"Robert Pinsky, Winner of PEN/Voelcker Career-Achievement Award for Poetry" Robert Pinsky, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States, 1997-2000, is the author of many books, including: Jersey Rain, Americans' Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, The Sounds of Poetry, The Handbook of Heartbreak, The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, among others, and three works published by Princeton: An Explanation of America; The Situation of Poetry; and...

"Women's Poetry and Popular Culture brings a fresh approach to the field by showing that poems by women do not always subvert the mainstream, the media, and the marketplace. Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary...

Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits that the Middle Ages and medieval fantasies of race and religion have recently returned. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, as well as cultural analyses...

It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded woman whom he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this common marriage plot reveals about changing reactions to money in British culture. It was in the novel that writers found space to articulate...

"Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the 'new poetry' of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including...

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, each title in the 'SparkNotes' series contains complete plot summary and analysis, key facts about the work, an analysis of the major characters, suggested essay topics, themes, motifs, and symbols, and an explanation of important quotations.

""Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture," the first comparative study of Wharton and Cather in thirty years, combines biographical, historical, and literary analyses with approaches focused on place and on aesthetics to reveal the profound similarities in their theories of fiction, their understanding of human nature, and their concerns about American culture. Employing the dual meanings of both "place" (as location and as status)...