Poetry : Ancient, Classical & Medieval

The brilliant historical epic “Metamorphoses” is Ovid’s magnum opus. He has brilliantly presented a vast canvas which offers a multitude of legendary and mythical figures; these are linked together by a single thread – the theme of transition and unpredictability of nature. It chronicles the history of the world from the time of creation till the era of Julius Caesar. An enduring classic! more...

Price: $4.99

This book presents a theoretical and historicized reading of the production of the 'autonomous' subject in Milton's prose and in Paradise Lost. It rejects the current orthodoxy that liberal humanism is just a form of domination, and reads Milton's texts as revolutionary. Although Milton participates in the formation of discourses of sexuality, labour and the nature of reason which come to be normative, neither Milton's texts nor modernity more generally can be understood without also accepting the dynamism inherent in the belief in individual freedom. more...

Price: $128.00

Jane Chance reveals how the concealment of embarrassing secrets often sexual in nature and the burden of political alliances and strategies—what might together be termed sexual politics—motivated Chaucer in much of his work. Firmly placing Chaucer in the cultural politics of his time, she shows how he manipulated the mythographic and textual conventions of the period for his own literary, social, and political purposes. more...

Price: $72.00

This gracefully written and well thought-out study deals with a neglected collection of poems by Spenser, which was issued in 1591 at the height of his career. While there has been a good deal written in recent years on two of the poems in the collection, ‘Mother Hubberd’s Tale’ and ‘Muiopotmos’, Brown innovatively addresses the collection in its entirety. He urges us to see it as a planned whole with a consistent design on the reader: he fully acknowledges, and even brings out further, the heterogeneity of the collection, but he examines it nevertheless as a sustained reflection on the nature of poetry and the auspices for writing in a modern world, distancing itself from the traditions of the immediate past. The strength of this work lies both in the originality of its project and in the precision and enterprise of the close reading that informs its argument. Interest in the concern of Spenser’s poetry with the nature of poetry is in the current critical mainstream, but here the attentiveness is both unusually focused and unusually sustained. Brown garners more than would be expected from the translations in the Complaints, while at the same time including striking and individual chapters on the better known ‘Mother Hubberd’s Tale’ and ‘Muiopotmos’; he advances understanding of these extremely subtle texts and fully justifies his wider approach to the collection as a whole. Arguing that Spenser’s relationship to literary tradition is more complex than is often thought, Brown suggests that Spenser was a self-conscious innovator whose gradual move away from traditional poetics is exhibited by the different texts in the Complaints . He further suggests that the Complaints are a ‘poetics in practice’, which progress from traditional ideas of poetry to a new poetry that emerges through Spenser’s transformation of traditional complaint. more...

Price: $75.00

The Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance and this study reveals much about its use and significance, offering fresh readings of a number of texts. These include the legend of Constance, where the mercantile details of the eastern Mediterranean reinforce the setting; the portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women; details in the Squire's Tale; and aspects of orientalism in the Middle English 'Floris and Blauncheflur' and 'Le Bone Florence of Rome', the latter related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who remain steadfast in virtue. more...

Price: $80.00