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Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa
by Joseph FarrellShortlised for the Saltire Society Non Fiction Book of the Year Award Almost every adult and child is familiar with his Treasure Island, but few know that Robert Louis Stevenson lived out his last years on an equally remote island, which was squabbled over by colonial powers much as Captain Flint's treasure was contested by the mongrel crew of the Hispaniola.In 1890 Stevenson settled in Upolu, an island in Samoa, after two years sailing round the South Pacific. He was given a Samoan name and became a fierce critic of the interference of Germany, Britain and the U.S.A. in Samoan affairs - a stance that earned him Oscar Wilde's sneers, and brought him into conflict with the Colonial Office, who regarded him as a menace and even threatened him with expulsion from the island.Joseph Farrell's pioneering study of Stevenson's twilight years stands apart from previous biographies by giving as much weight to the Samoa and the Samoans - their culture, their manners, their history - as to the life and work of the man himself. For it is only by examining the full complexity of Samoa and the political situation it faced as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, that Stevenson's lasting and generous contribution to its cause can be appreciated.
Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author's Profession
by Roslyn JollyRobert Louis Stevenson's departure from Europe in 1887 coincided with a vocational crisis prompted by his father's death. Impatient with his established identity as a writer, Stevenson was eager to explore different ways of writing, at the same time that living in the Pacific stimulated a range of latent intellectual and political interests. Roslyn Jolly examines the crucial period from 1887 to 1894, focusing on the self-transformation wrought in Stevenson's Pacific travel-writing and political texts. Jolly shows how Stevenson's desire to understand unfamiliar Polynesian and Micronesian cultures, and to record and intervene in the politics of Samoa, gave him opportunities to use his legal education, pursue his interest in historiography, and experiment with anthropology and journalism. Thus as his geographical and cultural horizons expanded, Stevenson's professional sphere enlarged as well, stretching the category of authorship in which his successes as a novelist had placed him. Rather than enhancing his stature as a popular writer, however, Stevenson's experiments with new styles and genres, and the Pacific subject matter of his later works, were resisted by his readers. Jolly's analysis of contemporary responses to Stevenson's writing, gleaned from an extensive collection of reviews, many of which are not readily available, provides fascinating insights into the interests, obsessions, and resistances of Victorian readers. As Stevenson sought to escape the vocational straightjacket that confined him, his readers just as strenuously expressed their loyalty to outmoded images of Stevenson the author, and their distrust of the new guises in which he presented himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888–1894 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)
by Carla ManfrediThis book tackles photography’s role during Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels throughout the Pacific Island region and is the first study of his family’s previously unpublished photographs. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, the book integrates photographs with letters, non-fiction, and poetry, and includes much unpublished material. The original readings of photographs and non-fiction highlight Stevenson’s engagement with colonial ideology and reality and advance new arguments about Victorian travel, settlement, and colonialisms in the Pacific. Like the Stevensons, the book moves from the Marquesas to the atolls of the Gilbert Islands in Micronesia; from the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s political ambitions to Samoan plantations and the Stevensons’ settlement at Vailima. Central to this study is the notion that Pacific history and Pacific Island cultures matter to the interpretation of Stevenson's work, and a rigorous historical and cultural contextualization ensures that local details structure literary and photographic interpretation. The book’s historical grounding is key to its insightful conclusions regarding travel, settlement, photography, and colonialism.
Robert Lowell In Context (Literature in Context)
by Thomas Austenfeld Grzegorz KośćRobert Lowell was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. This volume explores the various contexts of Lowell's life and work and evaluates his oeuvre from new perspectives. Individual chapters address his relation to the South, his religious evolution, aspects of his marriages and private life, his bipolar disorder seen through new theories of mental illness, his work as a letter writer and a connoisseur of art and photography. The book also introduces new parameters for a contemporary study of Lowell, commenting on current debates about race and privilege, feminism, ecoconsciousness, his engagement with the natural environment as well as his friendships with Randall Jarrell and Robert Penn Warren.
Robert Lowell in Love
by Jeffrey MeyersRobert Lowell was known not only as a great poet but also as a writer whose devotion to his art came at a tremendous personal cost. In this book, his third on Robert Lowell, Jeffrey Meyers examines the poet’s impassioned, troubled relationships with the key women in his life: his mother, Charlotte Winslow Lowell; his three wives—Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Caroline Blackwood; nine of his many lovers; his close women friends—Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich; and his most talented students, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Lowell’s charismatic personality, compelling poetry, and literary fame attracted lovers and friends who were both frightened and excited by his aura of brilliance and danger. He loved the idea of falling in love, and in his recurring manic episodes he needed women at the center of his emotional and artistic life. Each affair became an intense dramatic episode. Though he idealized his loves and encouraged their talents, his frenetic affairs and tortured marriages were always conducted on his own terms. Robert Lowell in Love tells the story of the poet in the grip of love and gives voice to the women who loved him, inspired his poetry, and suffered along with him.
