A reference book for scholarship on Edmund Spenser offering a detailed, literary guide to his life, works and influence. Over 700 entries by 422 contributors, an index and extensive bibliography.

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is among the most important literary products of the Elizabethan age, and the vast sweep of its moral, political and social concerns tells us more about the age than any other work. This volume, first published in 1989, offers detailed readings of each of the poem’s seven books, along with introductory chapters on Spenser’s career, and the roots of the poem in the English and continental traditions. Humphrey Tonkin pays particular attention to the work’s political and cultural role and its contribution to the development of Elizabethan ideology. A comprehensive analysis, this reissue will be of particular value to literature students and academics alike.

Published in 1783, Poetical Sketches was William Blake's first volume of poetry, and his only published work to appear in letterpress. This "little book" has been relegated by some critics to the periphery of the Blake canon. Yet the book's uniqueness and authorship have drawn scholars to it, resulting in often illuminating criticism. Speak Silence continues in this line and represents the first and only collection of essays devoted solely to exploring Poetical Sketches. Mark Greenberg's critical introduction traces the historical tendency both to denigrate and to praise the Sketches. The other chapters in this collection, written by distinguished scholars Susan J. Wolfson, Stuart Peterfreund, Thomas A. Vogler, Vincent DeLuca, Nelson Hilton, and Robert F. Gleckner analyze traditional elements of poetry as they appear in the Sketches. This analysis reveals how fully Blake, as a young poet, absorbed these elements and how deftly he manipulated and transvalued them in his early, ambitious, and revolutionary experiments with language, voice, and rhetorical form. This volume also focuses on the Sketches' politics, originality, and complex connections with Blake's poetic precursors and with other cultural institutions. What is most compelling about Speak Silence is the way in which the chapters are in dialogue with one another. The collection resembles a conversation between its notable contributors, inviting readers to witness the developmental process of particular ideas about Blake's early art - and its relation to his later work - as they solidify, are transformed, or dissolve.

Patrick Cheney's new book places the sublime at the heart of poems and plays in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Specifically, Cheney argues for the importance of an 'early modern sublime' to the advent of modern authorship in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Chapters feature a model of creative excellence and social liberty that helps explain the greatness of the English Renaissance. Cheney's argument revises the received wisdom, which locates the sublime in the eighteenth-century philosophical 'subject'. The book demonstrates that canonical works like The Faerie Queene and King Lear reinvent sublimity as a new standard of authorship. This standard emerges not only in rational, patriotic paradigms of classical and Christian goodness but also in the eternizing greatness of the author's work: free, heightened, ecstatic. Playing a centralizing role in the advent of modern authorship, the early modern sublime becomes a catalyst in the formation of an English canon.

In a detailed examination of the ways in which Blake's use of biblical tradition gives form and meaning to his early prophetic books, Leslie Tannenbaum shows what Blake meant when he called the Bible the Great Code of Art." Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

They say the sports world mimics the real world. It does—but there’s a lot more sex, money, and betrayal. Blake Brennon is an investigative reporter for a national sports magazine. He knows morality isn’t big in his industry, but murder is a whole other matter. Blake has always been protective of cheerleaders, but when one ends up murdered, he finds himself in the middle of the investigation. Blake and the local sheriff’s department have a good relationship. Petula, the deputy sheriff, is the most beautiful woman Blake has ever seen, but she seems to be after more than just Blake’s sparkling personality. Authorities want Blake’s help in catching a killer, and he figures he can get the inside scoop by assisting. However, is Blake using Petula, or is she using him? As spectators, what we see on the field is unpredictable, but what we don’t see is rife with danger and death.

The classic book on William Blake as prophet of the New Age William Blake (1757–1827) inhabited a remarkable inner world, one that he brought vividly to life in his poetry, painting, and printmaking. Blake and Antiquity situates this brilliant and enigmatic artist within the Western esoteric canon, revealing his indebtedness to Neoplatonism, the Gnostics, alchemy, and astrology. In this book, Kathleen Raine demonstrates how Blake rejected conventional orthodoxy and went in search among the occult traditions of antiquity for symbols that might expand the mind’s awareness into a spiritual state where space, time, and even death are transcended.