britain’s important contemporary poets. Wilkinson, now Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago, has long been a central figure in experimental poetry circles in Britain. The Lyric Touch contains essays on a number of important and often overlooked poets, and includes stunning pieces on the formidable poetry of J.H. Prynne."

"This slim volume collects a handful of pieces of literary scholarship by one of the most significant figures in critical theory and contemporary European Philosophy. Dante is the book’s key presider as Agamben thinks through questions about the relationship between literature, language, theology, and philosophy, and approaches from a number of angles the larger question of poetry’s ends."

"This is a wide-ranging survey of how various forms of transnationalism (migration, travel, diaspora, colonialism, decolonization, globalization) register within modern and contemporary poetry. Ramazani looks at major modernist poets like Yeats, Eliot, and Hughes as well as more recent writers such as Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, Lorna Goodison, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. He maps the complex paths of literary influence and formal energy that have shaped the development of a global Anglophone poetry."

"This is a wonderful history of the complicated question of language in Ireland. Crowley begins with Henry VIII’s 1537 Act for English Order, Habit, and Language and follows the story for nearly 500 years. He examines the relationship between English and Irish as an aspect of the larger colonial situation, and situates the importance of debates over and policies pertaining to language within the context of Irish nationalism and identity."

"Ireland’s neutrality during World War II was one of the most monumental political decisions made in the early decades of Ireland’s history as an independent state. And it still has the power to provoke significant arguments. Wills reads a wide range of literary and cultural materials in order to provide a detailed account of what life was like in Ireland during what was known as 'The Emergency.' Earlier in her career, Wills did pioneering work on contemporary Irish poetry, including scholarship on a number of the poets that feature prominently in Continuity and Change in

"Nagy is an English professor at UCLA and one of the foremost Celticists in the world. This volume, a revised version of which is being released this year by the Dublin-based Four Courts Press, is a comprehensive account of the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology and folklore. The book’s central figure is the Irish hero Finn mac Cumaill (Finn MacCool) and his band of followers, the Fianna. Nagy examines the central medieval manuscripts that tell the stories of Finn’s exploits and considers Finn’s role within Irish literature and culture."

"This is a fascinating account of the massive cultural, political, and economic changes that have taken place in Ireland in the past 40 years, and something of a coda to Foster’s monumental volume, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972. Foster is the most influential Irish historian around and his two-volume biography of W.B. Yeats has reinvigorated scholarship on the great modernist poet.