In The Art of Poetry, Shira Wolosky provides a dazzling introduction to an art whose emphasis on verbal music, wordplay, and dodging the merely literal makes it at once the most beguiling and most challenging of literary forms.

A uniquely comprehensive, step-by-step introduction to poetic form, The Art of Poetry moves progressively from smaller units such as the word, line, and image, to larger features such as verse forms and voice. In fourteen engaging, beautifully written chapters, Wolosky explores in depth how poetry does what it does while offering brilliant...

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life. Focusing on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, this book reveals how these issues contended and negotiated with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, offered a rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious...

Handbooks, guides, and articles on the Harry Potter books have been produced, but there is as yet no sustained discussion of the series as a literary work. Shira Wolosky shows here that the Harry Potter books take part in a rich literary tradition, including allegorical double meanings, mirror images among characters, psychological explorations of family dynamics, political and social critique, and complex moral questions. This book draws readers into deeper meanings of Harry Potter, arguing that the books launch and pursue interpretive quests in an ongoing effort to understand patterns and...

This work explores the place granted to language within metaphysical and theological hierarchies traditional to Western culture, where it reflects a deeply embedded ambivalence in the Western tradition toward material and temporal conditions in general. The author uses the writings of T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan to show how immediate this history of ambivalence remains. The language-centred interest of each writer focuses on theologies that are mystical and negative. A negative approach to language is almost always central to the mystical desire for a state beyond multiplicity,...

The Riddles of Harry Potter draws readers into the deeper meanings of these phenomenally successful books, arguing that they launch and pursue interpretive quests in an ongoing effort to understand patterns and their attendant meanings, implications, and consequences.

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America explores nineteenth-century poetry as it addresses and engages in the major concerns of American cultural life. Focusing on gender, biblical politics, Revolutionary discourses and racial, sectional, and religious identities, this book reveals how these issues contended and negotiated with each other in the shaping of a pluralist democratic polity. Nineteenth-century American poetry, far from being the self-reflective art object of twentieth-century aesthetic theory, offered a rhetorical arena in which civic, economic, and religious...