Author: Samantha Matthews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 439
Book Description
'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.
Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture
Author: Samantha Matthews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 439
Book Description
'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 439
Book Description
'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.
Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture
Author: Samantha Matthews
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192599844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
'Will you write in my album?' Many Romantic poets were asked this question by women who collected contributions in their manuscript books. Those who obliged included Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Lamb, but also Felicia Hemans, Amelia Opie, and Sara Coleridge. Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture presents the first critical and cultural history of this forgotten phenomenon. It asks a series of questions. Where did 1820s 'albo-mania' come from, and why was it satirized as a women's 'mania'? What was the relation between visitors' books associated with great institutions and country houses, personal albums belonging to individuals, and the poetry written in both? What caused albums' re-gendering from earlier friendship books kept by male students and gentlemen on the Grand Tour to a 'feminized' practice identified mainly with young women? When albums were central to women's culture, why were so many published album poems by men? How did amateur and professional poets engage differently with albums? What does album culture's privileging of 'original poetry' have to say about attitudes towards creativity and poetic practice in the age of print? This volume recovers a distinctive subgenre of occasional poetry composed to be read in manuscript, with its own characteristic formal features, conventions, themes, and cultural significance. Unique albums examined include that kept at the Grande Chartreuse, those owned by Regency socialite Lady Sarah Jersey, and those kept by Lake poets' daughters. As Album Verses and Romantic Literary Culture shows, album poetry reflects changing attitudes to identity, gender, class, politics, poetry, family dynamics, and social relations in the Romantic period.
How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information
Author: Jillian M. Hess
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192648489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection "Fly-Catchers", while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a "Quarry," and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his "Philosophical Miscellany." Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300 manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their less well-known contemporaries. Divided into two sections, the first half of the book contends that methods for organizing knowledge developed in line with the period's dominant epistemic frameworks, while the second half argues that commonplace books helped Romantics and Victorians organize people. Chapters focus on prominent organizational methods in nineteenth-century commonplacing, often attached to an associated epistemic virtue: diaristic forms and the imagination (Chapter Two); "real time" entries signalling objectivity (Chapter Three); antiquarian remnants, serving as empirical evidence for historical arguments (Chapter Four); communally produced commonplace books that attest to socially constructed knowledge (Chapter Five); and blank spaces in commonplace books of mourning (Chapter Six). Richly illustrated, this book brings an archive of commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums to the reader.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192648489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
Every literary household in nineteenth-century Britain had a commonplace book, scrapbook, or album. Coleridge called his collection "Fly-Catchers", while George Eliot referred to one of her commonplace books as a "Quarry," and Michael Faraday kept quotations in his "Philosophical Miscellany." Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century commonplace book, along with associated traditions like the scrapbook and album, remain under-studied. This book tells the story of how technological and social changes altered methods for gathering, storing, and organizing information in nineteenth-century Britain. As the commonplace book moved out of the schoolroom and into the home, it took on elements of the friendship album. At the same time, the explosion of print allowed readers to cheaply cut-and-paste extractions rather than copying out quotations by hand. Built on the evidence of over 300 manuscripts, this volume unearths the composition practices of well-known writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and their less well-known contemporaries. Divided into two sections, the first half of the book contends that methods for organizing knowledge developed in line with the period's dominant epistemic frameworks, while the second half argues that commonplace books helped Romantics and Victorians organize people. Chapters focus on prominent organizational methods in nineteenth-century commonplacing, often attached to an associated epistemic virtue: diaristic forms and the imagination (Chapter Two); "real time" entries signalling objectivity (Chapter Three); antiquarian remnants, serving as empirical evidence for historical arguments (Chapter Four); communally produced commonplace books that attest to socially constructed knowledge (Chapter Five); and blank spaces in commonplace books of mourning (Chapter Six). Richly illustrated, this book brings an archive of commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums to the reader.
Manuscript Albums and Their Cultural Contexts
Author: Janine Droese
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111321460
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Manuscript albums are oftentimes contradictory objects: ephemeral yet monumental, coherent yet inviting change. Collecting items made by others, owners form their albums as representations of their selves, their worlds, and their traditions. The volume's contributors - who come from musicology, European history, English literary studies, and Islamic art history - explore a set of these challenging manuscripts while addressing questions of manuscript studies through their respective disciplinary lenses. The albums under investigation range from Early Modern Stammbücher, or alba amicorum, to albums assembled jointly by nineteenth-century cultural elites, and from muraqqaʿs of the Persianate world to English and North American friendship albums, including some kept by women. This book is the first contribution to the comparative study of manuscript albums, focusing on their materiality and analysing the practices of all those involved in making and using them. Moreover, the collection introduces this hard-to-grasp type of written artefact to the field of cross-disciplinary manuscript studies and suggests albums as a touchstone for manuscriptological theories and terminologies.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111321460
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
Manuscript albums are oftentimes contradictory objects: ephemeral yet monumental, coherent yet inviting change. Collecting items made by others, owners form their albums as representations of their selves, their worlds, and their traditions. The volume's contributors - who come from musicology, European history, English literary studies, and Islamic art history - explore a set of these challenging manuscripts while addressing questions of manuscript studies through their respective disciplinary lenses. The albums under investigation range from Early Modern Stammbücher, or alba amicorum, to albums assembled jointly by nineteenth-century cultural elites, and from muraqqaʿs of the Persianate world to English and North American friendship albums, including some kept by women. This book is the first contribution to the comparative study of manuscript albums, focusing on their materiality and analysing the practices of all those involved in making and using them. Moreover, the collection introduces this hard-to-grasp type of written artefact to the field of cross-disciplinary manuscript studies and suggests albums as a touchstone for manuscriptological theories and terminologies.
