Mary Sanders Pollock

"This volume, the first full-length comparative study of the Brownings' poetry since the early twentieth century, examines the creative partnership of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning through a critical analysis of the poems written by this famous couple during the sixteen-year period of their friendship, courtship, and marriage. First attracted to each other by similarities in their poetry, the Brownings were both scholarly poets, and continually experimented with versification. Through their famous courtship correspondence of 1845-46, this cerebral attraction developed into creative exchange, erotic passion, and a reciprocal professional partnership. Pollock shows how, against the critical tide of the time, Elizabeth Barrett Browning became Robert Browning's most sympathetic reader and his most astute critic, and how, in return, Robert Browning encouraged his wife to challenge the "poetess" stereotype by writing about the public sphere, and to risk critical censure by commenting honestly in her work about the real lives of men and women." "This book will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, as well as to those exploring the nature of close critical dialogue among working poets."--Jacket.

"A literary analysis of the popular genre of the informal primatology field narrative. Explores the works of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, and others in the contexts of scientific, literary, and conservation discourses"--Provided by publisher.

"Figuring Animals is a collection of fifteen essays concerning the representation of animals in literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and cultural practice. At the turn of the new century, it is helpful to reconsider our inherited understandings of ourselves in relation to other species, some of which are still useful to us. It is also important to look ahead to new understandings and new dialogue, which may contribute to the survival of us all. The contributors to this volume participate in this dialogue in a variety of ways - through personal experience, natural history, cultural studies, philosophical inquiry, art history, literary analysis, film studies, and theoretical imagining, and through a combination of these trains of thought. The essays expose weaknesses in Western epistemological frames of reference that for centuries have limited our views and, thus, our experiences of animal being, including our own."--Jacket.