The Road To Xanadu A Study In The Ways Of The Imagination

It takes a great mind to study a great mind. The literary critic John Livingston Lowes puts his reputation on the line by chosing to analyse the sources, thoughts and imagination of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The result, 'The Road to Xanadu', is a remarkable and insightful examination of the creative processes and reading material that inspired 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan'. Lowes brilliantly uses his study of Coleridge as a springboard to a more wide-ranging analysis of the imagination. If you like Coleridge's work, you will be fascinated by this look into the mind of a literary giant. John Livingston Lowes (1867-1945) was an American scholar and critic of English literature. His best-known subjects were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer, author of 'The Canterbury Tales'. His most famous work is 'The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination', which examines the sources of Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan'.

Bonded Leather binding

High quality reprint of Road To Xandu; A Study In The Ways Of The Imagination, The by John Livingston Lowes.

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In this incisive and highly readable study, Rachel Buxton offers a much-needed assessment of Frost's significance for Northern Irish poetry of the past half-century. Drawing upon a diverse range of previously unpublished archival sources, including juvenilia, correspondence, and drafts of poems, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry takes as its particular focus the triangular dynamic of Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. Buxton explores the differing strengths which each Irish poet finds in Frost's work: while Heaney is drawn primarily to the Frost persona and to the "sound of sense", it is the studied slyness and wryness of the American's poetry, the complicating undertow, which Muldoon values. This appraisal of Frost in a non-American context not only enables a fuller appreciation of Heaney's and Muldoon's poetry but also provides valuable insight into the nature of trans-national and trans-generational poetic influence. Engaging with the politics of Irish-American literary connections, while providing a subtle analysis of the intertextual relationships between these three key twentieth-century poets, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry is a pioneering work.

Focusing on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson and Mary Shelley, this book uses key concepts of androgyny, subjectivity and the re-creative as a productive framework to trace the fascinating textual interactions and dialogues among these authors. It crosses the boundary between male and female writers of the Romantic period by linking representations of gender with late Enlightenment upheavals regarding creativity and subjectivity, demonstrating how these interrelated concerns dismantle traditional binaries separating the canonical and the noncanonical; male and female; poetry and prose; good and evil; subject and object. Through the convergences among the writings of Coleridge, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley, the book argues that each dismantles and reconfigures subjectivity as androgynous and amoral, subverting the centrality of the male gaze associated with canonical Romanticism. In doing so, it examines key works from each author's oeuvre, from Coleridge's “canonical” poems such as Rime of the Ancient Mariner, through Robinson's lyrical poetry and novels such as Walsingham, to Mary Shelley's fiction, including Frankenstein, Mathilda, and The Last Man.