Helen Moore – författare

This is a book about readers: readers reading, and readers writing. They are readers of all ages and from all ages: young and old, male and female, from Europe and the Americas. The book they are reading is the Spanish chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula, known in English as Amadis de Gaule. Famous throughout the sixteenth century as the pinnacle of its fictional genre, the cultural functions of Amadis were further elaborated by the publication of Cervantes's Don Quixote in 1605, in which Amadis features as Quixote's favourite book. Amadis thereby becomes, as the philosopher Ortega y Gasset terms it, 'enclosed' within the modern novel and part of the imaginative landscape of British reader-authors such Mary Shelley, Smollett, Keats, Southey, Scott, and Thackeray.Amadis in English ranges from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, demonstrating through this 'biography' of a book the deep cultural, intellectual, and political connections of English, French, and Spanish literature across five centuries. Simultaneously an ambitious work of transnational literary history and a new intervention in the history of reading, this study argues that romance is historically located, culturally responsive, and uniquely flexible in the re-creative possibilities it offers readers. By revealing this hitherto unexamined reading experience connecting readers of all backgrounds, Amadis in English also offers many new insights into the politicisation of literary history; the construction and misconstruction of literary relations between England, France, and Spain; the practice and pleasures of reading fiction; and the enduring power of imagination.

This is a wide-ranging collection of essays on ancient Roman literary careers and their reception in later European literature, with contributions by leading experts. Starting from the three major Roman models for constructing a literary career - Virgil (the rota Vergiliana), Horace and Ovid - the volume then looks at alternative and counter-models in antiquity: Propertius, Juvenal, Cicero and Pliny. A range of post-antique responses to the ancient patterns is examined, from Dante to Wordsworth, and including Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Goethe. These chapters pose the question of the continuing relevance of ancient career models as ideas of authorship change over the centuries, leading to varying engagements and disengagements with classical literary careers. The volume also considers other ways of concluding or extending a literary career, such as bookburning and figurative metempsychosis.

This is a wide-ranging collection of essays on ancient Roman literary careers and their reception in later European literature, with contributions by leading experts. Starting from the three major Roman models for constructing a literary career - Virgil (the rota Vergiliana), Horace and Ovid - the volume then looks at alternative and counter-models in antiquity: Propertius, Juvenal, Cicero and Pliny. A range of post-antique responses to the ancient patterns is examined, from Dante to Wordsworth, and including Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, Dryden and Goethe. These chapters pose the question of the continuing relevance of ancient career models as ideas of authorship change over the centuries, leading to varying engagements and disengagements with classical literary careers. The volume also considers other ways of concluding or extending a literary career, such as bookburning and figurative metempsychosis.

"Helen Moore not only has her own distinctive voice, she has also marked out her own territory, a territory at once local and universal. You could say she has globalised the local or rather localised the global, for her concern is nothing less than our mental and physical sanity, our survival in a dark time...This troubling and troubled book is instinct with life. 'Poetry and hope are one', writes Yves Bonnefoy. Helen Moore: keep on writing poems, keep hope alive!" (Anthony Rudolf)

Manifold Greatness: the Making of the King James Bible tells the story of the creation and immediate afterlife of the King James translation of the bible, first published in 1611. The King James Bible is the most printed book in existence, with one billion copies in print. Its effect on the English language is incalculable, both in common parlance and in literature. Richly illustrated with manuscripts, artefacts, and archival material concerning the Oxford Translators such as the annotated Bodleian Bishops’ Bible of 1602, pages from the Wycliffite and Tyndale bibles and an edition of the Bishop’s Bible owned by Elizabeth I, this book also contains material on the later reception of the King James Bible in America, including a chapter on the King James Bible and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Eight chapters contributed by leading academics in the field discuss the history of biblical translation, the political background to the project, the Oxford Translators (including Henry Savile, John Rainolds, and John Harmar) and their working milieu, the book and its cultural politics, and the reception and influence of the King James Bible up until 1769 (the publication date of the ‘Oxford Standard’ edition, the first revision of the 1611 translation). Published to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible and marking the first collaboration of two of the world's leading libraries, this book brings together key research and documentation to provide a lively and meticulous account of this publishing phenomenon.