Poetry lovers will delight in this hugely enjoyable and enlightening collection of such poems beginning in the age of Chaucer and ending in the present day. A valuable contribution to literary, gender and performance studies.

Both male and female poets cross the gender line: men assume a female voice and women a male voice. The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse is a fascinating collection of such poems, beginning in the age of Chaucer and working its way through to the present day. Together these poems offer a unique collection of masks, personae and voices, rife with issues of class, gender and race. Alan Parker and Mark Willhardt, in bringing together these poems for the first time, assert an entirely new paradigm; a theoretical and practical reading of a heretofore undefined genre. They also provide a critical introduction which synthesizes traditional literary debates with current gender theory and, through the lens of historical, literary, social and theoretical issues, present a new way to interpret these 'ventriloquized' poems. The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse provides a wealth of material for students and teachers of literature and gender studies. It is a compelling collection which will also appeal to poetry lovers.

This book investigates male writers' use of female voices and female writers' use of male voices in literature and theatre from the 1850s to the present, examining where, how and why such gendered crossings occur and what connections may be found between these crossings and specific psychological, social, historical and political contexts.

A collection of essays that concerns writers or real people of the early modern period who presented their protagonists or themselves as members of the opposite biological sex. The collection demonstrates the variety of motives for such acts of gender passing, and offers interpretations that shed some light on the probable intentions of the gender passers.

Clare L. Taylor investigates the problematic question of female fetishism within modernist women's writing, 1890-1950. Drawing on gender and psychoanalytic theory, she re-examines the works of Sarah Grand, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and Anaïs Nin in the context of clinical discourses of sexology and psychoanalysis to present an alternative theory of female fetishism, challenging the perspective that denies the existence of the perversion in women.

The Poetry Handbook is a lucid and entertaining guide to the poet's craft, and an invaluable introduction to practical criticism for students. Chapters on each element of poetry, from metre to gender, offer a wide-ranging general account, and end by looking at two or three poems from a small group (including works by Donne, Elizabeth Bishop, Geoffrey Hill, and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott), to build up sustained analytical readings. Thorough and compact, with notes and quotations supplemented by detailed reference to the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a companion website with texts, links, and further discussion, The Poetry Handbook is indispensable for all school and undergraduate students of English. A final chapter addresses examinations of all kinds, and sample essays by undergraduates are posted on the website. Critical and scholarly terms are italicised and clearly explained, both in the text and in a complete glossary; the volume also includes suggestions for further reading. The first edition, widely praised by teachers and students, showed how the pleasures of poetry are heightened by rigorous understanding and made that understanding readily available. This second edition — revised, expanded, updated, and supported by a new companion website - confirm The Poetry Handbook as the best guide to poetry available in English.

"A valuable and logical step in the progression of critical studies on convent writing. . . . We have moved from seeing women writers as working at the margins to seeing them as writing subjects."—Latin American Research Review "Consider[s] nuns not as merely secular or religious writers, but through the lens of interdisciplinary study, as multifaceted historical agents. . . . The importance of the kind of innovative theoretical work undertaken by this text . . . cannot be over-emphasized, and will offer a both provocative and illuminating read to scholars in a broad range of disciplines."—Journal of International Women’s Studies "Kirk reconstructs aspects of the lives of colonial nuns through close-up readings of select manuscripts and, additionally, of published primary sources. . . . A lively and provocative addition to the literature on colonial Mexico that offers new insights into the dynamics of religious community."—Bulletin of Latin American Research "A thought-provoking contribution to our understanding of community-building among colonial Latin American women."—A Contracorriente "A timely scholarly contribution to the field of gender and religion. . . . Presents a fresh look at convent literature by specifically analyzing alliances, friendships, and communities."—Colonial Latin American Historical Review "An interesting and ambitious study of the discourses associated with convent life in Mexico."—Catholic Historical Review

The problems of knowing and representing the other are acute every time we encounter a text as writers or readers. Ethical Encounters engages with the representation of encounters with alterity in the writings of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on the ethics of encountering the other, the book argues that Wiebe’s writings show that the self’s knowledge offers an inadequate basis for ethically valid representations of those encounters. In the search for ethical ways of engaging with alterity, Wiebe’s writings offer new ways of employing silence and the presence of the unknowable as means to explore encounters with alterity. Ethical Encounters shows that dividing Wiebe’s work into two sharply distinct categories of ‘Mennonite’ and ‘First Nations’ writings overlooks important connections between the author’s central works and may seriously hinder the interrogation of narrative engagement with alterity. While such human encounters resonate against ethical strategies of representation, the greatest challenge for the ethics of encounter in Wiebe’s texts arises in encounters with the alterity of space. Ethical Encounters engages with both physical and narrative spaces which are not permanently fixed in landscape or geography, or in human perceptions of place, arguing that the most radical expressions of alterity in Wiebe’s writings emerge in encounters with the spaces of the Canadian North. The study raises questions about the relationship between the self and the other as they concern knowing: what does the self know when it claims to know another person or space? How does the narrating self negotiate the seeming collapse of its own knowledge when it encounters others whose stories cannot be known? Ethical Encounters casts new light not just on Wiebe’s writings but also on how we as authors and readers engage with expressions of alterity which refuse to be transformed into familiar, knowable forms. Janne Korkka is post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the North American Studies programme in the Department of English, University of Turku, Finland. His main research interests lie in the problems of representing space and encountering alterity in Canadian writing. He is co-editor of Seeking the Self – Encountering the Other: Diasporic Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (2008). He teaches Canadian and postcolonial literatures and North American Studies, and publishes mainly on Canadian writing.

Narrative Fissures: Reading and Rhetoric is a guide to applied rhetorical criticism of narrative in diverse fields such as cultural studies, ethnography, psychotherapy, historiography, critical legal studies, education, communication, and medicine.

This innovative study of vision, gender and poetry traces Milton's mark on Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne to show how the lyric male poet achieves vision at the cost of symbolic blindness and feminisation. Drawing together a wide range of concerns including the use of myth, the gender of the sublime, the lyric fragment, and the relation of pain to creativity, this book is a major re-evaluation of the male poet and the making of the English poetic tradition.The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This book will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry.