This book explores the "self-conscious poem" - that is, a poem concerned with poetry that displays awareness of itself as poetry - in the work of the major Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Michael O'Neill's readings freshly illuminate the imaginative distinction of many famous and often-studied poems, and revalue less regarded works. An extended coda looks at some post-Romantic poets, particularly Yeats, Stevens, Auden, and Clampitt, in the light of the book's central theme.

In 'Percy Bysshe Shelly: A Literary Life', Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life . The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the...

In 'Percy Bysshe Shelly: A Literary Life', Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life . The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the...

Drawn from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, the title of this book suggests the cultural and literary persistence of the Romantic in the work of many British, American, and Irish poets since 1900. Allowing for and celebrating the multiple, even fractured nature of Romantic legacies, Michael O'Neill focuses on the creative impact of Romantic poetry on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry. Individual chapters embrace numerous authors and texts, and span different cultures; the intention is not the forlorn hope of completeness, but the wish to open up possibilities and intersections, and...

This book is a study of how some of the world's leading democratic states have responded to the challenge of territorial or sub-national movements seeking to increase the salience of cultural differences--ethnic, linguistic, and regional identity--on the national agenda. International experts explore the various ways that cultural differences have acquired political significance and how these are managed by democratic states in every region of the world.

Michael D. Hurley and Michael O'Neill offer a perceptive and illuminating look into poetic form, a topic that has come back into prominence in recent years. Building on the renewed interest in form, Hurley and O'Neill provide an accessible and comprehensive introduction that will be of help to undergraduates and more advanced readers of poetry alike. The book sees form as neither ornamenting nor mimicking content, but as shaping and animating it, encouraging readers to cultivate techniques to read poems as poems. Lively and wide-ranging, engaging with poems as aesthetic experiences, the book...