First published in 1933, this study, which underwent revision in the 1960s, is a comprehensive survey of the verse of English nineteenth-century poets whose work appeared after 1860. A special feature is the full and critical treatment of minor writers. In no other book is their work so carefully evaluated. There is a full account of the minor Pre-Raphaelites, of James Thomson, the poet of The City of Dreadful Night, of Henley, Stevenson and George MacDonald. John Davidson is the subject of a long and revealing study. Evans suggests that poetry from the late nineteenth century is neglected in scholarly study, and that Victorian Romanticism deserves more attention than it has recently received.

This anthology surveys Britain's golden years of poetry--the "long" nineteenth century. College students are introduced to the most frequently studied poems of eighteen poets, each afforded roughly equal space. Neither too condensed nor too comprehensive, this 436-page collection is designed specifically for six to eight weeks of poetry study in a British literature course.

Tracing the segmentation of the literary marketplace in 19th century America, this book analyses the implications of the subdivided literary field for readers, writers, and literature itself.

This ambitious undertaking is designed to acquaint students, teachers, and researchers with reference sources in any branch of English studies, which Marcuse defines as "all those subjects and lines of critical and scholarly inquiry presently pursued by members of university departments of English language and literature.'' Within each of 24 major sections, Marcuse lists and annotates bibliographies, guides, reviews of research, encyclopedias, dictionaries, journals, and reference histories. The annotations and various indexes are models of clarity and usefulness, and cross references are liberally supplied where appropriate. Although cost-conscious librarians will probably consider the several other excellent literary bibliographies in print, such as James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide (Modern Language Assn. of America, 1989), larger academic libraries will want Marcuse's volume.-- Jack Bales, Mary Washington Coll. Lib., Fredericksburg, Va. -Library Journal.

In arguing for the crucial importance of song for poets in the long nineteenth century, Elizabeth Helsinger focuses on both the effects of song on lyric forms and the mythopoetics through which poets explored the affinities of poetry with song. Looking in particular at individual poets and poems, Helsinger puts extensive close readings into productive conversation with nineteenth-century German philosophic and British scientific aesthetics. While she considers poets long described as "musical"--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Brontë, and Algernon Charles Swinburne--Helsinger also examines the more surprising importance of song for those poets who rethought poetry through the medium of visual art: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Christina Rossetti. In imitating song's forms and sound textures through lyric's rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, these poets were pursuing song's "thought" in a double sense. They not only asked readers to think of particular kinds of song as musical sound in social performance (ballads, national airs, political songs, plainchant) but also invited readers to think like song: to listen to the sounds of a poem as it moves minds in a different way from philosophy or science. By attending to the formal practices of these poets, the music to which the poets were listening, and the stories and myths out of which each forged a poetics that aspired to the condition of music, Helsinger suggests new ways to think about the nature and form of the lyric in the nineteenth century.

In The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry, Scott Mehl analyzes the complex response of Meiji-era Japanese poets and readers to the challenge introduced by European verse and the resulting crisis in Japanese poetry. Amidst fierce competition for literary prestige on the national and international stage, poets and critics at the time recognized that the character of Japanese poetic culture was undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the stakes were high: the future of modern Japanese verse. Mehl documents the creation of new Japanese poetic forms, tracing the first invention of Japanese free verse and its subsequent disappearance. He examines the impact of the acclaimed and reviled shintaishi, a new poetic form invented for translating European-language verse and eventually supplanted by the reintroduction of free verse as a Western import. The Ends of Meter in Modern Japanese Poetry draws on materials written in German, Spanish, English, and French, recreating the global poetry culture within which the most ambitious Meiji-era Japanese poets vied for position.

This study explores how poets who espoused republican political ideals sought to embody and advance those principles in their verse. By examining a range of canonical and non-canonical authors-including Blake, Shelley, Cooper, Linton, Landor, Meredith, Thomson and Swinburne, Kuduk Weiner connects the formal strategies of republican poems to the political theory and expressive cultures of republican radicalism. Her new study traces a strain of powerful, complex political poetry that casts new light on the political and literary history of nineteenth-century England.