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Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain
by Irene MorraThis book is the first to examine in depth the contributions of major British authors such as W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, as critics and librettists, to the rise of British opera in the twentieth century. The perceived literary values of British authors, as much as the musical innovations of British composers, informed the aesthetic development of British opera. Indeed, British opera emerged as a simultaneously literary and musical project. Too often, operatic adaptations are compared superficially to their original sources. This is a particular problem for British opera, which has become increasingly defined artistically by the literary sophistication of its narrative sources. The resulting collaborations between literary figures and composers have crucial implications for the development of both opera and literature. Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain reveals the importance of this literary involvement in operatic adaptation to literature and literary studies, to music and musicology, and to cultural and theoretical studies.
Twentieth Century British Drama
by John SmartCritical introductions to a range of literary topics and genres. Looking back on 20th century British drama from its' historical, social and political perspective enables the reader to set each play in a broader context. Contents include a selection of play extracts from well-known authors including Harold Brighouse, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Timberlake Wertenbaker.
Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History
by Alison DonnellThis bold study traces the processes by which a ‘history’ and canon of Caribbean literature and criticism have been constructed. It offers a supplement to that history by presenting new writers, texts and critical moments that help to reconfigure the Caribbean tradition. Focusing on Anglophone or Anglocreole writings from across the twentieth century, Alison Donnell asks what it is that we read when we approach ‘Caribbean Literature’, how it is that we read it and what critical, ideological and historical pressures may have influenced our choices and approaches. In particular, the book: * addresses the exclusions that have resulted from the construction of a Caribbean canon * rethinks the dominant paradigms of Caribbean literary criticism, which have brought issues of anti-colonialism and nationalism, migration and diaspora, ‘double-colonised’ women, and the marginalization of sexuality and homosexuality to the foreground * seeks to put new issues and writings into critical circulation by exploring lesser-known authors and texts, including Indian Caribbean women’s writings and Caribbean queer writings. Identifying alternative critical approaches and critical moments, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature allows us to re-examine the way in which we read not only Caribbean writings, but also the literary history and criticism that surround them.
Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism: Reading Audiences
by Kathy CawseyShifting ideas about Geoffrey Chaucer's audience have produced radically different readings of Chaucer's work over the course of the past century. Kathy Cawsey, in her book on the changing relationship among Chaucer, critics, and theories of audience, draws on Michel Foucault's concept of the 'author-function' to propose the idea of an 'audience function' which shows the ways critics' concepts of audience affect and condition their criticism. Focusing on six trend-setting Chaucerian scholars, Cawsey identifies the assumptions about Chaucer's audience underpinning each critic's work, arguing these ideas best explain the diversity of interpretation in Chaucer criticism. Further, Cawsey suggests few studies of Chaucer's own understanding of audience have been done, in part because Chaucer criticism has been conditioned by scholars' latent suppositions about Chaucer's own audience. In making sense of the confusing and conflicting mass of modern Chaucer criticism, Cawsey also provides insights into the development of twentieth-century literary criticism and theory.
Twentieth-Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary Talk: Speaking Between the Lines
by Susan MandalaIn this book, Susan Mandala offers a series of in-depth investigations into how the dialogue of four modern plays 'works' with respect to the pragmatic and discoursal norms postulated for ordinary conversation. After an account of the often-heated debates between linguists and critics concerning the analysis of drama dialogue as talk, four plays are considered: Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, Arnold Wesker's Roots, Terence Rattigan's In Praise of Love, and Alan Ayckbourn's Just Between Ourselves. For readers unfamiliar with linguistic approaches to talk, a chapter outlining the major frameworks used in the analysis of the plays is also included. By considering both linguistic and literary perspectives, this book extends the boundaries of traditional criticism and shows how the linguistic study of conversation can contribute to our understanding of dramatic dialogue.
Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender
by Heather IngmanDuring much of the twentieth century, Irish women's position was on the boundaries of national life. Using Julia Kristeva's theories of nationhood, often particularly relevant to Ireland, this study demonstrates that their marginalization was to women's, and indeed the nation's, advantage as Irish women writers used their voice to subvert received pieties both about women and about the Irish nation. Kristevan theories of the other, the foreigner, the semiotic, the mother, and the sacred are explored in authors as diverse as Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Edna O'Brien, Mary Dorcey, Jennifer Johnston, and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, as well as authors from Northern Ireland like Deirdre Madden, Polly Devlin, and Mary Morrissy. These writers, whose voices have frequently been sidelined or misunderstood because they write against the grain of their country's cultural heritage, finally receive their due in this important contribution to Irish and gender studies.
