To date, no book-length study of the work of poet Jorie Graham has been published. Graham now holds the prestigious Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University; recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, Graham has established herself as one of the most important poets of her generation. This book addresses the connection between Graham's work and the legacy of American Modernism, arguing that her recurring interest in the visible world and how best to represent it in her poetry can be seen as a continuation of the work of Eliot and Stevens. For Graham, the visible world is a means of approaching the ineffable, or the divine. The poet's approach to the ineffable in her work is conflated at times with the relationship between the self and the other: maintaining the integrity of both and accurately representing the truth of what she sees become a moral project for the poet, aligning her work with that of the Moderns. The book addresses Graham's entire body of work, now nine books of poetry, and interprets her poetic preoccupation with visuality through the lens of psychoanalytic criticism.

Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, The Machine That Sings focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats Voyages, The Wine Merchant, and Possessions as a triptych of erotic poems in which Crane plays out alternative resolutions to the dialectic between purity and defilement, a conceptual dynamic which Tapper argues is central to both Crane's poetics of difficulty and his representations of homosexual desire. Tapper concentrates on the three sections of The Bridge, most concerned with recuperating animality: 'National Winter Garden,' 'The Dance,' and 'Cape Hatteras.'

Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period. With the rise of women’s studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy’s work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy’s writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade. One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy’s changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy’s work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.

Celebrating the voices, current and past, that surface in lyric poetry

Contents: The Difficult BirthóAn Image of Utterance in Beckett, Paul Lawley; Less equals MoreóDeveloping Ambiguity in the Drafts of "Come and Go," Rosemary Pountney; Seeing is PerceivingóBeckett's Later Plays and the Theory of Audience Response, Karen L. Laughlin; Mutations of the Soliloquy, "Not I" to "Rockaby," Andrew Kennedy; Anonymity and IndividuationóThe Interrelation of Two Linguistic Functions in "Not I" and "Rockaby," Lois Oppenheim; Walking and Rocking, Ritual Acts in "Footfalls" and "Rockaby," Mary A. Doll; Beckett's Other Trilogyó"Not I," "Footfalls" and "Rockaby," R. Thomas Stone; Perspective in "Rockaby," Jane Alison Hale; Know HappinessóIrony in "Ill Seen Ill Said," Monique Nagem; Reading "That Time," Antoni Libera; The Speech Act in Beckett's "Ohio Impromptu," Kathleen O'Gorman; "Make Sense Who May," A Study of "Catastrophe" and "What Where," Annamaria Sportelli; "Catastrophe" and Dramatic Setting, Hersh Zeifman; A Political Perspective on "Catastrophe," Robert Sandarg; The Quad PiecesóA Screen for the Unseeable, Phyllis Carey. Irish Literary Studies Series No. 30.

Extending the discussion of critical content analysis to the visual realm of picturebooks and graphic novels, this book provides a clear research methodology for understanding and analyzing visual imagery. Offering strategies for "reading" illustrations in global and multicultural literature, chapter authors explore and bring together critical theory and social semiotics while demonstrating how visual analysis can be used to uncover and analyze power, ideologies, inequity, and resistance in picturebooks and graphic novels. This volume covers a diverse range of texts and types of books and offers tools and procedures for interpreting visual images to enhance the understandings of researchers, teachers, and students as they engage with the visual culture that fills our world. These methods are significant not only to becoming a critical reader of literature but to also becoming a critical reader of visual images in everyday life.