In Making the Miscellany Megan Heffernan examines the poetic design of early modern printed books and explores how volumes of compiled poems, which have always existed in practice, responded to media change in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Heffernan's focus is not only the material organization of printed poetry, but also how those conventions and innovations of arrangement contributed to vernacular poetic craft, the consolidation of ideals of individual authorship, and centuries of literary history. The arrangement of printed compilations contains a largely unstudied and undertheorized archive of poetic form, Heffernan argues. In an evolving system of textual transmission, compilers were experimenting with how to contain individual poems within larger volumes. By paying attention to how they navigated and shaped the exchanges between poems and their organization, she reveals how we can witness the basic power of imaginative writing over the material text. Making the Miscellany is also a study of how this history of textual design has been differently told by the distinct disciplines of bibliography or book history and literary studies, each of which has handled—and obscured—the formal qualities of early modern poetry compilations and the practices that produced them. Revisiting these editorial and critical approaches, this book recovers a moment when compilers, poets, and readers were alert to a poetics of organization that exceeded the limits of the individual poem.

Packed with fascinating facts, Literary Miscellany is sure to please both professor and pleasure reader alike. Wouldn’t it be great to be a fly on the wall as the great writers took pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard)? While reading this work, you’ll be just that. Here are behind-the-book stories and facts about authors, publishing and everything literary that will entertain both casual and serious readers. Among the questions asked and answered: • When Did Literature Finally Get Sexy? • Is Coffee or Opium Better for Literary Creativity? • Why Are the Best Autobiographies so Embarrassing? • Why Do Some Detectives Use Their Minds and Others Their Fists? Who knew that bestseller lists and children’s books could be the source of intense controversy? Or that even the biggest writers had to scrape by, with odd jobs and inventions like the Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrapbook? In Literary Miscellany, examine the trend of “fake memoirs,” with a list of who lied about what, and a rogues’ gallery of hoaxers dating back centuries. From epic poetry and Homer to pulp fiction and Harry Potter, Literary Miscellany, now available for the first time in paperback, is a breezy tour through the literature of today and yesterday, packed with enough interesting facts to entertain both the erudite professor and pleasure reader.

This book is a critical study of the ancestors of contemporary poetry anthologies: the poetic miscellanies of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that miscellanies are a distinctive kind of literary collection and that their popularity in the period 1680–1800 had a far-reaching impact on authors, publishers, and readers of poetry. This study expands the definition of miscellanies to include single-author collections called miscellanies as well as the multiple-author collections that have traditionally been the focus of scholarly attention. It shows how multiple-author miscellanies fostered different kinds of literary community and explores the neglected role of single-author miscellanies in the self-fashioning of eighteenth-century writers. Later chapters examine miscellanies’ relationships with periodicals, their contribution to the formation of the literary canon, and their reception and transformation in the hands of readers. The book draws on newly available digital data as well as evidence from hundreds of printed miscellanies to shed new light on how poetry was written, published, and read in the long eighteenth century.

Taking up the invitation extended by tentative attempts over the past three decades to construct a functioning definition of the genre, Jonathan Bradbury traces the development of the vernacular miscellany in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish-America. In the first full-length study of this commercially successful and intellectually significant genre, Bradbury underlines the service performed by the miscellanists as disseminators of knowledge and information to a popular readership. His comprehensive analysis of the miscelánea corrects long-standing misconceptions, starting from its poorly-understood terminology, and erects divisions between it and other related genres. His work illuminates the relationship between the Golden Age Spanish miscellany and those of the classical world and humanist milieu, and illustrates how the vernacular tradition moved away from these forebears. Bradbury examines in particular the later inclusion of explicitly fictional components, such as poetic compositions and short prose fiction, alongside the vulgarisation of erudite or inaccessible prose material, which was the primary function of the earlier Spanish miscellanies. He tackles the flexibility of the miscelánea as a genre by assessing the conceptual, thematic and formal aspects of such works, and exploring the interaction of these features. As a result, a genre model emerges, through which Golden Age works with fragmentary and non-continuous contents can better be interpreted and classified.

Anne Finch (nee Kingsmill), Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), was one of the first female English poets to be published. She was well educated as her family believed in good education for girls as well as for boys. Today, some consider her to be Englandas best female poet prior to the nineteenth century. While Finch also authored fables and plays, today she is best known for her poetry: lyric poetry, odes, love poetry and prose poetry. Later literary critics recognized the diversity of her poetic output as well as its personal and intimate style. Her works include: Miscellany Poems: On Several Occasions (1713) and Aristomenes; or, The Royal Shepherd (1713).

Songs and Sonnets (1557), the first printed anthology of English poetry, was immensely influential in Tudor England, and inspired major Elizabethan writers including Shakespeare. Collected by pioneering publisher Richard Tottel, it brought poems of the aristocracy - verses of friendship, war, politics, death and above all of love - into wide common readership for the first time. The major poets of Henry VIII's court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were first printed in the volume. Wyatt's intimate poem about lost love which begins 'They flee from me, that sometime did me seke', and Surrey's passionate sonnet 'Complaint of a lover rebuked' are joined in the miscellany by a large collection of diverse, intriguingly anonymous poems both moral and erotic, intimate and universal.

Including works from Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Manx, this Celtic Miscellany offers a rich blend of poetry and prose from the eighth to the nineteenth century, and provides a unique insight into the minds and literature of the Celtic people. It is a literature dominated by a deep sense of wonder, wild inventiveness and a profound sense of the uncanny, in which the natural world and the power of the individual spirit are celebrated with astonishing imaginative force. Skifully arranged by theme, from the hero-tales of Cú Chulainn, Bardic poetry and elegies, to the sensitive and intimate writings of early Celtic Christianity, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into a deeply creative literary tradition.

Includes works in French language with parallel English text.

A Miscellany, confined to a private edition for decades, sheds further light on the prodigious vision and imagination of the most inventive poet of the twentieth century: E.E. Cummings. Formally fractured and yet gleefully alive and whole, E. E. Cummings’s groundbreaking modernist poetry expanded the boundaries of language. In A Miscellany, originally released in a limited run in 1958, Cummings lent his delightfully original voice to “a cluster of epigrams,” a poem, three speeches from an unfinished play, and forty-nine essays—most of them previously written for or published in magazines, anthologies, or art gallery catalogues. Seven years later, George J. Firmage—editor of much of Cummings’s work, including Complete Poems—broadened the scope of this delightfully eclectic collection, adding seven more poems and essays, and many of Cummings’s unpublished line drawings. Together, these pieces paint a distinctive portrait of Cummings’s eccentric, yet precise, genius. Like his poetry, Cummings’s prose is lively; often witty, biting, and offbeat, he is an intelligent observer and critic of the modern. His essays explore everything from Cubism to the circus, equally quick to analyze his poetic contemporaries and satirize New York society. As Cummings wrote in his original foreword, A Miscellany contains “a great deal of liveliness and nothing dead.” This remains true today, more than fifty years after its original publication.