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Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

Irish women writers entered the international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. This collection of new essays explores how Irish women, officially disenfranchised through much of that era, felt inclined and at liberty to exercise their political influence through the unofficial channels of their literary output. By challenging existing and often narrowly-defined conceptions of what constitutes ‘politics’, the chapters investigate Irish women writers’ responses to, expressions of, and dialogue with a contemporary political landscape that included not only the debates surrounding nationalism and unionism, but also those concerning education, cosmopolitanism, language, Empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, the marriage ‘market’, the publishing industry, the commercial market, and employment. The volume demonstrates how women from a variety of religious, social, and regional backgrounds – including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, and the Ulster writers Ella Young, Beatrice Grimshaw, and F. E. Crichton – used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. Close readings of individual texts are framed by new archival research and detailed historical contextualisation. Offering fresh critical perspectives by internationally-renowned scholars including Lauren Arrington, Heidi Hansson, Margaret Kelleher, Patrick Maume, James H. Murphy, and Eve Patten, Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty is an innovative and essential contribution to the study of Irish literature as well as women’s writing at the turn of the twentieth century.

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century British literature, focusing on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at precise cultural moments. With particular interest in how texts entered the seventeenth-century public world, some of these essays emphasise the variety of motivations – from generic distaste to personal frustration – that explain how ideology and form fuse together in various works. Others offer fine-grained and multi-sided contextualisations of familiar texts and cruxes. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors provide novel readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the complexities these writers faced as the remarkable events of the century moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Edmund Waller. New work appears here by Nigel Smith and Michael McKeon on Marvell, Michael Schoenfeldt on new formalism, Derek Hirst on child abuse in the seventeenth century, and Joad Raymond on print politics. Because of their relevance to contemporary critical debates, the studies here will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars working on seventeenth-century British literature, culture, and history.