The Twentieth Century in Poetry
by Peter ChildsUntil now, most teaching has focused on the novel as the most useful way of raising issues of gender, ethnicity, theory, nationality, politics and social class. In The Twentieth Century in Poetry Peter Childs places literature in a wider social context and demonstrates that all poetry is historically produced and consumed and is part of our understanding of society and identity. This student-friendly critical survey includes chapters on: * the Georgians * First World War poetry * Eliot * Yeats * the thirties * post-war poetry * contemporary anthologies * women's poetry * Northern Irish and black British poets It builds a narrative not of poetry in the twentieth century, but of the twentieth century in poetry.
Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden
by Richard RulandA collection of essays on Thoreau's work.
Twentieth-century Literary Encounters in China: Modernism, Travel, and Form (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Jeffrey MatherFrom the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound’s mediated ‘journeys’ to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the flux of travel – including poems, novels, autobiographies – this study argues that the tumultuous social and political context of China’s Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine China’s influence on Western modernism through language, translation, and discourse, the book recovers a materialist engagement with landscapes, objects, and things as transcribed through travel, ethnographic encounter, and embodied experience. The book is organized by three themes which suggest formal strategies through which notions cultural modernity were explored or contested: borderlands, cosmopolitan performances, and mobile poetics. As it draws from archival sources in order to develop these themes, this study offers a place-based historical perspective on China’s changing status in Western literary cultures.
Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War
by Rachel BryanStudents of twentieth-century literature are familiar with narratives that associate devastating wars with conceptual, societal, and aesthetic upheavals. What these accounts overlook, however, is a body of psychologically attuned modern writing that was less interested in this shattering of faith and form than in those counterfactual modes of resistance deployed by individuals and nations in response to mass violence and profound change. Twentieth-Century Literature and the Aftermath of War is an innovative study of the attention paid to such reparative, stabilising impulses in post-war writings from across the last century. Focusing on works by Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as case studies, it argues that to fully understand the relationship between modern warfare and literary art, we must learn to engage with texts whose modernity lies in their acknowledgement of the draw felt towards, and contested ethics of, consolatory counterfactuals.
Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction
by Naomi LindstromSpanish American fiction became a world phenomenon in the twentieth century through multilanguage translations of such novels as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits . Yet these "blockbusters" are only a tiny fraction of the total, rich outpouring of Spanish-language literature from Latin America. In this book, Naomi Lindstrom offers English-language readers a comprehensive survey of the century's literary production in Latin America (excluding Brazil). Discussing movements and trends, she places the famous masterworks in historical perspective and highlights authors and works that deserve a wider readership. Her study begins with Rodó's famous essay Ariel and ends with Rigoberta Menchú's 1992 achievement of the Nobel Prize. Her selection of works is designed to draw attention, whenever possible, to works that are available in good English translations. A special feature of the book is its treatment of the "postboom" period. In this important concluding section, Lindstrom discusses documentary narratives, the new interrelations between popular culture and literary writing, and underrepresented groups such as youth cultures, slum dwellers, gays and lesbians, and ethnic enclaves. Written in accessible, nonspecialized language, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction will be equally useful for general readers as a broad overview of this vibrant literature and for scholars as a reliable reference work. Spanish American fiction became a world phenomenon in the twentieth century through multilanguage translations of such novels as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, and Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits. Yet these "blockbusters" are only a tiny fraction of the total, rich outpouring of Spanish-language literature from Latin America. In this book, Naomi Lindstrom offers English-language readers a comprehensive survey of the century's literary production in Latin America (excluding Brazil). Discussing movements and trends, she places the famous masterworks in historical perspective and highlights authors and works that deserve a wider readership. Her study begins with Rodó's famous essay Ariel and ends with Rigoberta Menchú's 1992 achievement of the Nobel Prize. Her selection of works is designed to draw attention, whenever possible, to works that are available in good English translations. A special feature of the book is its treatment of the "postboom" period. In this important concluding section, Lindstrom discusses documentary narratives, the new interrelations between popular culture and literary writing, and underrepresented groups such as youth cultures, slum dwellers, gays and lesbians, and ethnic enclaves. Written in accessible, nonspecialized language, Twentieth-Century Spanish American Fiction will be equally useful for general readers as a broad overview of this vibrant literature and for scholars as a reliable reference work.
