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Featured EBooks in Ritter Library

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry by Ann Bates; Catherine Bates (Editor) The most comprehensive collection of essays on Renaissance poetry on the market Covering the period 1520-1680, A Companion to Renaissance Poetry offers 46 essays which present an in-depth account of the context, production, and interpretation of early modern British poetry. It provides students with a deep appreciation for, and sensitivity toward, the ways in which poets of the period understood and fashioned a distinctly vernacular voice, while engaging them with some of the debates and departures that are currently animating the discipline. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry analyzes the historical, cultural, political, and religious background of the time, addressing issues such as education, translation, the Reformation, theorizations of poetry, and more. The book immerses readers in non-dramatic poetry from Wyatt to Milton, focusing on the key poetic genres--epic, lyric, complaint, elegy, epistle, pastoral, satire, and religious poetry. It also offers an inclusive account of the poetic production of the period by canonical and less canonical writers, female and male. Finally, it offers examples of current developments in the interpretation of Renaissance poetry, including economic, ecological, scientific, materialist, and formalist approaches. * Covers a wide selection of authors and texts * Features contributions from notable authors, scholars, and critics across the globe * Offers a substantial section on recent and developing approaches to reading Renaissance poetry A Companion to Renaissance Poetry is an ideal resource for all students and scholars of the literature and culture of the Renaissance period.
Publication Date: 2018
The Romantic Poetry Handbook by Michael O'Neill; Madeleine Callaghan An absorbing survey of poetry written in one of the most revolutionary eras in the history of British literature This comprehensive survey of British Romantic poetry explores the work of six poets whose names are most closely associated with the Romantic era--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, and Shelley--as well as works by other significant but less widely studied poets such as Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Along with its exceptional coverage, the volume is alert to relevant contexts, and opens up ways of understanding Romantic poetry. The Romantic Poetry Handbook encompasses the entire breadth of the Romantic Movement, beginning with Anna Laetitia Barbauld and running through to Thomas Lovell Beddoes and John Clare. In its central section 'Readings' it explores tensions, change, and continuity within the Romantic Movement, and examines a wide range of individual poems and poets through sensitive, attentive and accessible analyses. In addition, the authors provide a full introduction, a detailed historical and cultural timeline, biographies of the poets whose works are featured in the "Readings" section, and a helpful guide to further reading. The Romantic Poetry Handbook is an ideal text for undergraduate and postgraduate study of British Romantic poetry. It also will appeal to every reader with an interest in the Romantics and in poetry generally. 
Publication Date: 2018
War Isn't the Only Hell by Keith Gandal American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army's unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men--except, notoriously, African Americans--to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame. Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper context--as a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressed--often in coded ways--the noncombatant failure to measure up. Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers--Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte--who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn't the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.
Publication Date: 2018