In 1753 Robert Dodsley published Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. Sponsored by Horace Walpole, this luxurious quarto was the first major aesthetic expression of the Strawberry Hill circle and a landmark in English book illustration. Kenneth Clarke called it "the most graceful monument to Gothic Rococo." Its witty interplay between illustration and text anticipated Blake, who studied it some thirty years later. Among its poems is Gray's famous Elegy Written in a Courtly Church-Yard. Loftus Jestin offers a facsimile of Designs (out of print since 1786) and a full-length interdisciplinary study of the collaboration of Bentley, Gray, and Walpole that produced this extraordinary book. He shows the way poems and illustration at once complement, compete with and invigorate each other, and he examines Strawberry Hill. Walpole's house at Twickenham, where Bentley's genius flourished. He also considers the interplay of the sister arts in the work of Hogarth, Kent, and Pine, and surveys the tastes, friendships, economics, and politics that helped shape the development of Bentley's book illustrations.

Redefines modern lyric poetry at the intersection of literary and media studies. In The Lyre Book, Matthew Kilbane urges literary scholars to consider lyric not as a genre or a reading practice but as a media condition: the generative tension between writing and sound. In addition to clarifying issues central to the study of modern poetry—including its proximity to popular song, hallowed objecthood, and seeming autonomy from historical determination—this revisionary theory of lyric presents a new history of modern US poetry as one sonorous practice among many clamorous others. Focusing on the mid-twentieth century, Kilbane traces the impact of new sound technologies on a diverse array of literary and musical works by Lorine Niedecker, Harry Partch, Louis and Celia Zukofsky, Sterling Brown, John Wheelwright, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Russell Atkins, and Helen Adam. Kilbane shows how literary critics can look to media history to illuminate poetry's social life, and how media scholars can read poetry for insight into the cultural history of technology. In this book, the lyric poem emerges as a sensitive barometer of technological change.

'A Compendium of Musical Instruments and Instrumental Terminology in the Bible' draws on extensive historical research, comparative linguistic analysis and musical study to offer the first compilation of its kind. The volume examines the entire range of musical instruments in the Bible - stringed, wind and percussion - drawing on ancient and modern translations of the Bible and the works of rabbinic teachers, Church Fathers and medieval, renaissance and contemporary scholars. The book offers a historical survey of Hebrew instrumental music - its origins and links with neighbouring cultures, the role of instruments in the religious, social, public and private life of ancient Israel, and the system of musical education - and explores the understanding of Hebrew musical instruments in post-biblical times. This comprehensive volume will be invaluable to musicologists, archaeologists, theologians, historians, philologists and Bible translators, as well as general readers in the subject.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have fascinated listeners and readers for over twenty-five centuries. In this volume of original essays, collected to honor the distinguished career of Emily T. Vermeule, thirty-four leading experts in Homeric studies and related fields provide up-to-date, multidisciplinary accounts of the most current issues in the study of Homer. The book is divided into three sections. The first section treats the Bronze Age setting of the poems (around 1200 B.C.), using archaeological evidence to reveal how poetic memory preserves, distorts, and invents the past. The second section explores the early Iron Age, in which the poems were written (c. 800-500 B.C.), using the strategies of comparative philology and mythology, literary theory, historical linguistics, anthropology, and iconography to determine how the poems took shape. The final section traces the use of Homer for literary and artistic inspiration by classical Greece and Rome.

The classical conception of reason (or logos) has been repeatedly attacked in the modern era. Its enemies range from Descartes, who complains that logos is not sufficiently useful or precise, to Derrida who hopes to liberate Western thought from its bondage to "logocentrism." At least since the time of Nietzsche, Plato has been damned as the chief architect of the classical conception of logos. He is accused of overvaluing reason and thereby devaluing the other, more human aspects of life. As it was originally formulated in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Plato has been taken to be the arch-enemy of tragedy, which for Nietzsche was the most life-affirming of all the art forms of Greek culture. Originally published in 1990, The Tragedy of Reason defends Plato against his accusers. Employing a mode of exposition which exhibits Plato’s position, Roochnik presents the Platonic conception of logos in confrontation with texts by Homer, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Descartes, Porty, and Derrida. In clear language, unencumbered by technical terminology, Roochnik shows that Platonic conception of logos is keenly aware of the strength of its opponents. The result is a presentation of Plato as a "tragic philosopher" whose conception of logos is characterized by an affirmation of its own limits as well as its goodness.