First comprehensive biography of inventive, since neglected poet in the 150th anniversary of her birth The British poet Charlotte Mew - whose 150th anniversary falls in 2019 - was regarded as one of the best poets of her age by fellow writers. She has since been neglected, but her star is beginning to rise again. This is the first comprehensive biography, from cradle to grave, and it is written by Faber poet Julia Copus, who recently unveiled a blue plaque on Mew's childhood house in Doughty Street. Mew was a curious mix of New Woman and stalwart Victorian. Her poems speak to us strongly today, in these strangely mixed times of exposure and seclusion: they reveal the private agony of an isolated being who was forced to keep secret the tragedies of her personal life while being at the same time propelled by her work into the public arena. Her poetry transfigures that very private suffering into art that has a universal resonance.

This multi-disciplinary volume brings together the voices of biblical scholars, classicists, philosophers, theologians and political theorists to explore how ecology and theology intersected in ancient thinking, both pagan, Jewish and Christian. Ecological awareness is by no means purely a modern phenomenon. Of course, melting icecaps and plastic bag charges were of no concern in antiquity: frequently what made examining your relationship with the natural world urgent was the light this shed on human relationships with the divine. For, in the ancient world, to think about ecology was also to think about theology. This ancient eco-theological thinking - whilst in many ways worlds apart from our own environmental concerns - has also had a surprisingly rich impact on modern responses to our ecological crisis. As such, the voices gathered in this volume also reflect on whether and how these ancient ideas could inform modern responses to our environment and its pressing challenges. Through multi-disciplinary conversation this volume offers a new and dynamic exploration of the intersection of ecology and theology in ancient thinking, and its living legacy.

This books presents the first extended study of the relationship between British modernist poetry and the environment. Challenging reductive associations of modernism as predominantly anthropocentric in character and urban in focus, the book’s central argument is that within British modernist poetry there is a clear and sustained interest in the natural world which has yet to receive adequate critical attention. Whilst modernist studies continues to emphasize the plurality of the movement and the breadth of voices and concerns within it, the environmental consciousness of modernist literature and its response to changes to human/nature relations following the experience of war and modernity remain largely unexamined. Exploring British modernist poetry from an ecocritical perspective offers a fresh approach to the movement and its context, and produces original readings of both canonical and more marginalized modernist voices. This book opens by discussing the relationship between modernism and ecocriticism and the benefits of creating a dialogue between the two. It then presents new readings of Edward Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Charlotte Mew that reveal a shared preoccupation with environmental issues and a common desire to find new ways of achieving physical, psychological, and artistic reconnection with nature. Building on the continuing growth of ecocriticism, this book demonstrates how green approaches to modernist studies can produce new insights into both individual poets and the modernist movement as a whole, making it an essential resource for students of modernism, ecocriticism, and early-twentieth-century literature.

Queer Kinship after Wilde investigates the afterlife of the Decadent Movement's ideas about kinship, desire, and the family during the modernist period within a global context. Drawing on archival materials, including diaries, correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, and photograph albums, it tells the story of individuals with ties to late-Victorian Decadence and Oscar Wilde who turned to the fin-de-siècle past for inspiration as they attempted to operate outside the heteronormative boundaries restricting the practice of marriage and the family. These post-Victorian Decadents and Decadent modernists engaged in translation, travel, and transnational collaboration in pursuit of different models of connection that might facilitate their disentanglement from conventional sexual and gender ideals. Queer Kinship after Wilde attends to the successes and failures that resulted from these experiments, the new approaches to affiliation inflected by a cosmopolitan or global perspective that occurred within these networks as well as the practices marked by Decadence's troubling patterns of Orientalism and racial fetishism.

Animals, Animality, and Literature offers readers a one-volume survey of the field of literary animal studies in both its theoretical and applied dimensions. Focusing on English literary history, with scrupulous attention to the interplay between English and foreign influences, this collection gathers together the work of nineteen internationally noted specialists in this growing discipline. Offering discussion of English literary works from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf and beyond, this book explores the ways human/animal difference has been historically activated within the literary context: in devotional works, in philosophical and zoological treatises, in plays and poems and novels, and more recently within emerging narrative genres such as cinema and animation. With an introductory overview of the historical development of animal studies and afterword looking to the field's future possibilities, Animals, Animality, and Literature provides a wide-ranging survey of where this discipline currently stands.