Literature & Poetry

This issue of Alif strives to cover the multi-faceted career of Said, with emphasis on his critical contribution to decolonization and resistance to hegemony. There are moving testimonies by friends and relatives, students and colleagues, which throw light on his personality. An article by Said on the ...

With a writing career spanning some seventy years, Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most recognized writers in the world. His study of philosophy at what is now Cairo University greatly influenced his works, as did his wide readings and his work in the government and in the Cinema Organization. The Wisdom ...

With a writing career spanning some seventy years, Naguib Mahfouz is one of the most recognized writers in the world. His study of philosophy at what is now Cairo University greatly influenced his works, as did his wide readings and his work in the government and in the Cinema Organization. Life's Wisdom ...

Andrew Motion's prose memoir In the Blood (2006) was widely acclaimed, praised as an act of magical retrieval and a hymn to familial love. Now, twelve years later and three years after moving to live and work in the United States, Motion looks back once more to recreate a stunning biographical sequel - but this time in verse.

Over the next thirty years, his life there will be dominated by three women.

In this funny and touching new play, we see behind the facade of 'the Bard of Humberside' and into his complex private life.

Larkin With Women premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in November 1999.

In Between Literature and Science Peter Swirski examines the true intellectual scope of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem. Swirski shows that Poe and Lem propose far-reaching hypotheses in aesthetics, epistemology, cognitive science and philosophy of science as well as in cosmology, artificial intelligence and futurology.

This book explores representations of community in Anglophone Caribbean short story collections and cycles of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

A detailed working through of the impact of the political theory and practise of contemporary antiracism in Britain in a selection of novels by black British and British Asian writers.

Of all the Roman poets Catullus is the most accessible for the modern reader. In six concise chapters Godwin deals with the cultural background to Catullus' poetic production, its literary context, the role of love, Alexandrian learning and obscenity and, in the final chapter, considers the coherence and rationale of the collection as a whole.

In Helen Barr's new edition, the 24 short lyrics of Oxford Bodleian MS Digby 102 are freshly transcribed and edited. New evidence shows that this sequence of poems was written in the early years of Henry V's reign (c.1413-14), and most probably by a Benedictine monk eager to add his support for the Henrician new dawn.

Instead of (mis)reading these autobiographies as historical documentation, Pooler examines how these authors conduct a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.

In this elegant collection, the author takes on the subject of the individual in European history, suspecting that the End of History has been announced a little early. The environment inhabited by his poetry is pervaded by ideologies and upheavals; the speakers of his poems brag, explain, confess, resign, but are always human in their concerns.

Acclaimed critic John Sutherland gets his teeth into the literary puzzles of the greatest-ever Gothic novel

Long unavailable in this country, Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti comprises some of the best comedy that Bertolt Brecht wrote for the theater and contains one of his great characters. For his complexity and vitality, Mr. Puntila ranks on a par with Brecht's indelible Galileo and Mother Courage. A hard-drinking ...

This particular pamphlet is beautifully designed, printed on high-stock paper, with a proper spine, and an ultra-cool cover. It features 19 song lyrics - zany, witty, brilliant, sometimes startling - by the master poet, songs played by his band, Rogue Oliphant.

This Dialogue of One collects thirteen essays on English, French and American poets by one of the era's most engaging and highly esteemed poet-critics. Like Randall Jarrell, whose achievement is assessed here, Ford combines a refreshing openness to innovation with an authoritative awareness of what makes ...

Tree Language is told in shard-like poems of supreme richness and finely balanced darkness - variously shaped, whittled to a point, almost sharp enough to draw blood. And although this is a book spiked with brambles and skeletal branches, shot through with frost and fossilled with plant-bones, blood ...

Dean of St. Paul’s, John Donne was feted in his day not just as a poet but also as an inspired and inspiring preacher, and these four extended meditations on death are amongst his most powerful and dramatic writings. The magnificent “Death’s Duel” is published here alongside his Lent sermons ...

Aphorisms have been described as 'the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose' (New Yorker) - short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades.