Alex Davis - Böcker

Impossible bequests of the soul; an outlawed younger son who rises to become justice of the king's forests; the artificially-preserved corpse of the heir to an empire; a medieval clerk kept awake at night by fears of falling; a seventeenth-century noblewoman who commissions copies upon copies of her genealogy; Elizabethan efforts to eradicate Irish customs of succession; thoughts of the legacy of sin bequeathed to mankind by our first parents, Adam and Eve.This book explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. The writing composed during this period was the product of what the historian Georges Duby has called a 'society of heirs', in which inheritance functioned as a key instrument of social reproduction, acting to ensure that existing structures of status, wealth, familial power, political influence, and gender relations were projected from the present into the future. In poetry, prose, and drama--in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and his Canterbury Tales; in Spenser's Faerie Queene; in plays by Shakespeare such as Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; and in a host of other works--we encounter a range of texts that attests to the extraordinary imaginative reach of questions of inheritance between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Moving between the late medieval and early modern periods, Imagining Inheritance examines this body of writing in order to argue that an exploration of the ways in which premodern inheritance was imagined can make legible the deep structures of power that modernity wants to forget.

This glossary offers an introduction to Irish culture and society and a route-map to further study. Designed specifically with undergraduates in mind, it contains around 400 short and accessible explanations of the key events, figures and concepts in Irish Studies since the pre-modern period.

In this 2000 collection, an international team of contributors contest the conventional critical view of modernism as a transnational or supranational entity. They examine relationships between modernist poetry and place, and foreground issues of region and space, nation and location in the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. The book brings the work of major canonical writers into juxtaposition with more neglected modernists such as Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas, writers whose investment in the concepts of region and nation, it is argued, contributed to their relative marginalisation. These essays offer a fascinating perspective on contemporary valuations of modernism through their investigation of some of the Anglo-American locations of modernism, and assess the regional and nationalist affiliations of modernist poetry. The Locations of Literary Modernism maps a topography of poetic modernism that is quite different from what had hitherto been accepted as comprehensive.

This Companion offers the most comprehensive overview available of modernist poetry, its forms, its major authors and its contexts. The first part explores the historical and cultural contexts and sexual politics of literary modernism and the avant garde. The chapters in the second part concentrate on individual authors and movements, while the concluding part offers a comprehensive overview of the early reception and subsequent canonisation of modernist poetry. As well as insightful readings of canonical poets, the Companion features extended discussions of poets whose importance is now being increasingly recognised, such as Mina Loy, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and postcolonial poets in the Caribbean, Africa and India. While modernist poets are often thought of as difficult, these essays will help students to understand and enjoy their experimental, playful and fascinating responses to contemporary social and cultural change and their dialogue with the arts and with each other.

In this 2000 collection, an international team of contributors contest the conventional critical view of modernism as a transnational or supranational entity. They examine relationships between modernist poetry and place, and foreground issues of region and space, nation and location in the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. The book brings the work of major canonical writers into juxtaposition with more neglected modernists such as Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas, writers whose investment in the concepts of region and nation, it is argued, contributed to their relative marginalisation. These essays offer a fascinating perspective on contemporary valuations of modernism through their investigation of some of the Anglo-American locations of modernism, and assess the regional and nationalist affiliations of modernist poetry. The Locations of Literary Modernism maps a topography of poetic modernism that is quite different from what had hitherto been accepted as comprehensive.

This Companion offers the most comprehensive overview available of modernist poetry, its forms, its major authors and its contexts. The first part explores the historical and cultural contexts and sexual politics of literary modernism and the avant garde. The chapters in the second part concentrate on individual authors and movements, while the concluding part offers a comprehensive overview of the early reception and subsequent canonisation of modernist poetry. As well as insightful readings of canonical poets, the Companion features extended discussions of poets whose importance is now being increasingly recognised, such as Mina Loy, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and postcolonial poets in the Caribbean, Africa and India. While modernist poets are often thought of as difficult, these essays will help students to understand and enjoy their experimental, playful and fascinating responses to contemporary social and cultural change and their dialogue with the arts and with each other.

A reinterpretation of the place and significance of chivalric culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what it says about contemporary attitudes to the medieval.Chivalry and Romance in Renaissance England offers a reinterpretation of the place and significance of chivalric culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century and explores the implications of this reconfigured interpretation for an understanding of the medieval generally. Received wisdom has it that both chivalric culture and the literature of chivalry - romances - were obsolete by the time of the Renaissance, an understanding epitomised by the figure of Don Quixote, the reader of chivalric fictions whose risible literary tastes render him absurd. By way of contrast, this study finds evidence for the continued vitality and relevance of chivalric values at all levels of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century society, from the court entertainments of Elizabeth I to the civic culture of London merchants and artisans. At the same time, it charts the process by which, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chivalric has been firstly exclusively identified with the medieval and then transformed into a virtual shorthand for 'pastness' generally.ALEX DAVIS is lecturer in English, University of St Andrews.

A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative anglophone poetries from decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

First full study of the use made by Renaissance writers of the past in their prose fiction.Davis's study could scarcely be more timely or invigorating. SEAN KEILEN, College of William and Mary. Williamsburg VAA majority of the fiction composed in England in the second half of the sixteenth century was set inthe past. All the major prose writers of the period (Thomas Lodge, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, Robert Greene) produced historical fiction, with settings ranging from the ancient world (as in Sidney's Arcadia) to the time of Henry VIII (in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller). Yet while studies of the historical drama of the period abound, the historical bias of prose fiction has so far escaped any sort of sustained critical consideration. Renaissance Historical Fiction is the first book-length study of this important topic. It argues for the complex ways in which these prose fictions engage with an idea of the past, and of their power to destabilize some of our dominant models for understanding the period of 'the Renaissance'. The wide range of texts discussed includes Lodge's Robin the Devil; Greene's Ciceronis Amor; John Lyly's Euphues and his England; and the anonymous Famous History of Friar Bacon. In addition, a chapter apiece is devoted to three key authors (Sidney, Deloney and Nashe) whose work best represents the imaginative richness and thematic complexity of the historical fiction of the late sixteenth century.Alex Davis is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews.

This is a study of one of the most important poets of the mid 20th-century. At the time of his death, Denis Devlin was Irish ambassador to Italy. This book looks at Devlin's work within the aftermath of the Irish literary revival and Anglo-American and French modernism and then relates it to the work of Devlin's contemporaries (such as Thomas McGreevy, Brian Coffey and Samuel Beckett) and to modernism poets since his death.

This is a study of one of the most important poets of the mid 20th-century. At the time of his death, Denis Devlin was Irish ambassador to Italy. This book looks at Devlin's work within the aftermath of the Irish literary revival and Anglo-American and French modernism and then relates it to the work of Devlin's contemporaries (such as Thomas McGreevy, Brian Coffey and Samuel Beckett) and to modernism poets since his death.