THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY

Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O'Neill Frontmatter More information

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

ENGLISH POETRY

Poetry written in English is uniquely powerful and suggestive in its capacity to surprise, unsettle, shock, console and move. The Cambridge History of English Poetry offers sparklingly fresh and dynamic readings of an extraordinary range of poets and poems from Beowulf to Alice Oswald. An international team of experts explores how poets in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland use language and to what effect, examining questions of form, tone and voice; they comment, too, on how formal choices are inflected by the poet's time and place. The Cambridge History of English Poetry is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the field from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. It traces patterns of continuity, transformation, transition and development. Covering a remarkable array of poets and poems, and featuring an extensive bibliography, the scope and depth of this major work of reference make it required reading for anyone interested in poetry.

M I C H A E L O ' N E I L L is Professor of English at Durham University. He has published widely on poetry and is a published poet himself. His recent publications include The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American and Irish Poetry (2007) and Wheel (2008), a collection of poems.

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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O'Neill Frontmatter More information

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

ENGLISH POETRY

*

Edited by MICHAEL O'NEILL

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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O'Neill Frontmatter More information

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First published 2010

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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O'Neill Frontmatter More information

Contents

Notes on contributors x Acknowledgments xvi

Introduction 1 michael o'neill

1 . Old English poetry 7 bernard o'donoghue

2 . The Gawain-poet and medieval romance 26 corinne saunders

3 . Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy) 43 wendy scase

4 . Langland: Piers Plowman 63 a. v. c. schmidt

5 . Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales 81 laura varnam

6 . Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas 96 felicity riddy

7 . Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey 115 elizabeth heale

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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-88306-1 - The Cambridge History of English Poetry Edited by Michael O'Neill Frontmatter More information

List of contents

8 . Spenser 136 andrew hadfield

9 . Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric 154

katharine a. craik

10 . The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare 173 paul edmondson

11 . Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson 192 jonathan post

12 . Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell 211 alison shell

13 . Milton's shorter poems 231 barbara k. lewalski

14 . Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes 255 barbara k. lewalski

15 . Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries 281 hester jones

16 . Dryden: major poems 299 steven n. zwicker

17 . Swift 318 claude rawson

18 . Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet 333 claude rawson

19 . Eighteenth-century women poets 358 christine gerrard

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