Grauballe Man is one of Denmark's best-preserved bog bodies, originally discovered in 1952. He had been killed by having his throat slit before being laid in the bog. Although scientific tests were carried out in 1952, it was felt that technological advancements warranted further testing in 2001-2. This large and well-presented book, excellent value for money, is intended both to present the result of these tests and to deliver a comprehensive portrait of Grauballe Man. Chapters deal with the 1952 discovery and conservation, then detail the new scientific proceedures. Additional information is supplied on his intestines and gut contents, his teeth and jaw, his hair, and dating is attempted more precisely. The book concludes by placing the experiences of Grauballe man in the context of other European bog bodies and examines the religious significance of boglands and human sacrifice in the Iron Age.

Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, author of nine collections of poetry and three volumes of influential essays, is regarded by many as the greatest Irish poet since Yeats. Passage to the Center is the most comprehensive critical treatment to date on Heaney's poetry and the first to study Heaney's body of work up to Seeing Things and The Spirit Level. It is also the first to examine the poems from the perspective of religion, one of Heaney's guiding preoccupations. According to Tobin, the growth of Heaney's poetry may be charted through the recurrent figure of "the center," a key image in the relationship that evolved over time between the poet and his inherited place, an evolution that involved the continual re-evaluation and re-vision of imaginative boundaries. In a way that previous studies have not, Tobin's work examines Heaney's poetry in the context of modernist and postmodernist concerns about the desacralizing of civilization and provides a challenging engagement with the work of a living master.

One spring morning two men cutting peat in a Danish bog uncovered a well-preserved body of a man with a noose around his neck. Thinking they had stumbled upon a murder victim, they reported their discovery to the police, who were baffled until they consulted the famous archaeologist P.V. Glob. Glob identified the body as that of a two-thousand-year-old man, ritually murdered and thrown in the bog as a sacrifice to the goddess of fertility. Written in the guise of a scientific detective story, this classic of archaeological history--a best-seller when it was published in England but out of print for many years--is a thoroughly engrossing and still reliable account of the religion, culture, and daily life of the European Iron Age. Includes 76 black-and-white photographs.

This volume ranges from the Second World War to the postmodern, considering issues of the 'popular' and the competing criteria by which literature has been judged in the later twentieth century. As well as tracing the transition from modernism to postmodernism, the authors guide students through debates around the pleasures of the popular and the question of inter-relations between 'mass' and 'high' cultures. Drawing further upon issues of value and function raised in Aestheticism and Modernism: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1900-1960, they examine contemporary literary prizes and the activity of judgement involved in English Studies. This text can be used alongside the other books in the series for a complete course on twentieth-century literature, or on its own as essential reading for students of mid to late twentieth-century writing. Texts examined in detail include: du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise, Barker's The Ghost Road.

Throughout the centuries, different cultures have established a variety of procedures for handling and disposing of corpses. Often the methods are directly associated with the deceased's position in life, such as a pharaoh's mummification in Egypt or the cremation of a Buddhist. Treatment by the living of the dead over time and across cultures is the focus of this study. Burial arrangements and preparations are detailed, including embalming, the funeral service, storage and transport of the body, and forms of burial. Autopsies and the investigative process of causes of deliberate death are fully covered. Preservation techniques such as cryonic suspension and mummification are discussed, as well as a look at the "recycling" of the corpse through organ donation, donation to medicine, animal scavengers, cannibalism, and, of course, natural decay and decomposition. Mistreatments of a corpse are also covered.

Describes the discovery of bog bodies in northern Europe and the evidence which their remains reveal about themselves and the civilizations in which they lived.

What is the relationship between poetry and power? Should poetry be considered a mode of authority or an impotent medium? And why is it that the modern poets most commonly regarded as authoritative are precisely those whose works wrestle with a sense of artistic inadequacy? Such questions lie at the heart of Shades of Authority, prompting fresh insights into three of the most important poets of recent decades: Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Through attentive close readings, James shows how their responsiveness to matters of political and cultural import lends weight to the idea of poetry as authoritative utterance—but also how each is exercised by a sense of the limitations and liabilities of language itself.

Arguably one of the most important American writers working today, Wendell Berry is the author of more than fifty books, including novels and collections of poems, short stories, and essays. A prominent spokesman for agrarian values, Berry frequently defends such practices and ideas as sustainable agriculture, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of work, and the interconnectedness of life. In The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love, Fritz Oehlschlaeger provides a sweeping engagement with Berry's entire corpus. The book introduces the reader to Berry's general philosophy and aesthetic through careful consideration of his essays. Oehlschlaeger pays particular attention to Berry as an agrarian, citizen, and patriot, and also examines the influence of Christianity on Berry's writings. Much of the book is devoted to lively close readings of Berry's short stories, novels, and poetry. The Achievement of Wendell Berry is a comprehensive introduction to the philosophical and creative world of Wendell Berry, one that offers new critical insights into the writing of this celebrated Kentucky author.

Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children." View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course. Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world's great poets. Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing, this book looks squarely and deeply at Heaney's poetry as art. A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times. With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes. Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.

Seamus Heaney, widely considered the most gifted living poet in Ireland and Britain, is the first Irish poet since Yeats to gain an international reputation. In this remarkable study, henry Hart discusses Heaney's poems, his creative and personal situations, and his assimilation of contemporary literary theory. From Heaney's Ulster background to poetic influences as diverse as Dante and Wordsworth, Yeats and Bly, Hart offers sophisticated, lucid insights. Hart argues that the best way into Heaney's poetic world is in seeking to understand him—as with Blake and Yeats—in terms of oppositions and conflicts, progressions and syntheses. At the root of all his work is a multifaceted argument with himself, with others, with sectarian Northern Ireland, with his Anglo-Irish heritage, with his Roman Catholicism, and with his Nationalist upbringing on a farm in County Derry. For each volume of poems, from Door into the Dark to The Haw Lantern, Hart identifies and works with a specific problem in the text, while developing its intellectual and creative implications. He covers aspects as diverse as Heaney's incorporation of antipastoral attitudes in his poems, his fascination with how etymology recapitulates ancient and modern history, and apocalypticism in North. Placing his trust in art's ability to confront conflicts between freedom and responsibility, between private craft and public involvement, Heaney is shown nonetheless to chastise himself for failing to have a greater impact on the situation he left behind in Northern Ireland. In pursuing the literary, religious, and political themes in his books of poetry, Hart shows that Heaney is no provincial bard, as some critics have suggested, but is as intellectually informed and astute as any postmodernist writer. Any reader of Seamus Heaney's poetry, and any poet, poetry scholar, critic of contemporary poetry, or student of Irish literature will gain much from reading this book.