Fiona Stafford

Jane Austen

Content with her life and not interested in marriage, Emma Woodhouse, a rich and beautiful heiress, causes complications with her matchmaking schemes.

Emma

Fiona J. Stafford

Fiona Stafford offers intimate, detailed explorations of seventeen common trees, from ash and apple to pine, oak, cypress, and willow. Stafford discusses practical uses of wood past and present, tree diseases and environmental threats, and trees' potential contributions toward slowing global climate change

The Long, Long Life of Trees

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint collection of poems has often been singled out as the founding text of English Romanticism. This is the only edition to print both the original 1798 collection and the expanded 1802 edition, with Wordsworth's famous Preface. It includes important letters, a wide-ranging introduction and generous notes.

1798 and 1802

Lyrical Ballads

Every devoted reader feels that, in some way, they know Jane Austen. But how can we make sense of her extraordinary achievements? At a time when most women received so little formal education and none could obtain a place at university, how did Austen come to write novels that have commanded the attention of some of the most brilliant minds ever since? Why were hers the books that Darwin knew by heart and Churchill read during the Blitz? In this graceful introduction to the author's life and works, Fiona Stafford offers a fresh and accessible perspective, discussing Austen's six astonishing novels in the context of their time. Newly updated, Jane Austen: A Brief Life offers a rich and sympathetic insight into a writer who was just as much the Romantic genius as Keats, Shelley or Byron - full of youthful exuberance, intensely creative once she had found her individual voice, and dead before she reached middle age.

A Brief Life

The beauty of flowers is well known, inspiring creative minds from Botticelli to Beatrix Potter. But they've also played a key part in forming the past, and may shape our future. Roses and thistles have served as symbols of monarchs, dynasties and nations. We wear poppies to remember the First World War, but it was the elderflower that treated its wounded soldiers. A rose might mend a broken heart, and sunflowers may just save our planet. At once enchanting and intriguing, The Brief Life of Flowers reveals how even the most ordinary of flowers have extraordinary stories to tell.

The Brief Life of Flowers

Pamela Clemit

Jeanne Moskal

Nora Crook

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Doucet Devin Fischer

TheNovels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley

Taking as a framework the history of relations between Ireland, England, and Scotland, each chapter in this book discusses a Scottish, English or Irish poem that begins with a line from one of the other national literatures of the British Isles

From Burns to Heaney

Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish, and English Poetry

Looks at the life, times, and work of the author of such classic novels as "Emma," "Pride and Prejudice," and "Sense and Sensibility."

Howard Gaskill

The appearance of James Macpherson's Ossian in the 1760s caused an international sensation. The discovery of poetic fragments that seemed to have survived in the Highlands of Scotland for some 1500 years gripped the imagination of the reading public, who seized eagerly on the newly available texts for glimpses of a lost primitive world. That Macpherson's versions of the ancient heroic verse were more creative adaptations of the oral tradition than literal translations of a clearly identifiable original may have exercised contemporary antiquarians and contributed eventually to a decline in the popularity of Ossian. Yet for most early readers, as for generations of enthusiastic followers, what mattered was not the accuracy of the translation, but the excitement of encountering the primitive, and the mood engendered by the process of reading. The essays in this collection represent an attempt by late twentieth-century readers to chart the cultural currents that flowed into Macpherson's texts, and to examine their peculiar energy. Scholars distinguished in the fields of Gaelic, German, Irish, Scottish, French, English and American literature, language, history and cultural studies have each contributed to the exploration of Macpherson's achievement, with the aim of situating his notoriously elusive texts in a web of diverse contexts. Important new research into the traditional Gaelic sources is placed side by side with discussions of the more immediate political impetus of his poetry, while studies of the reception of Ossian in Scotland, Germany, France and England are part of the larger recognition of the cultural significance of Macpherson's work, and its importance to issues of fragmentation, liminality, colonialism, national identity, sensibility and gender.

Ossianic Translations

From Gaelic to Romantic

Un poetico omaggio alla diversità degli alberi, alla loro bellezza, ai loro usi e tratti caratteristici, ai loro messaggi in perenne evoluzione. Fin dai primordi gli alberi sono stati utili all’umanità in innumerevoli modi, ma il rapporto tra noi e loro ha molte più dimensioni di quelle puramente pratiche. Gli alberi si intrecciano con l’esperienza umana a tal punto che molte specie hanno ispirato direttamente storie, miti, canzoni, poesie, dipinti e valori spirituali. Alcuni sono assurti a simboli religiosi, culturali o nazionali. In questo splendido volume illustrato Fiona Stafford propone un’esplorazione intima e dettagliata di diciassette alberi comuni - dal frassino al melo, dalla quercia al cipresso, al salice. Di più: rende omaggio ad alcuni individui specifici - come il favoloso tasso di Ankerwycke sotto cui Enrico VIII corteggiò Anna Bolena, o gli spettacolari ciliegi di Washington - e descrive gli usi pratici del legno nel passato e nel presente, le malattie arboree e le minacce per l’ambiente, non trascurando il potenziale contributo degli alberi al rallentamento dei cambiamenti climatici. Insomma, un libro ricco di spunti insoliti e aneddoti affascinanti, che celebra gli alberi e le loro lunghissime vite come nostri compagni naturali, fonti di affetto e ispirazione.

La lunghissima vita degli alberi

A Casebook

Jane Austen's Emma

A beautiful hardcover anthology of stories by a brilliant and surprising mix of classic and contemporary writers who have been inspired by trees. Trees have starred in stories ever since Ovid described Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel, and the landscape of literature has long been enlivened by wild woodlands, sacred groves, and fertile orchards. This delightful collection ranges from Ovid to Austen and from Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest (via Thomas Love Peacock's Maid Marian) to Treebeard's story in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Here are forest-haunted fairy tales both classic (the Brothers Grimm) and inventively retold (Angela Carter), and there is room in these woods for comedy as well as terror, in Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, an episode from Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, and Alexander McCall Smith's Head Tree. Here too are notable writers from around the world, including Yuri Olyesha, Jean Giono, Tove Jansson, Joseph Zobel, Yvonne Vera, Damon Galgut, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Eudora Welty. From Daphne du Maurier's The Apple Tree to N. K. Narayan's Under the Banyan Tree, the sheer range of tales in these pages will leave readers refreshed and dazzled.

Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest

Reading Romantic Poetry introduces the major themes and preoccupations, and the key poems and players of a period convulsed by revolution, prolonged warfare and political crisis. Provides a clear, lively introduction to Romantic Poetry, backed by academic research and marked by its accessibility to students with little prior experience of poetry Introduces many of the major topics of the age, from politics to publishing, from slavery to sociability, from Milton to the mind of man Encourages direct responses to poems by opening up different aspects of the literature and fresh approaches to reading Discusses the poets' own reading and experience of being read, as well as analysis of the sounds of key poems and the look of the poem on the page Deepens understanding of poems through awareness of their literary, historical, political and personal contexts Includes the major poets of the period, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Burns and Clare —as well as a host of less familiar writers, including women

Reading Romantic Poetry

How can poems firmly attached to particular regions speak to readers far away? Why do writers turn to their own communities for materials? This book explores the literature of local attachment through the consideration of works by writers - Heaney, Burns, Wordsworth, Scott, Lamb, and Dickens - whose feeling for place is especially evident.

Fiona Stafford

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