Robert of Brunne's Handlyng Synne: And its French Original (Routledge Revivals)
by Frederick J. FurnivallPublished in 1901, this book provides an English and French version of the 1303 text by Robert Manning of Brunne. Handlyng Synne was adapted from an Anglo-Norman work attributed to William of Waddington, the Manuel de Pechiez. It consists of more than 12,000 lines of verse, arranged in four-stress couplets. It is a discussion of the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins, the seven sacraments, and the elements of confession, illustrated throughout by exempla, or moral anecdotes, thirteen of which do not appear in the Manuel. Handlyng Synne has been described as "a reduction of the world's experience to a comprehensive moral scheme"
Robert Penn Warren after Audubon: The Work of Aging and the Quest for Transcendence in His Later Poetry (Southern Literary Studies)
by Joseph R. MillichapDespite nearly universal critical acclaim for Robert Penn Warren's later poetry, much about this large body of work remains unexplored, especially the psychological sources of these poems' remarkable energy. In this groundbreaking work, Warren scholar Joseph R. Millichap takes advantage of current research on developmental psychology, gerontology, and end-of-life studies to offer provocative new readings of Warren's later poems, which he defines as those published after Audubon: A Vision (1969). In these often intricate poems, Millichap sees something like an autobiographical epic focused on the process of aging, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of transcendence. Thus Warren's later poetry reviews an individual life seen whole, contemplates mortality and dissolution, and aspires to the literary sublime.Millichap locates the beginning of Warren's late period in the extraordinary collection Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968--1974, basing his contention on the book's complex, indeed obsessive sequencing of new, previously published, and previously collected poems unified by themes of time, memory, age, and death. Millichap offers innovative readings of Or Else and Warren's five other late gatherings of poems -- Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand?: Poems 1975; Now and Then: Poems 1976--1978, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Being Here: Poetry 1977--1980; Rumor Verified: Poems 1979--1980; and Altitudes and Extensions 1980--1984. Among the autobiographical elements Millichap brings into his careful readings are Warren's loneliness in these later years, especially after the deaths of family members and friends; his alternating feelings of personal satisfaction and emptiness toward his literary achievements; and his sense of the power, and at times the impotence, of memory. Millichap's analysis explores how Warren often returned to images and themes of his earlier poems, especially those involving youth and midlife, with the new perspective given by advancing age and time's passage. Millichap also relates Warren's work to that of other poets who have dealt profoundly with memory and age, including Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and, at times, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and the whole English and American nineteenth-century Romantic tradition.An epilogue traces Warren's changing reputation as a poet from the publication of his last volume in 1985 through his death in 1989 and the centennial of his birth in 2005, concluding persuasively that the finest of all of Warren's literary efforts can be found in his later poetry, concerned as it is with the work of aging and the quest for transcendence.
Robert Pollok’s The Course of Time and Literary Theodicy in the Romantic Age: The Rise and Fall of a Christian Epic (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
by Deryl DavisThis book explores the contexts and reception history of Robert Pollok’s religious epic The Course of Time (1827), one of the best- selling long poems of the nineteenth century, which has been almost entirely forgotten today. Widely read in the United States and across the British Empire, the poem’s combination of evangelical Calvinism, High Romanticism, and native Scottishness proved irresistible to many readers. This monograph traces the poem’s origins as a defense of Biblical authority, divine providence, and religious orthodoxy (against figures like Byron and Joseph Priestley) and explores the reasons for The Course of Time’s enormous, decades- long popularity and later precipitous decline. A close reading of the poem and an examination of its reception history offers readers important insights into the dynamic relationship between religion and wider culture in the nineteenth century, the uses of literature as a vehicle for theological argument and theodicy, and the important but often overlooked role that religion played in literary— and, particularly, Scottish— Romanticism. This work will appeal to scholars of religious history, literary history, Evangelicalism, Romanticism, Scottish literature, and nineteenth- century culture.
Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture: Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature)
by Brian MaidmentRobert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture is the first book-length study of the original illustrator of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Discussion of the range and importance of Seymour’s work as a jobbing illustrator in the 1820s and 1830s is at the centre of the book. A bibliographical study of his prolific output of illustrations in many different print genres is combined with a wide-ranging account of his major publications. Seymour’s extended work for The Comic Magazine, New Readings of Old Authors and Humorous Sketches, all described in detail, are of particular importance in locating the dialogue between image and text at the moment when the Victorian illustrated novel was coming into being.
