The poets of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126) were writing after what was then and still is acknowledged to be the Golden Age of Chinese poetry, the Tang dynasty (618-907). This study examines how these Song poets responded to their uncomfortable proximity to such impressive predecessors and reveals how their response shaped their literary art. The author's focus is on the poetic theory and practice of the poet Huang Tingjian (1045-1105). This first full-length study in English of one of the most difficult and complex poets of the classical Chinese tradition aims to provide the background for understanding better why Huang was so greatly admired, especially by the outstanding literati of his age, and why later scholars claim Huang is the characteristic Northern Song poet. The author concludes by considering how Huang's literary project resembles, but ultimately differs from, Western literary theories of influence and intertextuality.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Devotes considerable attention to Cardenio (the collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher) and its notional offspring (works by Greenblatt and Mee, Doran, Armenteros, et al.), discussing all these texts' relations to Cervantes's work and the nature of the various kinds of borrowings and influences.

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the first great poet, observed W. J. Bate, to labor under "the burden of the past". Over the years, he read, wrote about, and adapted or translated the works an extraordinary number of European writers; these works in turn formed the textual ground from which his own art emerged. In The Imperial Dryden, David Bruce Kramer shows how Dryden used the efforts of other writers "not to save himself the trouble of making but to make anew". Tracing the course of the poet's career, Kramer focuses first on Dryden's approach to the French poet and critic Pierre Corneille, who had developed a subversive strategy of "misquoting" his predecessors - a strategy Dryden soon learned to use against Corneille himself. He then explores Dryden's more open plundering of secondary French poets; this tactic constituted a kind of literary "imperialism" that echoed England's own imperial ambitions regarding foreign wealth. Finally, Kramer shows how, after the Revolution of 1688, Dryden's poetic persona shifted from that of plundering male to vulnerable neuter to, at moments, a disenfranchised female wishing to be seized and "impregnated" by the spirits of her great male predecessors. Kramer's study extends beyond the works of Dryden himself into several larger questions of literary history: the effect of dynastic changes and national revolutions upon poetic alliances and ruptures; the manner in which a poetic sensibility defines itself in concert with, and in opposition to, shifting groups of writers and schools; and the ways in which personal reverses may alter gender identification. Demonstrating how poets' relations with their predecessors can modulate from agonistic struggle touneasy but productive truce, Kramer proposes a series of frameworks for discussing the effects of political and cultural circumstance upon poetic production.

Michael Ewans explores how classical Greek tragedy and epic poetry have been appropriated in opera, through eight selected case studies. He examines the issues through a comparative analysis of significant divergences of plot, character and dramatic strategy between source text, libretto and opera.

The study of the deliberate allusion by one author to the words of a previous author has long been central to Latin philology. However, literary Romanists have been diffident about situating such work within the more spacious inquiries into intertextuality now current. This 1998 book represents an attempt to find (or recover) some space for the study of allusion - as a project of continuing vitality - within an excitingly enlarged universe of intertexts. It combines traditional classical approaches with modern literary-theoretical ways of thinking, and offers attentive close readings, innovative perspectives on literary history, and theoretical sophistication of argument. Like other volumes in the series it is among the most broadly conceived short books on Roman literature to be published in recent years.

you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome / you are a man / you are a little confused / you are entirely happy with your poem / you are not happy then there is no charge and your deposit is returned / you are totally satisfied with the outcome . . . Apostrophe is: a) a figure of speech in which a person, an abstract quality or a nonexistent entity is addressed as though present b) a poem written in 1993 in which every sentence is an apostrophe c) a

Tsvetaeva's work has an originality and diversity that has been hitherto neglected by critics. Michael Makin's book examines in depth her entire poetic output, paying particular attention to the appropriation, and frequent distortion, of familiar literary material in her lyrical, dramatic, and narrative verse. Major chapters are devoted to the long narrative poems, the mature lyric verse, and the verse plays, on which very little has so far been written.

The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. For humanists, the ruin became the material sign that marked the rupture between themselves and classical antiquity. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Andrew Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future.