The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel
by Raymond Leslie WilliamsSpanish American novels of the Boom period (1962-1967) attracted a world readership to Latin American literature, but Latin American writers had already been engaging in the modernist experiments of their North American and European counterparts since the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the desire to be "modern" is a constant preoccupation in twentieth-century Spanish American literature and thus a very useful lens through which to view the century's novels.<P><P>In this pathfinding study, Raymond L. Williams offers the first complete analytical and critical overview of the Spanish American novel throughout the entire twentieth century. Using the desire to be modern as his organizing principle, he divides the century's novels into five periods and discusses the differing forms that "the modern" took in each era. For each period, Williams begins with a broad overview of many novels, literary contexts, and some cultural debates, followed by new readings of both canonical and significant non-canonical novels. A special feature of this book is its emphasis on women writers and other previously ignored and/or marginalized authors, including experimental and gay writers. Williams also clarifies the legacy of the Boom, the Postboom, and the Postmodern as he introduces new writers and new novelistic trends of the 1990s.
Twentieth-Century Writers 1950-1990
by Tom VerdeBiographies of Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, and John Updike. A glimpse of the society which inspired the author is provided as well as the impact of the author's work on the reading public. This is a fascinating and useful literary resource. A reader interested in sampling the author's writing for the first time will find informative descriptions which will help in selecting a place to start. Those who have already read a book or two by one of the authors can find ideas for further exploration of that author's themes, style and stories. [from the back cover:] "From 1950 to 1990, America underwent tremendous economic, technological, social and cultural change. Emerging from World War II as citizens of a triumphant modern power, Americans saw among other phenomena the cold war, the "Beat," generation of the 1950s, hippies, the Vietnam War, the fight for the rights of women and minorities, Watergate, and the rise and fall of the Regan era. Twentieth-Century writers 1950-1990 explores the literary figures who looked at America during this time and gave us their unique and artful interpretations of modern culture. Twentieth-Century Writers 1950--1990 profiles eight of the most celebrated and compelling voices in American letters since World War II. The literary landscape covered by these authors ranges broadly from John Updike's elite New England prep schools to Jack Kerouac's endless highways, from Flannery O'Connor's twisted South to Saul Bellow's bustling North: from J. D. Salinger's view of alienated adolescence to Kurt Vonnegut's chilling vision of the future. Author Tom Verde skillfully interweaves biographical information with literary criticism and assessments of the authors' work and its significance in American life and culture. The reference value of every book in American Profiles, the series of which Twentieth-Century Writers 1950-1990 is a part is greatly enhanced by the inclusion of chronologies and further reading lists and a concise introduction of the general subject of the book. The first reference of its kind designed with the needs of middle school and high school students in mind, the series presents a wealth of useful information on important Americans and their achievements in all fields of endeavor.
Twenty-First Century Arab and African Diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America (Routledge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature)
by Cristián H. RicciThis volume considers the Arabic and African Diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking essays extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.
Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City (Literary Urban Studies)
by Magali Cornier MichaelThe essays in this edited collection offer incisive and nuanced analyses of and insights into the state of British cities and urban environments in the twenty-first century. Britain’s experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literature’s depiction of the city and urban contexts. Recent British fiction focuses in particular on cities as intertwined with globalization and global capitalism (including the proliferation of media) and with issues of immigration and migration. Indeed, decolonization has brought large numbers of people from former colonies to Britain, thus making British cities ever more diverse. Such mixing of peoples in urban areas has led to both racist fears and possibilities of cosmopolitan co-existence.