Robert Southey
by Stuart AndrewsIn"Robert Southey," Andrews""argues that Robert Southey'sdenunciation of global Catholicism is essential to understanding his life, works, and times. On this issue, Southey was absolutely consistent - from his first visit to Lisbon in 1795-6 to his "Colloquies" published in 1829. The Poet Laureate's partisan rhetoric reflect its intensity and reveal a great deal about the religious culture of this stormy period in England. "
Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (Critical Heritage Ser.)
by Lionel MaddenThe Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each vlume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling the student or researcher to read the material themselves.
Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (The\nineteenth Century Ser.)
by Lynda PrattLynda Pratt's collection of specially commissioned essays is the first edited volume devoted to the multiple connections between Robert Southey (1774-1843) and English Romantic culture. A major and highly controversial personage in his own day, Southey has until recently been the forgotten member of the Lake School.
Robert Southey Essays Moral and Political 1832
by Tim FulfordRobert Southey's Essays Moral and Political, originally published in 1832, brings together many of Southey’s most influential journal pieces, providing important evidence for students of the political and literary culture of the Romantic period. Edited by Tim Fulford, this volume features a full introduction and detailed editorial notes setting the Essays in their contexts. The volume sets the Essays in the context of the political and social issues and controversies on which they comment, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Literary and Political History.
Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley; and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (Routledge Historical Resources)
by Tim FulfordThe Life of Wesley was one of Southey’s most influential and bestselling works. It was the first biography of John Wesley – the major figure in the largest religious movement of the eighteenth century – to be published by anyone beyond the Methodist community. In addition, it was a major history of the rise of a phenomenon that Southey and many others saw as a defining sign of contemporary history – the rise of sectarianism and of religious cults. This two-volume edition will represent the full text of the 1820 edition. It will include a comprehensive critical apparatus that will make sense of the major issues posed by the text and how it contributes to studies of both Southey and Romanticism. The edition will feature a critical and contextual introduction, which will set out the origins and composition of the text together with its publication history, as well as offer a carefully considered view of the interplay between the Life and other biographies of Wesley and accounts of Methodism, bringing into view the wide array of sources and influences Southey drew from. It will also examine the book’s reception history, incorporating material from reviews of the period and detailing the controversy it caused in the Methodist community.
Robert Southey Lives of Labouring-Class Poets
by Tim FulfordThe Lives of Uneducated Poets, written by Robert Southey and published in 1831, unites several poets under the ‘uneducated’ banner, being the first to identify them as a group and claiming their their writing was worth consideration as that of a class. The book's foundational role contributes to the current interest in labouring-class/self-educated poetry and nineteenth-century history and culture. Accompanied by a new introduction written by Southey scholar Tim Fulford, this title will be of great interest to students and scholars of Literary History.
Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810 Vol 1
by Lynda Pratt Tim Fulford Daniel RobertsThis edition of Robert Southey's early poetry seeks to restore Southey the poet to his place at the centre of late 18th and early 19th century British literary culture. This collection of his poetical works critically reassesses Southey's epics and romances.
Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810 Vol 2
by Lynda Pratt Tim Fulford Daniel RobertsThis edition of Robert Southey's early poetry seeks to restore Southey the poet to his place at the centre of late 18th and early 19th century British literary culture. This collection of his poetical works critically reassesses Southey's epics and romances.
Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810 Vol 3
by Lynda Pratt Tim Fulford Daniel RobertsThis edition of Robert Southey's early poetry seeks to restore Southey the poet to his place at the centre of late 18th and early 19th century British literary culture. This collection of his poetical works critically reassesses Southey's epics and romances.
Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810 Vol 4
by Lynda Pratt Tim Fulford Daniel RobertsThis edition of Robert Southey's early poetry seeks to restore Southey the poet to his place at the centre of late 18th and early 19th century British literary culture. This collection of his poetical works critically reassesses Southey's epics and romances.
Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810 Vol 5
by Lynda Pratt Tim Fulford Daniel RobertsThis edition of Robert Southey's early poetry seeks to restore Southey the poet to his place at the centre of late 18th and early 19th century British literary culture. This collection of his poetical works critically reassesses Southey's epics and romances.
