William Dunbar – författare

At the same time that he charged Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the great Northwest, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned William Dunbar and George Hunter to make a parallel journey through the southern unmapped regions of the Louisiana Purchase. From October 16, 1804, to January 26, 1805, Dunbar and Hunter, both renowned scientists, made their way through what is now northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas, ascending the Ouachita River and investigating the natural curiosity called ""the hot springs."" The Forgotten Expedition, 1804-1805 represents the first time that their daily journals -- which describe the flora and fauna, geology, weather, and native peoples they encountered along the way -- appear in a single volume.The team of the ""Grand Expedition,"" as it was optimistically named, was the first to send its findings on the newly annexed territory to the president, who received Dunbar and Hunter's detailed journals with pleasure. They include descriptions of flora and fauna, geology, weather, landscapes, and native peoples and European settlers, as well as astronomical and navigational records that allowed the first accurate English maps of the region and its waterways to be produced. Their scientific experiments conducted at the hot springs may be among the first to discover a microscopic phenomena still under research today.Extensively annotated and carefully researched, The Forgotten Expedition completes the picture of the Louisiana Purchase presented through the journals of explorers Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, and Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis. It is a treasure of the early natural history of North America and the first depiction of this new U.S. southern frontier.

William Dunbar (c.1460-1520) bridges the divide between medieval bard and Renaissance poet. From the sonorous beat of the Lament for the Makaris to the subtle satire of "The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo", his self-knowledge and mocking wit points to the development of a modern artistic consciousness while his skill, craftsmanship and sense of language still have the power to inspire today. This book is a must-have for any serious scholar of European Medieval and Renaissance literature. The first volume gives the text of every Dunbar poem while the second provides a wealth of explanatory notes and reference material, allowing each poem to be easily studied in-depth. As well as freshly established texts of all Dunbar's works, these two volumes contain a full introduction; a complete listing of textual variants in all the early manuscripts and printings; extensive notes on every poem; a glossary; and lists of sources and secondary material.One of the editor's chief concerns has been to elucidate not just the literal sense but also the connotations of Dunbar's words: the figurative and metaphoric uses, the legalisms, poetic archaisms, puns and other wordplay, as well as the use of proverbs, scriptural allusions and debts or affinity to earlier poets. This has taken her into many varied and unexpected areas of medieval life and thought in assembling her line-by-line commentary on every poem in the edition. Readers will find new information about obscure words and phrases and no difficult passage is passed over silently. These volumes are a tribute not only to the wonderful poet whose works they contain but also to the industry, erudition and acumen of his latest editor.

Scottish poet William Dunbar is usually considered one of the most important figures of fifteenth-century British literature, and may lay claim to being the finest lyric poet writing in English in the century and half between the death of Chaucer in 1400 and the appearance of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. Dunbar's poems offer vivid depictions of late medieval Scottish society and serve up a striking pageant of colorful figures at the court of James IV (r. 1488-1513), with which he was associated for much of his adult life. The poems are remarkable both for their diversity and variability and for their multiplicity of voices, styles, and tones. The great variety of poems within Dunbar's canon includes religious hymns of exaltation, moral poems on a wide range of serious themes, comic and parodic poems of extreme salaciousness and scatological coarseness, general satires against the times, and satires with much more specific targets, often a single individual. This edition of eighty-four poems attributed to Dunbar includes extensive background material and explanatory notes that are sure to be of interest to students and Dunbar enthusiasts alike. The edition is rounded out with textual notes, an index of first lines, and a glossary.