Title: Sappho's lyre: archaic lyric and women poets of ancient Greece
Author: Rayor, Diane J
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literature in Translation | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Sappho sang her poetry to the accompaniment of the lyre on the Greek island of Lesbos over 2500 years ago. Throughout the Greek world, her contemporaries composed lyric poetry full of passion, and in the centuries that followed the golden age of archaic lyric, new forms of poetry emerged. In this unique anthology, today's reader can enjoy the works of seventeen poets, including a selection of archaic lyric and the complete surviving works of the ancient Greek women poets - the latter appearing together in one volume for the first time. Sappho's Lyre is a combination of diligent research and poetic artistry. The translations are based on the most recent discoveries of papyri (including "new" Archilochos and Stesichoros) and the latest editions and scholarship. The introduction and notes provide historical and literary contexts that make this ancient poetry more accessible to modern readers.Although this book is primarily aimed at the reader who does not know Greek, it would be a splendid supplement to a Greek language course. It will also have wide appeal for readers of' ancient literature, women's studies, mythology, and lovers of poetry.   [brief]
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Title: Seeing double: intercultural poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria
Author: Stephens, Susan A
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry | Classical Politics
Publisher's Description: When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context - within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands" - no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.   [brief]
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Title: Catullan provocations: lyric poetry and the drama of position 
Author: Fitzgerald, William 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Classics | Comparative Literature | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Restoring to Catullus a provocative power that familiarity has tended to dim, this book argues that Catullus challenges us to think about the nature of lyric in new ways. Fitzgerald shows how Catullus's poetry reflects the conditions of its own consumption as it explores the terms and possibilities of the poet's license. Reading the poetry in relation to the drama of position played out between poet, poem, and reader, the author produces a fresh interpretation of almost all of Catullus's oeuvre. Running through the book is an analysis of the ideological stakes behind the construction of the author Catullus in twentieth-century scholarship and of the agenda governing the interpreter's position in relation to Catullus.   [brief]
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Title: Mexican ballads, Chicano poems: history and influence in Mexican-American social poetry 
Author: Limón, José Eduardo
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | American Literature | American Studies | Latin American History | Folklore and Mythology
Publisher's Description: Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems combines literary theory with the personal engagement of a prominent Chicano scholar. Recalling his experiences as a student in Texas, José Limón examines the politically motivated Chicano poetry of the 60s and 70s. He bases his analyses on Harold Bloom's theories of literary influence but takes Bloom into the socio-political realm. Limón shows how Chicano poetry is nourished by the oral tradition of the Mexican corrido , or master ballad, which was a vital part of artistic and political life along the Mexican-U.S. border from 1890 to 1930.Limón's use of Bloom, as well as of Marxist critics Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, brings Chicano literature into the arena of contemporary literary theory. By focusing on an important but little-studied poetic tradition, his book challenges our ideas of the American canon and extends the reach of Hispanists and folklorists as well.   [brief]
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Title: Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus
Author: Theocritus
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who ruled Egypt in the middle of the third century B.C.E., Alexandria became the brilliant multicultural capital of the Greek world. Theocritus's poem in praise of Philadelphus - at once a Greek king and an Egyptian pharaoh - is the only extended poetic tribute to this extraordinary ruler that survives. Combining the Greek text, an English translation, a full line-by-line commentary, and extensive introductory studies of the poem's historical and literary context, this volume also offers a wide-ranging and far-reaching consideration of the workings and representation of poetic patronage in the Ptolemaic age. In particular, the book explores the subtle and complex links among Theocritus's poem, modes of praise drawn from both Greek and Egyptian traditions, and the subsequent flowering of Latin poetry in the Augustan age. As the first detailed account of this important poem to show how Theocritus might have drawn on the pharaonic traditions of Egypt as well as earlier Greek poetry, this book affords unique insight into how praise poetry for Ptolemy and his wife may have helped to negotiate the adaptation of Greek culture that changed conditions of the new Hellenistic world. Invaluable for its clear translation and its commentary on genre, dialect, diction, and historical reference in relation to Theocritus's Encomium, the book is also significant for what it reveals about the poem's cultural and social contexts and about Theocritus' devices for addressing his several readerships. COVER IMAGE: The image on the front cover of this book is incorrectly identified on the jacket flap. The correct caption is: Gold Oktadrachm depicting Ptolemy II and Arsinoe (mid-third century BCE; by permission of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).   [brief]
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Title: Classical Telugu poetry: an anthology 
Author: Nārāyaṇarāvu, Vēlcēru 1932-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Asian Studies | Hinduism | Poetry | Folklore and Mythology | South Asia | Social Theory | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking anthology opens a window on a thousand years of classical poetry in Telugu, the mellifluous language of Andhra Pradesh in southern India. The classical tradition in Telugu is one of the richest yet least explored of all South Asian literatures. This authoritative volume, the first anthology of classical Telugu poetry in English, gives an overview of one of the world's most creative poetic traditions. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have brought together mythological, religious, and secular texts by twenty major poets who wrote between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. The beautifully translated selections are often dramatic and unexpected in tone and effect, and sometimes highly personal. The authors have provided an informative, engaging introduction, fleshing out the history of Telugu literature, situating its poets in relation to significant literary themes and historical developments, and discussing the relationship between Telugu and the classical literature and poetry of Sanskrit.   [brief]
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Title: Death before dying: the Sufi poems of Sultan Bahu
Author: Sult̤ān Bāhū 1630-1691
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Literature | Religion | Poetry | Middle Eastern Studies | Literature in Translation | Islam | South Asia
Publisher's Description: These 115 poems introduce readers in English to Sultan Bahu (d. 1691), a Sufi mystical poet who continues to be one of the most beloved writers in Punjabi. Bahu, whose name translates as "With God," remains highly popular in Pakistan and India today - even illiterate Punjabis can recite his poetry b . . . [more]
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Title: A. Sutzkever: selected poetry and prose 
Author: Sutzkever, Abraham 1913-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Literature in Translation | Poetry
Publisher's Description: The work of A. Sutzkever, one of the major twentieth-century masters of verse and the last of the great Yiddish poets, is presented to the English reader in this banquet of poetry, narrative verse, and poetic fiction. Sutzkever's imposing body of work links images from Israel's present and past with the extinction of the Jews of Europe and with deeply personal reflection on human existence.In Sutzkever's poetry the Yiddish language attains a refinement, richness of sound, and complexity of meaning unknown before. His poetry has been translated into many languages, but this is the most comprehensive presentation of his work in English. Benjamin Harshav provides a biography of the poet and a critical assessment of his writings in the context of his times. The illustrations were originally created for Sutzkever's work by such artists as Marc Chagall, Yosl Bergner, Mane-Katz, Yankl Adler, and Reuven Rubin.   [brief]
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Title: Hesiod's Works and days
Author: Hesiod
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Economics and Business | Classics | Sociology | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: This new, annotated translation of Hesiod's Works and Days is a collaboration between David W. Tandy, a classicist, and Walter Neale, an economist and economic historian. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet whose Works and Days discusses agricultural practices and society in general. Classicists and ancient historians have turned to Works and Days for its insights on Greek mythology and religion. The poem also sheds light on economic history and ancient agriculture, and is a good resource for social scientists interested in these areas. This translation emphasizes the activities and problems of a practicing agriculturist as well as the larger, changing political and economic institutions of the early archaic period.The authors provide a clear, accurate translation along with notes aimed at a broad audience. The introductory essay discusses the changing economic, political and trading world of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., while the notes present the range and possible meanings of important Greek terms and references in the poem and highlight areas of ambiguity in our understanding of Works and Days .   [brief]
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Title: "Peaks of Yemen I summon": poetry as cultural practice in a North Yemeni tribe
Author: Caton, Steven Charles 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Medieval Studies | Folklore and Mythology | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: In this first full-scale ethnographic study of Yemeni tribal poetry, Steven Caton reveals an astonishingly rich folkloric system where poetry is both a creation of art and a political and social act. Almost always spoken or chanted, Yemeni tribal poetry is cast in an idiom considered colloquial and "ungrammatical," yet admired for its wit and spontaneity. In Yemeni society, the poet has power over people. By eloquence the poet can stir or, if his poetic talents are truly outstanding, motivate an audience to do his bidding. Yemeni tribesmen think, in fact, that poetry's transformative effect is too essential not to use for pressing public issues.Drawing on his three years of field research in North Yemen, Caton illustrates the significance of poetry in Yemeni society by analyzing three verse genres and their use in weddings, war mediations, and political discourse on the state. Moreover, Caton provides the first anthropology of poetics. Challenging Western cultural assumptions that political poetry can rarely rise above doggerel, Caton develops a model of poetry as cultural practice. To compose a poem is to construct oneself as a peacemaker, as a warrior, as a Muslim. Thus the poet engages in constitutive social practice.Because of its highly interdisciplinary approach, this book will interest a wide range of readers including anthropologists, linguists, folklorists, literary critics, and scholars of Middle Eastern society, language, and culture.   [brief]
