The environmental imagination does not stop short at the edge of the woods. Nor should our understanding of it, as Lawrence Buell makes powerfully clear in his new book that aims to reshape the field of literature and environmental studies. Emphasizing the influence of the physical environment on individual and collective perception, his book thus provides the theoretical underpinnings for an ecocriticism now reaching full power, and does so in remarkably clear and concrete ways. Writing for an Endangered World offers a conception of the physical environment--whether built or natural--as simultaneously found and constructed, and treats imaginative representations of it as acts of both discovery and invention. A number of the chapters develop this idea through parallel studies of figures identified with either "natural" or urban settings: John Muir and Jane Addams; Aldo Leopold and William Faulkner; Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Dreiser; Wendell Berry and Gwendolyn Brooks. Focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, but ranging freely across national borders, his book reimagines city and country as a single complex landscape.

Susan Clair Imbarrato, Carol Berkin, Brett Barney, Lisa Paddock, Matthew J. Bruccoli, George Parker Anderson, Judith S.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.

In this critical study of the influence of W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) on the poetry and drama of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), Deborah Fleming examines similarities in imagery, landscape, belief in eternal recurrence, use of myth, distrust of rationalism, and dedication to tradition. Although Yeats's and Jeffers's styles differed widely, Towers of Myth and Stone examines how the two men shared a vision of modernity, rejected contemporary values in favor of traditions (some of their own making), and created poetry that sought to change those values. Jeffers's well-known opposition to modernist poetry forced him for decades to the margins of critical appraisal, where he was seen as an eccentric without aesthetic content. Yet both Yeats and Jeffers formulated social and poetic philosophies that continue to find relevance in critical and cultural theory. Engaging Yeats's work enabled Jeffers to develop a related, though distinct, sense of what themes and subject matter were best suited for poetic endeavor. His connection to Yeats helps to explain the nature of Jeffers's poetry even as it helps to clarify Yeats's influence on those who followed him. Moreover, Fleming argues, Jeffers's interest in Yeats suggests that critics misunderstand Jeffers if they take his rejection of modernism (as exemplified by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound) as a rejection of contemporary poetry or the process by which modern poetry came into being.

The first collection in twenty years of essays on Robinson Jeffers, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, this work signals the sea change in Jeffers scholarship, as well as the increasing breadth and depth of criticism of the literature of the American West. The essays assembled here highlight issues and theories critical to Jeffers studies, among them the advance of ecocriticism, the reimagining of regionalism as place studies, the continuing development of cultural studies and the new historicism, the increasingly poignant vector of science and literature, the new formalism, particularly as it pertains to narrative verse, and the glaring omission of feminist analysis in Jeffers scholarship. Jeffers has always appealed to a wider audience than many twentieth-century poets, and this book will speak to that general readership as well as to scholars and students.

The Companion to the Victorian Novel provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published between 1837 and 1901. Provides contextual and critical information about the entire range of British fiction published during the Victorian period. Explains issues such as Victorian religions, class structure, and Darwinism to those who are unfamiliar with them. Comprises original, accessible chapters written by renowned and emerging scholars in the field of Victorian studies. Ideal for students and researchers seeking up-to-the-minute coverage of contexts and trends, or as a starting point for a survey course.

This new collection of Keith Sagar's writings on the poetry of D H Lawrence includes many new interpretations of well-known poems. It ends with a year-by-year checklist of reviews and criticism of Lawrence's poems, from 1913 to the present. Though much has been written about Lawrence's poetry (as revealed by the several hundred entries in the book's checklist of criticism), there have been relatively few full length studies. This book deals with the whole range of his poetry from his earliest poems, such as 'To Campions' and 'To Guelder Roses', through the poems inspired by his elopement with and subsequent marriage to Frieda Weekley (Look! We Have Come Through!), to the mature achievement, in free verse forms inspired by Walt Whitman, of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Pansies and Last Poems. The genesis of the poems in Lawrence's life is explored; and there are new interpretations of his most memorable poems, such as 'The Wild Common', 'Piano', 'Song of a Man Who Has Come Through', Tortoises, 'Peach', 'Pomegranate', 'Snake', 'Bavarian Gentians' and 'The Ship of Death'.

Darwin's Bards is the first comprehensive study of how poets have responded to the ideas of Charles Darwin in over fifty years. John Holmes argues that poetry can have a profound impact on how we think and feel about the Darwinian condition. Is a Darwinian universe necessarily a godless one? If not, what might Darwinism tell us about the nature of God? Is Darwinism compatible with immortality, and if not, how can we face our own deaths or the loss of those we love? What is our own place in the Darwinian universe, and our ecological role here on earth? How does our kinship with other animals affect how we see them? How does the fact that we are animals ourselves alter how we think about our own desires, love and sexual morality? All told, is life in a Darwinian universe grounds for celebration or despair? Holmes explores the ways in which some of the most perceptive and powerful British and American poets of the last hundred-and-fifty years have grappled with these questions, from Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy, through Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay, to Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Amy Clampitt and Edwin Morgan. Reading their poetry, we too can experience what it can mean to live in a Darwinian world. Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at scientists, theologians, philosophers and ecologists as well as poets, critics and students of literature, Darwin's Bards is a timely intervention into the heated debates over Darwin's legacy for religion, ecology and the arts.