Twenty-First Century Drama
by Louise Lepage Siân AdiseshiahWithin this landmark collection, originalvoices from the field of drama provide rich analysis of a selection of the mostexciting and remarkable plays and productions of the twenty-first century. But what makes the drama of the new millenium so distinctive? Which events, themes, shifts, and paradigms are marking its stages? Kaleidoscopic in scope, Twenty-FirstCentury Drama: What Happens Now creates a broad, rigorously criticalframework for approaching the drama of this period, including its forms,playwrights, companies, institutions, collaborative projects, and directors. The collection has a deliberately British bent,examiningestablished playwrights - such as Churchill, Brenton, and Hare - alongside anew generation of writers - including Stephens, Prebble, Kirkwood, Bartlett,and Kelly. Simultaneously international in scope, it engages with significant new work from the US,Japan, India, Australia, and the Netherlands, to reflect atwenty-first century context that is fundamentally globalized. The volume'scentral themes - the financial crisis, austerity, climate change, new forms ofhuman being, migration, class, race and gender, cultural politics and issues ofnationhood - are mediated through fresh, cutting-edge perspectives.
Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature (Children's Literature Association Series)
by Roberta Seelinger TritesOver twenty years after the publication of her groundbreaking work, Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels, Roberta Seelinger Trites returns to analyze how literature for the young still provides one outlet in which feminists can offer girls an alternative to sexism. Supplementing her previous work in the linguistic turn, Trites employs methodologies from the material turn to demonstrate how feminist thinking has influenced literature for the young in the last two decades. She interrogates how material feminism can expand our understanding of maturation and gender—especially girlhood—as represented in narratives for preadolescents and adolescents. Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature applies principles behind material feminisms, such as ecofeminism, intersectionality, and the ethics of care, to analyze important feminist thinking that permeates twenty-first-century publishing for youth. The structure moves from examinations of the individual to examinations of the individual in social, environmental, and interpersonal contexts. The book deploys ecofeminism and the posthuman to investigate how embodied individuals interact with the environment and via the extension of feministic ethics how people interact with each other romantically and sexually. Throughout the book, Trites explores issues of identity, gender, race, class, age, and sexuality in a wide range of literature for young readers, such as Kate DiCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park. She demonstrates how shifting cultural perceptions of feminism affect what is happening both in publishing for the young and in the academic study of literature for children and adolescents.
Twenty-First Century Fiction
by Siân Adiseshiah Rupert HildyardThis lively new volume of essays examines what happens now in 21st century fiction. Fresh theoretical approaches to writers such as Salman Rushdie, David Peace, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel, and identifications of 21st-century themes, tropes and styles combine to produce a timely critical intervention into genuinely contemporary fiction.
Twenty-First-Century Fiction
by Peter BoxallThe widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilyn Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald, and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman, and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students, and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.
Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing: Decentring Epistemologies (Routledge Research in Travel Writing)
by Samia Ounoughi Emmanuelle Peraldo Anne-Florence QuaireauTwenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing evidences the evolution of travel writing studies over the last two decades and points to innovative ways to study this heterogeneous genre. This volume seeks to build bridges between the study of travel writing and disciplines of sciences and human sciences so that the analyses of travel texts, images, and objects lead to interdisciplinary enrichment. This volume revisits the complicated relationship between fact and fiction, science and literature, and the world and the word through transdisciplinary approaches. Through case studies of British travel writing from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the contributors provide illustrations of the fruitful intersection of travel writing studies with other methodologies, such as literary studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, visual studies, areal studies, engineering studies, food studies, animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and geocriticism.
Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies: Native North America in (Trans)Motion (Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives #1)
by Sabine N. Meyer Birgit Däwes Karsten FitzIn recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of Native North American and Indigenous Studies have reflected, at times even foreshadowed and initiated, many of the influential theoretical discussions in the humanities after the "transnational turn." Global trends of identity politics, performativity, cultural performance and ethics, comparative and revisionist historiography, ecological responsibility and education, as well as issues of social justice have shaped and been shaped by discussions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. This volume brings together distinguished perspectives on these topics by the Native scholars and writers Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), and Tomson Highway (Cree), as well as non-Native authorities, such as Chadwick Allen, Hartmut Lutz, and Helmbrecht Breinig. Contributions look at various moments in the cultural history of Native North America—from earthmounds via the Catholic appropriation of a Mohawk saint to the debates about Makah whaling rights—as well as at a diverse spectrum of literary, performative, and visual works of art by John Ross, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, Emily Pauline Johnson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Emma Lee Warrior, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Stephen Graham Jones, and Gerald Vizenor, among others. In doing so, the selected contributions identify new and recurrent methodological challenges, outline future paths for scholarly inquiry, and explore the intersections between Indigenous Studies and contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies at large.
Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers: New Voices, New Perspectives
by Jean W. Cash and Richard GaughranContributions by Destiny O. Birdsong, Jean W. Cash, Kevin Catalano, Amanda Dean Freeman, David Gates, Richard Gaughran, Rebecca Godwin, Joan Wylie Hall, Dixon Hearne, Phillip Howerton, Emily D. Langhorne, Shawn E. Miller, Melody Pritchard, Nick Ripatrazone, Bes Stark Spangler, Scott Hamilton Suter, Melanie Benson Taylor, Jay Varner, and Scott D. Yarbrough Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers: New Voices, New Perspectives, an anthology of critical essays, introduces a new group of fiction writers from the American South. These fresh voices, like their twentieth-century predecessors, examine what it means to be a southerner in the modern world. These writers’ works cover wide-ranging subjects and themes: the history of the region, the continued problems of the working-class South, the racial divisions that have continued, the violence of the modern world, and the difficulties of establishing a spiritual identity in a modern context. The approaches and styles vary from writer to writer, with realistic, place-centered description as the foundation of many of their works. They have also created new perspectives regarding point of view, and some have moved toward the inclusion of “magic realism” and even science fiction in their work. The nineteen essays in Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers feature a handful of fiction writers who are already well known, such as National Book Award–winner Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Michael Farris Smith, and Inman Majors. Others deserve greater recognition, and, in many cases, works in this anthology will be the first pieces of analysis dedicated to writers and their work. Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers aims to alert scholars of southern literature, as well as the reading public, to an exciting and varied group of writers, while laying a foundation for future examination of these works.
Twenty-five Books That Shaped America
by Thomas C. FosterFrom the author of the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes a highly entertaining and informative new book on the twenty-five works of literature that have most shaped the American character. Foster applies his much-loved combination of wit, know-how, and analysis to explain how each work has shaped our very existence as readers, students, teachers, and Americans.Foster illuminates how books such as The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, My Ántonia, The Great Gatsby, The Maltese Falcon, Their Eyes Were Watching God, On the Road, The Crying of Lot 49, and others captured an American moment, how they influenced our perception of nationhood and citizenship, and what about them endures in the American character. Twenty-five Books That Shaped America is a fun and enriching guide to America through its literature.
The Twenty Most Effective Language Teaching Techniques (ISSN)
by I.S.P. NationFrom leading scholar and applied linguist Paul Nation, this book describes and explains the 20 most effective and efficient language teaching techniques and why they work. Backed by decades of research and expertise, Nation examines the principles of learning connected to these techniques, as well as the factors affecting their choice and usage.These techniques are organized around the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For each skill, there is an opportunity for learning through meaning-focused use, an opportunity for learning through deliberate study, and a window for fluency development through working with easy material. Each technique is described and analyzed to demonstrate its learning goals and the principles of learning in use.In demonstrating key techniques and methods for language learning, this book is particularly useful for pre-service teachers and students in applied linguistics, TESOL, and language teaching. Each chapter also has a substantial list of research topics for projects or theses.
Twenty-Nine Goodbyes: An Introduction to Chinese Poetry
by Timothy BillingsA primer for those with no previous knowledge of Chinese, this book introduces readers to the fundamentals of classical Chinese poetry through twenty-nine ways of understanding a single poem. “Seeing Off a Friend,” by the great Tang poet Li Bai (701–762) has long been praised for its vividness, subtlety, and poignancy. Anthologizing twenty-nine translations of the poem, Timothy Billings not only introduces the poem’s richness and depth but also the nuanced art of translating Chinese poetry into European languages. A famous exemplar of “seeing off poetry,” which was common in an empire whose literati were continually on the move, Li’s poem has continued to fascinate readers far removed from its moment of composition, from the Victorians, to Ezra Pound, to contemporary translators from around the world. In talking us through these linguistic crossings, Billings unpacks the intricacies of the lüshi or "regulated verse poem," a form as pivotal to Chinese literature as the sonnet is to European tradition.This book promises to transform its readers, step-by-step, into adept interpreters of one of the most significant verse forms in Chinese literary history. Billings’s engaging teaching style, backed by a lightly worn but deep scholarly engagement with Chinese poetry, makes this work an indispensable guide for anyone interested in poetry, translation, or the cultural heritage of China.