Dick Davis's verse translations of short poems by numerous Persian poets, including Rumi and Hafez.

The English language in the Renaissance was in many ways a collection of competing Englishes. Paula Blank investigates the representation of alternative vernaculars - the dialects of early modern English - in both linguistic and literary works of the period. Blank argues that Renaissance authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare and Jonson helped to construct the idea of a national language, variously known as 'true' English or 'pure' English or the 'King's English', by distinguishing its dialects - and sometimes by creating those dialects themselves. Broken English reveals how the Renaissance 'invention' of dialect forged modern alliances of language and cultural authority. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Renaissance studies and Renaissance English literature. It will also make fascinating reading for anyone with an interest in the history of English language.

In the eighteenth century, the British Empire pursued its commercial ambitions across the globe, greatly expanding its colonial presence and, with it, the reach of the English language. During this era, a standard form of English was taught in the British provinces just as it was increasingly exported from the British Isles to colonial outposts in North America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Oceania, and West Africa. Under these conditions, a monolingual politics of Standard English came to obscure other forms of multilingual and dialect writing, forms of writing that were made to appear as inferior, provincial, or foreign oddities. Daniel DeWispelare's Multilingual Subjects at once documents how different varieties of English became sidelined as "dialects" and asserts the importance of both multilingualism and dialect writing to eighteenth-century anglophone culture. By looking at the lives of a variety of multilingual and nonstandard speakers and writers who have rarely been discussed together—individuals ranging from slaves and indentured servants to translators, rural dialect speakers, and others—DeWispelare suggests that these language practices were tremendously valuable to the development of anglophone literary aesthetics even as Standard English became dominant throughout the ever-expanding English-speaking world. Offering a prehistory of globalization, especially in relation to language practices and politics, Multilingual Subjects foregrounds the linguistic multiplicities of the past and examines the way these have been circumscribed through standardized forms of literacy. In the process, DeWispelare seeks to make sense of a present in which linguistic normativity plays an important role in determining both what forms of writing are aesthetically valued and what types of speakers and writers are viewed as full-fledged bearers of political rights.