This is Alden Nowlan's poignant first novel, in which a boy growing up in a small Nova Scotia mill town is abandoned by the young mother he adores. Family relationships, sexual confusions, and the pains of love are rendered with deep and authentic feeling. This is an essential book for all those many readers who have admired the poems and stories of this major Canadian writer.

The causes of the three English Civil Wars (1642 to 1645, 1648, and 1651) are complex and controversial clashes of conviction, belief, and personality, and a struggle between opposing social groups and economic interests. But, whatever the focus of scholarship, many answers can be sought at the local level, among county communities that were far more outward-looking than once suggested. That is why Ian Becketts in-depth study of Buckinghamshire, one of the pivotal counties during this turbulent period in British history, is of such value. None of the best-known battles or sieges took place in Buckinghamshire, but there was destructive combat in the county on a smaller scale because its location placed it on the front line between the opposing forces between the royalist headquarters at Oxford and the parliamentarian stronghold of London. As Ian Beckett shows, the impact of war on Bucks was considerable. His analysis gives us an insight into the experience of local communities and the county as a whole and it reveals much about the experience of the conflict across the country.

The Modest Ambition of Andrew Marvell deals with the specific historical presences and pressures that led Marvell to devise his defenses of Richard Lovelace, Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Fairfax, and John Milton. It also focuses on the poetic or formal response that Marvell makes to historical fact, not only in the strategies of his language, but also in the perceptible adjustments such strategies signal for his self-appointed role as poet-apologist.

The Maritime region is thus torn between its memory of an earlier, more prosperous and traditional social order and its present experience as a less fortunate modern industrial society. These tensions are embedded in the Maritime character and have affected not only the lives of its people but the imaginations and texts of its writers."--BOOK JACKET.

This book examines Nowlan's bravery in accepting the limitations of his class and his art, as well as the myopia of the critical milieu in which his work was measured. Here is a glimpse of his Künstlerroman - the elements of his art and his humanity, which sees his reputation steadily developing internationally.

How do men imagine women? In the poetry of Petrarch and his English successors—Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell—the male poet persistently imagines pursuing a woman, Laura, whom he pursues even as she continues to deny his affections. Critics have long held that, in objectifying Laura, these male-authored texts deny the imaginative, intellectual, and physical life of the woman they idealize. In Laura, Barbara L. Estrin counters this traditional view by focusing not on the generative powers of the male poet, but on the subjectivity of the imagined woman and the imaginative space of the poems she occupies. Through close readings of the Rime sparse and the works of Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell, Estrin uncovers three Lauras: Laura-Daphne, who denies sexuality; Laura-Eve, who returns the poet’s love; and Laura-Mercury, who reinvents her own life. Estrin claims that in these three guises Laura subverts both genre and gender, thereby introducing multiple desires into the many layers of the poems. Drawing upon genre and gender theories advanced by Jean-François Lyotard and Judith Butler to situate female desire in the poem’s framework, Estrin shows how genre and gender in the Petrarchan tradition work together to undermine the stability of these very concepts. Estrin’s Laura constitutes a fundamental reconceptualization of the Petrarchan tradition and contributes greatly to the postmodern reassessment of the Renaissance period. In its descriptions of how early modern poets formulate questions about sexuality, society and poetry, Laura will appeal to scholars of the English and Italian Renaissance, of gender studies, and of literary criticism and theory generally.

First published in 1998, this title provides for the reader of the renowned metaphysical poet and politician a valuable reference and resource volume. It is a compendium of useful information for any reader of Andrew Marvell, including crucial biographical material, historical contextualisation, and details about his life’s work. The intention throughout is to enhance understanding and appreciation, without being exhaustive. The major portion of the volume, in both importance and size, is ‘A Marvell Dictionary’. Its entries are arranged alphabetically: they identify, describe and explain the most influential persons in Marvell’s life and works, as well as places, characters, allusions, ideas, concepts, individual words, phrases and literary terms that are relevant to a rounded appreciation of his poetry and prose. An Andrew Marvell Companion will prove invaluable for all students of English poetry and seventeenth-century political history.