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Title: Green thoughts, green shades: essays by contemporary poets on the early modern lyric 
Author: Post, Jonathan F. S 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: Green Thoughts, Green Shades is a strikingly original book, the first and only of its kind. Edited and introduced by noted seventeenth-century scholar Jonathan Post, it enlists the analytic and verbal power of some of today's most celebrated poets to illuminate from the inside out a number of the greatest lyric poets writing in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Written by people who spend much of their time thinking in verse and about verse, these original essays herald the return of the early modern lyric as crucial to understanding the present moment of poetry in the United States. This work provides fascinating insights into what today's poets find of special interest in their forebears. In addition, these discussions shed light on the contributors' own poetry and offer compelling clues to how the poetry of the past continues to inform that of the present.   [brief]
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Title: The poet's truth: a study of the poet in Virgil's Georgics 
Author: Perkell, Christine
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language
Publisher's Description: The controversy over Virgil's optimism or pessimism, which has long absorbed readers of his poetry, might fruitfully yield to a perspective which allows contradictions to stand unresolved, to constitute, in fact, the essence of his poems' meaning. So interpreted, the pervasive contradictions of the Georgics are not problems to be solved, but expressions of the poet's vision of fundamental tensions in human experience.Focusing on the figure of the poet in his relationship to the farmer, Professor Perkell studies oppositions between power and beauty, profit and art, matter and spirit, which are critical to the poem's meaning. She points to the poet's privileging of myth over praeceptum , of divine revelation over experiment and practice, and of mystery over solution. The poem's oppositions find ultimate expression in the bougonia , literally false as Georgic precept but metaphorically true as image of Iron Age technology and culture. Through this metaphor, the poet suggests the high value of his own truth and implicitly challenges the values of the agricultural, material poem which the Georgics on its surface professes to be.Shaped by insights of reader-response and structuralist criticism, this new study of the Georgics should interest Classicists and students of literature.   [brief]
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Title: Orphans of Petrarch: poetry and theory in the Spanish Renaissance 
Author: Navarrete, Ignacio Enrique 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry | Renaissance Literature
Publisher's Description: In Spain as elsewhere, Renaissance poets transformed the lyric tradition by using Petrarch as a source of poetic renewal. But political unity and military hegemony, coupled with a sense of cultural inferiority and an obsession with ethnic purity, made Spain different. Drawing on modern critical theory, Ignacio Navarrete offers a new exposition of the development of Spanish Renaissance poetics. Grounded in both philology and cultural theory, Orphans of Petrarch is the first book to integrate the "Spanish difference" into an understanding of Renaissance lyric as a European phenomenon.   [brief]
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Title: Poetic garlands: Hellenistic epigrams in context
Author: Gutzwiller, Kathryn J
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Comparative Literature | Literature
Publisher's Description: Epigrams, the briefest of Greek poetic forms, had a strong appeal for readers of the Hellenistic period (323-31 B.C.). One of the most characteristic literary forms of the era, the epigram, unlike any other ancient or classical form of poetry, was not only composed for public recitation but was also collected in books intended for private reading. Brief and concise, concerned with the personal and the particular, the epigram emerged in the Hellenistic period as a sophisticated literary form that evinces the period's aesthetic preference for the miniature, the intricate, and the fragmented.Kathryn Gutzwiller offers the first full-length literary study of these important poems by studying the epigrams within the context of the poetry books in which they were originally collected. Drawing upon ancient sources as well as recent papyrological discoveries, Gutzwiller reconstructs the nature of Hellenistic epigram books and interprets individual poems as if they remained part of their original collections. This approach results in illuminating and original readings of many major poets, and demonstrates that individual epigrammatists were differentiated by gender, ethnicity, class status, and philosophical views. In an important final chapter, Gutzwiller reconstructs much of the poetic structure of Meleager's Garland , an ancient anthology of Hellenistic epigrams.   [brief]
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Title: The best of the Argonauts: the redefinition of the epic hero in book one of Apollonius's Argonautica 
