By Kellie Robertson (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) What does it mean to speak for nature? Contemporary environmental critics warn that giving a voice to nonhuman nature reduces it to a mere echo of our own needs and desires; they caution that it is a perverse form of anthropocentrism. And yet nature's voice proved a powerful and … Continued
By Andrew P. Debicki (NHC Fellow, 1979–80; 1992–93) A leading critic of contemporary Spanish poetry examines here the work of ten important poets who came to maturity in the immediate post-Civil War period and whose major works appeared between 1956 and 1971: Francisco Brines; Eladio Cabañero; Angel Crespo; Gloria Fuertes; Jaime Gil de Biedma; Angel … Continued
By William C. Dowling (NHC Fellow, 1979–80) The eighteenth-century verse epistle, argues William Dowling, was an attempt to solve in literary terms the dilemma of solipsism as raised by Locke and Hume. The focus of The Epistolary Moment is on internal audience in poetry — the audience “inside” the poem, created by its discourse and belonging to … Continued
By Christopher Baswell (NHC Fellow, 1993–94) What happens when a prestigious text of one period is read and reused in a different, much later world? What can we learn from the annotations accumulated by a single manuscript as it moved among new institutions and readerships? In this study Christopher Baswell takes as his model Virgil's … Continued
By John A. Hodgson (NHC Fellow, 1981–82) The English Romantic writers and poets valued a genuine coherence of image and idea. Striving for organic form, they were faced with the challenge of using figuration – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche – to represent the essentially unrepresentable: God, ultimate power, the human mind and psyche, what Shelley called … Continued
By Susan Youens (NHC Fellow, 2003–04) More than any other poet, Heinrich Heine has provided composers for almost two hundred years with texts for music: more than eight thousand compositions to date. Nineteenth-century composers were drawn in particular to a limited selection of Heine's early lyrical works from the Buch der Lieder and the Neue … Continued
Edited by Gavin Kelly (NHC Fellow, 2010–11) and Johannes A. van Waarden Sidonius Apollinaris is a central figure in the literature and history of fifth-century Gaul. But he still awaits sustained debate in modern scholarship. This integrated and international collection of essays explores the potential for a complete commentary on his works, starting with a … Continued
By Howard Erskine-Hill (NHC Fellow, 1988–89) This is a major study of the relation between poetry and politics from the 1688 Revolution to the early years of the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on the works of Dryden, Pope, Johnson, and Wordsworth. Building on his argument in Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (also … Continued
By Derek Attridge (NHC Fellow 2014–15; 2016–17) Was the experience of poetry–or a cultural practice we now call poetry–continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson's Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616? How did the pleasure afforded by the crafting of language into memorable … Continued
By ZhuangziTranslated by Victor H. Mair (NHC Fellow, 1991–92) In this vivid, contemporary translation, Victor Mair captures the quintessential life and spirit of Chuang Tzu while remaining faithful to the original text.