"Introducing concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics, Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. Ultimately, he offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection...

As a literary mode, "lyric" is difficult to define. The term is conventionally applied to brief, songlike poems expressing the speaker's interior thoughts, but many critics have questioned the underlying assumptions of this definition. While many people associate lyric with the Romantic era, Heather Dubrow turns instead to the poetry of early modern England. The Challenges of Orpheus confronts widespread assumptions about lyric, exploring such topics...

Explores the poetry of the Renaissance, from Dunbar in the late fifteeth century to the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne in the early seventeenth. The book offers more than the wealth of literature discussed: it is a pioneering work in its own right, bringing the insights of contemporary literary and cultural theory to an overview of the period.