Author: Clauss, James Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Classics | Literature | Classical Literature and Language | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: This revelatory exploration of Book One of the Argonautica rescues Jason from his status as the ineffectual hero of Apollonius' epic poem. James J. Clauss argues that by posing the question, "Who is the best of the Argonauts?" Apollonius redefines the epic hero and creates, in Jason, a man more realistic and less awesome than his Homeric predecessors, one who is vulnerable, dependent on the help of others, even morally questionable, yet ultimately successful.In bringing Apollonius' "curious and demanding poem" to life, Clauss illuminates two features of the poet's narrative style: his ubiquitous allusions to the poetry of others, especially Homer, and the carefully balanced structural organization of his episodes. The poet's subtextual interplay is explored, as is his propensity for underscoring the manipulation of the poetry of others through ring composition.   [brief]
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Title: Poets on painters: essays on the art of painting by Twentieth-century poets
Author: McClatchy, J. D 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Literature | Art | Poetry | Art History
Publisher's Description: What are poets looking at , looking for , when they walk into a room of pictures? Poets on Painters attempts to answer this question by bringing together, for the first time, essays by modern American and British poets about painting. The poets bring to their task a fresh eye and a freshened languag . . . [more]
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Title: Immanent visitor: selected poems of Jaime Saenz 
Author: Sáenz, Jaime
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Poetry | Latin American Studies | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: Immanent Visitor is the first English-language translation of the work of Bolivia's greatest and most visionary twentieth-century poet. A poète maudit, Jaime Saenz rejected the conventions of polite society and became a monk in service of his own imagination. Apocalyptic and occult in his politics, a denizen of slum taverns, unashamedly bisexual, insistently nocturnal in his artistic affairs, and secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological, and the symbolic. In masterly translations by two poet-translators, Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, Saenz's strange, innovative, and wildly lyrical poems reveal a literary legacy of fierce compassion and solidarity with indigenous Bolivian cultures and with the destitute, the desperate, and the disenfranchised of that unreal city, La Paz. In long lines, in odes that name desire, with Whitmanesque anaphora, in exclamations and repetitions, Saenz addresses the reader, the beloved, and death in one extended lyrical gesture. The poems are brazenly affecting. Their semantic innovation is notable in the odd heterogeneity of formal and tonal structures that careen unabashedly between modes and moods; now archly lyrical, now arcanely symbolic, now colloquial, now trancelike. As Saenz's reputation continues to grow throughout the world, these inspired translations and the accompanying Spanish texts faithfully convey the poet's unique vision and voice to English-speaking readers.   [brief]
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Title: The dissonant legacy of modernismo: Lugones, Herrera y Reissig, and the voices of modern Spanish American poetry 
Author: Kirkpatrick, Gwen
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Latin American Studies | European Literature | Poetry
Publisher's Description: This is a provocative new reading of a crucial and often misunderstood period of Spanish American literature. Most studies of modernismo have focused on the poetry of Rubén Darío and have noted the movement's aestheticism and its unmistakable French influences. Kirkpatrick concentrates instead on important negations of harmony and the movement's internal dismantling of its own precepts. Major contradictions within the movement itself are revealed through the works of the Argentine Leopoldo Lugones and the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig. Extending her analysis to later writers such as Ramón López Velarde, César Vallejo, and Alfonsina Storni, Kirkpatrick shows the changes that foreshadow the more overt experiments of these poets and illuminates the continuity between the modernistas and later generations.   [brief]
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Title: Re-reading Sappho: reception and transmission
Author: Greene, Ellen 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Re-Reading Sappho reflects the recent fascination with Sappho's "afterlife." The essays examine the changing interpretations of scholars and writers who have read the fragmentary remains of Sappho's poetry. As the contributors explore the ways that each generation creates its own Sappho, the Sapphic tradition itself becomes an index to changing sensibilities and cultural norms about sexuality, gender roles, and notions of fema le authorship.A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Reading Sappho, represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.   [brief]
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Title: Reading Sappho: contemporary approaches 
Author: Greene, Ellen 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literary Theory and Criticism | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Reading Sappho considers Sappho's poetry as a powerful, influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. Essays are divided into four sections: "Language and Literary Context," "Homer and Oral Tradition", "Ritual and Social Context", and "Women's Erotics". Contributors focus on literary history, mythic traditions, cultural studies, performance studies, recent work in feminist theory, and more.A legendary literary figure, Sappho has attracted readers, critics, and biographers ever since she composed poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C. Bringing together some of the best recent criticism on the subject, this volume, together with Re-Reading Sappho , represents the first anthology of Sappho scholarship, drawing attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and reflecting the diversity of critical approaches in classical and literary scholarship during the last several decades.   [brief]
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