This book is the first collection of essays dedicated to the work of C. H. Sisson (1915-2003), a major English poet, critic and translator. The collection aims to offer an overall guide to his work for new readers, while also encouraging established readers of one aspect (such as his well-known classical translations) to explore others. It champions in particular the quality of his original poetry. The book brings together contributions from scholars and critics working in a wide range of fields, including classical reception, translation studies and early modern literature as well as modern English poetry, and concludes with a more personal essay on Sisson’s work by Michael Schmidt, his publisher.

The Movement was the preeminent poetical grouping of post-war Britain. This collection of original essays by distinguished poets, critics, and scholars from Britain and America provides new accounts not only of the best-known of Movement writers - Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie - but of less-familiar contemporaries.

Speaking to You explores the work of four important poets writing post-1960 - Don Paterson, Geoffrey Hill, W.S. Graham, and C.H. Sisson - in order to show how contemporary British poetry's creative handling of addresses to 'you' are key in its interactions with readers, critics, lovers, editors, fellow poets, and deceased forebears.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

Grotesque Anatomies is a study of Menippean satire in English since the Renaissance. It consists of revisionist, close readings of canonical works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pope’s Dunciad among others, and investigates how identifying them as Menippean satires changes our understanding of them. The initial chapter offers a comprehensive account of the form from antiquity to the present day, identifying its bifurcated development in the shorter form (Seneca-Lucian-Julian) and the longer, more encylopedic form (Varro-Petronius-Boethius), and their subsequent fusion during the Renaissance. It also contains an account of the critical reception of the genre, with the term ‘Menippean satire’ first being used by Justus Lipsius in 1581. Finally, Menippean satire is described as a literary version of the grotesque, and a brief theory of the grotesque in the modern period as ‘radical heterogeneity’ is outlined. This is also the foundation of a new definition of Menippean satire, drawing on previous definitions by Frye, Bakhtin and Kirk, and revising them for the modern period. The following chapters examine iconic works as examples of Menippean satire and of the grotesque. Chapter 2 offers an overview of the nose in Menippean satire and comic literature generally, and reads Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in this context. It also gives an account of metaphor as a ‘grotesque transformation’. Chapter 3 examines the figure of the stomach in Menippean satire and symposiastic literature, and reads Peacock’s Gryll Grange in this context. The link between the stomach as a figure of thinking in comic literature is the basis for an account of symbolic structuring as ‘grotesque association’. Chapter 4 is a close reading of the scatological imagery of Pope’s Dunciad, and how scatology generally tends towards a cyclical metaphysics. It also relates changes in print technology and copyright laws to the reticular scatological structure of the Dunciad. Chapter 5 argues for Eliot’s The Waste Land as a Menippean satire, focusing on the rhetorical figure of the enthymeme as a missing premise, as an example of ‘under-mindedness’ and as an ironic aspect of the fragmentation typical of late Romantic Menippean satires. Chapter 6 examines Urquhart’s eccentric The Jewel as a satire on the referential function of language, reading it in the context of projections for a universal language from this period. The final chapter identifies some key works by Derrida and Barthes as Menippean satires, noting the resurgence of the form in some postmodern and deconstructive writing.

While immensely popular in the eighteenth century, current critical wisdom regards graveyard poetry as a short-lived fad with little lasting merit. In the first book-length study of this important poetic mode, Eric Parisot suggests, to the contrary, that graveyard poetry is closely connected to the mid-century aesthetic revision of poetics. Graveyard poetry's contribution to this paradigm shift, Parisot argues, stems from changing religious practices and their increasing reliance on printed material to facilitate private devotion by way of affective and subjective response. Coupling this perspective with graveyard poetry’s obsessive preoccupation with death and salvation makes visible its importance as an articulation or negotiation between contemporary religious concerns and emerging aesthetics of poetic practice. Parisot reads the poetry of Robert Blair, Edward Young and Thomas Gray, among others, as a series of poetic experiments that attempt to accommodate changing religious and reading practices and translate religious concerns into parallel reconsiderations of poetic authority, agency, death and afterlife. Making use of an impressive body of religious treatises, sermons and verse that ground his study in a precise historical moment, Parisot shows graveyard poetry's strong ties to seventeenth-century devotional texts, and most importantly, its influential role in the development of late eighteenth-century sentimentalism and Romanticism.