Joshua Scodel is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth and has published numerous articles on various aspects of Renaissance literature. This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As...

As a literary mode, "lyric" is difficult to define. The term is conventionally applied to brief, songlike poems expressing the speaker's interior thoughts, but many critics have questioned the underlying assumptions of this definition. While many people associate lyric with the Romantic era, Heather Dubrow turns instead to the poetry of early modern England. The Challenges of Orpheus confronts widespread assumptions about lyric, exploring such topics...

"Who will mourn with me? Who will break bread with me? Who is my neighbor? In the wake of the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, such questions called for a new approach to the communal religious rituals and verses that shaped and commemorated many of the brightest and darkest moments of English life. In England, new forms of religious writing emerged out of a deeply fractured spiritual community. Conflicts of Devotion reshapes our understanding...

"C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other members of the Inklings met each week to read and discuss each other's work-in-progress, offering both encouragement and blistering critique. How did these conversations shape the books they were writing? How does creative collaboration enhance each individual talent? And what can we learn from their example? Beautifully illustrated by James A. Owen, Bandersnatch offers an inside look at the Inklings of Oxford...

"A stirring group biography of the Inklings, the Oxford writing club featuring J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis"-- Provided by publisher.

Natania Rosenfeld is Assistant Professor of English at Knox College. Her articles and poetry have appeared in various journals. The marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf is best understood as a dialogue of two outsiders about ideas of social and political belonging and exclusion. These ideas infused the written work of both partners and carried over into literary modernism itself, in part through the influence of the Woolfs' groundbreaking publishing...