Cultural Heritage and the Literary Archive
Author: Tim Sommer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040119719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Modern literary archives play a key role in how authors’ lives and works get canonized and consecrated as cultural heritage. This interdisciplinary volume combines literary studies, book history, textual criticism, heritage studies, archival theory, and the digital humanities to examine the past, present, and future of literary archiving. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and archive professionals, the book explores the objects, practices, and institutions that have been at the heart of the modern archival landscape since its emergence in the nineteenth century. Covering a wide range of questions, the volume reconstructs how literary manuscripts turned into secular relics and analyzes the impact that the rise of the archive has had on the scholarly study and public perception of literature as cultural heritage. Individual chapters range from historical accounts of the Romantic origins of manuscript worship to critical discussions of the archiving of contemporary writers’ born-digital material.
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040119719
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Modern literary archives play a key role in how authors’ lives and works get canonized and consecrated as cultural heritage. This interdisciplinary volume combines literary studies, book history, textual criticism, heritage studies, archival theory, and the digital humanities to examine the past, present, and future of literary archiving. Featuring contributions from leading international scholars and archive professionals, the book explores the objects, practices, and institutions that have been at the heart of the modern archival landscape since its emergence in the nineteenth century. Covering a wide range of questions, the volume reconstructs how literary manuscripts turned into secular relics and analyzes the impact that the rise of the archive has had on the scholarly study and public perception of literature as cultural heritage. Individual chapters range from historical accounts of the Romantic origins of manuscript worship to critical discussions of the archiving of contemporary writers’ born-digital material.
The Limits of Familiarity
Author: Lindsey Eckert
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684483905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684483905
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.
A Comparative History of the Literary Draft in Europe
Author: Olga Beloborodova
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027246580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 566
Book Description
Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and beyond. It is organised according to eight categories of comparison distributed over the volume’s two parts, devoted respectively to ‘Text’ (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes) and ‘Beyond Text’ (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual). Across geographical, temporal, linguistic, generic and media boundaries, to name but a few, this book uncovers idiosyncrasies and parallels in the surviving traces of human creativity while drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of literary drafts and the ephemerality of the writing process they capture.
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027246580
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 566
Book Description
Literary drafts are a constant in literatures of all ages and linguistic areas, and yet their role in writing processes in various traditions has seldom been the subject of systematic comparative scrutiny. In 38 chapters written by leading experts in many different fields, this book charts a comparative history of the literary draft in Europe and beyond. It is organised according to eight categories of comparison distributed over the volume’s two parts, devoted respectively to ‘Text’ (i.e. the textual aspects of creative processes) and ‘Beyond Text’ (i.e. aspects of creative processes that are not necessarily textual). Across geographical, temporal, linguistic, generic and media boundaries, to name but a few, this book uncovers idiosyncrasies and parallels in the surviving traces of human creativity while drawing the reader’s attention to the materiality of literary drafts and the ephemerality of the writing process they capture.
Fragmentary Forms
Author: Freya Gowrley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691253757
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Book Description
A beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to today While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world’s oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity. Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims’ religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion. Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691253757
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Book Description
A beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to today While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world’s oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity. Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims’ religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion. Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.
The Cambridge Companion to the Poem
Author: Sean Pryor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100949886X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100949886X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.
The Latin Poetry of Thomas Gray
Author: Estelle Haan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350419885
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
In the first full-scale edition of Thomas Gray's Latin poetry, the Latin text and facing English translation are complemented by a detailed introduction and comprehensive commentary that situate Gray's Latin verse in relation to his vernacular poetry, epistolary correspondence, and, especially, his appropriation of classical and Neo-Latin literature. This book also traces hitherto unlocated manuscripts of several of his Latin poems, and includes an editio princeps of recently discovered Latin verses pertaining to his Neapolitan sojourn. Gray's Latin poetry presents an illuminating portrait of the artist as a young man, mapping his growth and development from his Etonian days to his undergraduate years at Cambridge University, to his continental journey and his return to England. Impressively eclectic in its scope and tone, it ranges from experimental renderings of English, Greek and Italian verse to more strikingly original pieces, including poetic reinterpretations of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man and John Locke's An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. Gray looks back to a classical past, offering imaginative re-readings of Lucretius, Virgil and Horace. At the same time, his Latin verse is firmly rooted in a postclassical world. At its heart is the theme of presences, whether sacred, imagined, absent or remembered, conveyed with a linguistic ingenuity that facilitates the encoding of homoeroticism in a Neo-Latin language of sensibility.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350419885
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Book Description
In the first full-scale edition of Thomas Gray's Latin poetry, the Latin text and facing English translation are complemented by a detailed introduction and comprehensive commentary that situate Gray's Latin verse in relation to his vernacular poetry, epistolary correspondence, and, especially, his appropriation of classical and Neo-Latin literature. This book also traces hitherto unlocated manuscripts of several of his Latin poems, and includes an editio princeps of recently discovered Latin verses pertaining to his Neapolitan sojourn. Gray's Latin poetry presents an illuminating portrait of the artist as a young man, mapping his growth and development from his Etonian days to his undergraduate years at Cambridge University, to his continental journey and his return to England. Impressively eclectic in its scope and tone, it ranges from experimental renderings of English, Greek and Italian verse to more strikingly original pieces, including poetic reinterpretations of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man and John Locke's An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. Gray looks back to a classical past, offering imaginative re-readings of Lucretius, Virgil and Horace. At the same time, his Latin verse is firmly rooted in a postclassical world. At its heart is the theme of presences, whether sacred, imagined, absent or remembered, conveyed with a linguistic ingenuity that facilitates the encoding of homoeroticism in a Neo-Latin language of sensibility.