Robert the Devil: The First Modern English Translation of Robert le Diable, an Anonymous French Romance of the Thirteenth Century
by Samuel N. RosenbergSamuel N. Rosenberg, one of the premier translators of Old French, presents in this volume the first modern English-language version of the thirteenth-century French romance Robert le Diable, a tale of supernatural birth and spiritual redemption. Robert is born after his mother, a childless noblewoman, secretly calls upon Satan to help her conceive. His wicked behavior as a boy and, later, as a destructive young man is so brutal that one day Robert prevails upon his mother to reveal the secret of his birth and thus the source of his wickedness. Upon learning the truth, he leaves his privileged home in Normandy to seek salvation. Robert’s lengthy penance—under the aegis of the Pope and a pious hermit—begins with his acting as a mute fool in the Roman Emperor’s court and ends with his sainthood. In between he plays the hero’s role in defeating the Turks in battle and turns down the hand of the Emperor’s daughter in marriage, choosing instead to return to the hermit’s abode. The legend of Robert le Diable was extraordinarily influential in the seven hundred years after its creation, generating new versions and adaptations in various languages, ranging from sixteenth-century English adaptations by Wynken de Worde and Thomas Lodge to Giacomo Meyerbeer’s esteemed 1831 opera. Framed by a thoughtful introduction and thorough bibliography, this accessible translation renders the original octosyllabic rhymed couplets of the metrical Old French romance in energetic free verse.
Robert Williams: Conversations (Conversations with Comic Artists Series)
by Joseph R. Givens and Darius A. SpiethA legendary figure of underground comix, Robert Williams (b. 1943) is an important social chronicler of American popular culture. The interviews assembled in Robert Williams: Conversations attest to his rhetorical powers, which match the high level of energy evident in his underground comix and action-filled canvases.The public perception of Williams was largely defined by two events. In 1987, Guns N’ Roses licensed a Williams painting for the cover of their best-selling album Appetite for Destruction. However, Williams’s cover art stirred controversies and was moved to the inside of the album. The second defining event was Williams’s participation in the Helter Skelter exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992. Protests ensued when a room was set aside to feature his work. Uncovering long-forgotten and hard-to-find interviews, this collection serves as a social chronicle of counterculture from the 1960s through the early 2000s. One of the founders of the original ZAP Comix collective in the 1960s, Williams drew inspiration from pulp fiction, hot rod culture, pin-up girls, and traditional academic art. He invented the comics character Cootchy Cooty and worked for the studios of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. He rubbed shoulders with outlaw motorcycle gangs and tested the legal limits of what was permissible comic book art during his day. He has often been described as a figure courting scandal and controversy, a reputation he discusses repeatedly in some of the interviews here. Since the 1980s, Williams has emerged as a force in the fine art world, raising interesting questions about how painting and comic art interrelate.
Roberto Bolaño In Context (Literature in Context)
by Jonathan B. MonroeFrom his first fifteen years in Chile, to his nine years in Mexico City from 1968 to 1977, to the quarter of a century he lived and worked in the Blanes-Barcelona area on the Costa Brava in Spain through his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño developed into an astonishingly diverse, prolific writer. He is one of the most consequential and widely read of his generation in any language. Increasingly recognized not only in Latin America, but as a major figure in World Literature, Bolaño is an essential writer for the 21st century world. This volume provides a comprehensive mapping of the pivotal contexts, events, stages, and influences shaping Bolaño's writing. As the wide-ranging investigations of this volume's 30 distinguished scholars show, Bolaño's influence and impact will shape literary cultures worldwide for years to come.
Roberto Bolaño's Fiction: An Expanding Universe
by Chris AndrewsSince the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolaño's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction.Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolaño's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile, while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolaño's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolaño's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolaño emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.
Roberto Bolaño's Fiction
by Chris AndrewsSince the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolaño (1953--2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed in contemporary fiction. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolaño's work into English, explores the singular achievements of the author's oeuvre, engaging with its distinct style and key thematic concerns, incorporating his novels and stories into the larger history of Latin American and global literary fiction.Andrews provides new readings and interpretations of Bolaño's novels, including 2666, The Savage Detectives, and By Night in Chile while at the same time examining the ideas and narrative strategies that unify his work. He begins with a consideration of the reception of Bolaño's fiction in English translation, examining the reasons behind its popularity. Subsequent chapters explore aspects of Bolaño's fictional universe and the political, ethical, and aesthetic values that shape it. Bolaño emerges as the inventor of a prodigiously effective "fiction-making system," a subtle handler of suspense, a chronicler of aimlessness, a celebrator of courage, an anatomist of evil, and a proponent of youthful openness. Written in a clear and engaging style, Roberto's Bolano's Fiction offers an invaluable understanding of one of the most important authors of the last thirty years.