A Study Guide for Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Anne Finch's "A Nocturnal Reverie," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Why women’s brains work differently at night—and how we can harness that altered state for greater creativity, insight, and courage. In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs-Streets experienced a series of losses: her stepfather, then father, and finally her family’s puppy. Unmoored by grief, she couldn’t sleep. But she discovered something surprising: during her wakeful nights, the darkness became a place of sanctuary, filled with creativity, reflection, and wonder. And once she stopped fighting her insomnia, Annabel tapped into something mysterious and beguiling: her Night Self. In the tradition of books like Breath and Wintering, Sleepless combines science, historical research, and personal experience to explore the complicated relationship women have with darkness. Her night journeys range from quiet country fields to brightly lit city streets to the darkest reaches of the Arctic Circle. And from women of the past—Lee Krasner, Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois, and dozens more—who opened their minds on sleepless nights, to contemporary women who found a form of healing in darkness. From moth hunters to astronomers, from artists to photographers, Annabel found she wasn’t alone. Cut loose from the anxiety of insomnia, numerous women discovered strength, imagination, and inner knowledge at night. Many also learned to—finally—sleep.

Derived from the parent Guide to Literature in English, this volume offers in concise form over 4,000 entries on literature in English from cultures throughout the world. Writers and major works from the UK and the USA are represented, as are those from Canada, the Caribbean, Australia, India, and Africa. The coverage is broad - from the classics of English literature to the best of modern writing. Additionally, the Guide has a wealth of entries on literary movements, groups or schools in literature and criticism, literary magazines, genres and sub-genres, critical concepts, and rhetorical terms.

V.1. pt. 1. Medieval literature : Chaucer and the alliterative tradition. pt. 2. Medieval literature : the European inheritance -- v.2. The age of Shakespeare - - v.3. From Donne to Marvell -- v.4. From Dryden to Johnson -- v.5. From Blake to Byron -- v.6. From Dickens to Hardy -- v.7. From James to Elliot -- v.8. The present -- v.9. American literature.

Scholar Susan Godwin is hooked when she comes across the captivating story of Mary of Modena—a seventeenth-century Italian princess who was only fourteen when coerced into marriage with the future king of England, James II, yet went on to cultivate a court full of women writers in an age when female authorship was rare. How did Mary achieve such a feat? Rain Dodging is Susan’s creative nonfiction account of the years-long search upon which this question—and her own unquenchable curiosity—launched her. Godwin travels through both space and time, solo adventuring through Britain in pursuit of truth and, in a spicy parallel arc, chronicling her own cluttered but resilient feminist path. From schizophrenic lovers to out-there musicians to one unhinged mother, Susan tells the story of her personal enlightenment even as she visits the palaces and manor houses in England and Scotland Mary once inhabited and pores over materials in Oxford’s stunning 400-year-old Bodleian Library, finding moments of transcendence and unexpected delight along the way. Join Susan in this irreverent and illuminating journey—a fascinating account of the late Stuart monarchy, the progression of feminist history, and the unexpected connection between the two.

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).

In Poetic Sisters, Deborah Kennedy explores the personal and literary connections among five early eighteenth-century women poets: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford; Sarah Dixon; and Mary Jones. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, this book brings the eighteenth century to life, presenting a diverse range of material from serious religious poems to amusing verses on domestic life. The work of Anne Finch, author of "A Nocturnal Reverie," provides the cornerstone for this well informed study. But it was Elizabeth Rowe who achieved international fame for her popular religious writings. Both women influenced the Countess of Hertford, who wrote about the beauty of nature, centuries before modern Earth Day celebrations. Sarah Dixon, a middle-class writer from Kent, had a strong moral outlook and stood up for those whose voices needed to be heard, including her own. Finally, Mary Jones, who lived in Oxford, was praised for both her genius and her sense of humor. Poetic Sisters presents a fascinating female literary network, revealing the bonds of a shared vocation that unites these writers. It also traces their literary afterlife from the eighteenth century to the present day, with references to contemporary culture, demonstrating how their work resonates with new generations of readers.

In Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, Suvir Kaul argues that the aggressive nationalism of James Thomson's ode "Rule, Britannia " (1740) is the condition to which much English poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries aspires. Poets as varied as Marvell, Waller and Dryden, Defoe, Addison, John Dyer and Edward Young, or Goldsmith, Cowper, Hannah More and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, all wrote poems deeply engaged with the British-nation-in-the-making. These poets, and many others like them, recognized that the nation and its values and institutions were being defined by the expansion of overseas trade, naval and military control, plantations and colonies. Their poems both embodied, and were concerned about, the culture and ideology of "Great Britain" (itself an idea of the nation that developed alongside the formation of a British Empire). Poems in this period thus flaunt various images of poetic inspiration that show poetry and culture following triumphantly where mercantile and military ships sail. Or sometimes, more self-aggrandizingly for the poet, they enact the process by which the Muses use their powers to inspire and show the way. Even at their most hesitant, these poems were written as interventions into public discussion; their creativity is tied up with that desire to convince and persuade. Finally, as Kaul writes, it is their encyclopedic desire to incorporate new experiences, visions, and values that makes these poems such fine guides to the world of poetry in the long years in which "Great Britain" was consolidated as an empire, at home and abroad.