"Cris Hollingsworth's waggle dance after scouting the rangiest field of literature--Virgil and Homer down to Milton and Swift, on to Plath and Byatt&#$151;leads you to where the nectar hides. . . . He wisely roams, extracting an anthology of poetry, prose, psychology, history&151;most of all, perception--that tops the bee's knees." --Paul West, author of The Secret Life of Words "Hollingsworth's wide-ranging exploration of the image of the hive is impressive. Poetics of the Hive and its panoply of references cannot fail to enrich university classrooms, especially those devoted to both the visual arts and literature." --Dore Ashton, author of A Fable of Modern Art "Cris Hollingsworth's Poetics of the Hive . . . is complex, even daring in argument; I'm even more impressed by [his] skill at an increasingly rare critical art, the educing of argument from careful, often brilliant analytical reading of literary texts." --Thomas R. Edwards, executive editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review A study to delight the passionate reader, Poetics of the Hive tells the story of the evolution of the insect metaphor from antiquity to the multicultural present. An experiment in the &147;evolutionary biology&148; of artistic form, Poetics of the Hive freshly examines classic works of literature, offering a view of poetic creation that complicates our ideas of the past and its formative role in modern consciousness and world literature. In the first part of this lyrical synthesis of rhetoric, visual and postmodern theory, and cognitive science, Cristopher Hollingsworth reveals the structure behind his metaphor, redefining it as an aesthetically and philosophically potent tableau that he calls the Hive. He traces the Hive's evolution in epic poetry from Homer to Milton, which establishes antithetical but complementary images of angelic and demonic bees that Swift, Mandeville, and Keats use variously to debate classical versus emerging ideas of the individual's relationship to society. But the Hive becomes fully psychologized, Hollingsworth argues, only when its use by Conrad and Wells to explore Europe's colonial imagination of the Other is transformed by Kafka and Sartre into competing symbols of the modern self's existential condition. Cristopher Hollingsworth is an assistant professor of English at St. John's University, Staten Island.

It is the nature of Sylvia Plath's poetry to generate singular interpretative questions and problems. With her poems, Sylvia Plath has left the enigma how a comparatively small, speedily completed oeuvre wins an international reputation. They will make my name, Sylvia Plath accurately assessed of the poems she wrote within a single month in 1962. While her name has long been made, the origins of her late work attract attention. Focusing on the cycle that introduces her culminative period, this study attempts to locate her work within the contradictions that constitute her poetics.

At the crossroads of science, mathematics, and art lives Quiver, a stunning new collection of poems that seeks to reconcile the empirical truths of science with the emotional truths of human experience. Through an ambitious set of poetic series and sequences, Somers-Willett re-invents the love poem, conjuring a voyeuristic affair between a radio astronomer and Dark Matter, radium's atomic aubade for Marie and Pierre Curie, and the shrill love song of Gregor Mendel's cross-pollinated pea plants. With intelligence and wonder, Quiver comes to understand the pursuits of science and beauty as one and the same, rendering an exquisite world where the graph of a mathematical equation can become the image of "love's witness / running with its arms open all the way home." In deft, musical lyrics that are by turns formal and experimental, studied and accessible, meditative and pragmatic, Somers-Willett portrays scientific phenomena in strikingly intimate ways. Every mystery connects in her universe, revealing a relationship between science and human sentiment that is as surprising as it is profound. --University of Georgia Press.

The book is a collection of essays presented during the First Global Conference of Monstrous Geography held at Manchester College, Oxford, and examines monstrous geographies, or the other frontier, a space that runs counter to the socially constructed space of culture.

This is an entirely different garden book: a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. There is a universality about the creation of gardens across time and in diverse cultures that has inspired this entirely different garden book: a playful and affectionate typology of gardens; a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. The Poetics of Gardens is a celebration of places and the gardens they can become. Most of the 500 sketches, axonometric drawings, and photographs were created especially for this book. They explore the special qualities of places and the acts that can transform them into gardens. The authors discuss the qualities that create the promise of a garden the shapes of land and water, the established plants, the light and wind, the climate and show how these can be organized to give a place a special meaning. And they pay particular attention to the "rituals of habitation" by which we imaginatively take possession of places on the surface of the earth. The Poetics of Gardens examines great gardens made in other places, with other climates, at other times from ancient Rome to modem England, from Ball to Botany Bay, from the court of Ch'ien Lung to the magic kingdom of Walt Disney to explore their devices and record their images, scents, and sounds. The authors discuss the adaptation of the great garden traditions of the past to North American soil and call together the creators of these gardens to speculate about how their patterns and ideas can be appropriated, transformed, and composed into places that come alive for us.

Swoon is the first extensive study of literary swooning, homing in on swooning’s rich history as well as its potential to provide new insights into the contemporary. This study demonstrates that passing-out has had a pivotal place in English literature. Beginning with an introduction to the swoon as a marker of aesthetic sensitivity, it includes chapters on swooning and generic transformation in Chaucer and Shakespeare; morbid, femininised swoons and excessive affect in romantic, gothic, and modernist works; irony, cliché and bathos in the swoons of contemporary romance fiction. This book revisits key texts to show that passing-out has been intimately connected to explorations of emotionality, ecstasy and transformation; to depictions of sickness and dying; and to performances of gender and gendering. Swoon offers an exciting new approach the history of the body alongside the history of literary response.