Books by Michael Ferber
Poetry and Language: The Linguistics of Verse
Michael Ferber's accessible introduction to poetry's unusual uses of language tackles a wide range of subjects from a linguistic point of view. Written with the non-expert in mind, the book explores current linguistic concepts and theories and applies them to a variety of major poetic features. Equally appealing to linguists who feel that poetry has been unjustly neglected, the broad field of investigation touches on meter, rhyme (and other sound effects), onomatopoeia, syntax, meaning, metaphor, style, and translation, among others. Close study of poetic examples are mainly in English, but the book also focuses on several French, Latin, Greek, German, and Japanese examples, to show what is different and far from inevitable in English. This original, and unusually wide ranging study, delivers an engaging and often witty summary of how we define what poetry is.
Cambridge University Press, August, 2019
A Dictionary of Literary Symbols
This is an expansion of the first dictionary of symbols to be based on literature, rather than on 'universal' psychological archetypes or myths. It explains and illustrates the literary symbols that we frequently encounter (such as swan, rose, moon, gold) and gives thousands of cross-references and quotations. The dictionary concentrates on English literature, but its entries range widely from the Bible and classical authors to the twentieth century, taking in American and European literatures. For this third edition, Michael Ferber has included some twenty completely new entries (such as birch, childbirth, grove, mill, and railroad) and has added to many of the existing entries. Its rich references make this book an essential tool not only for literary and classical scholars but also for all students of literature.
Cambridge University Press, June 2017
The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry
The best way to learn about Romantic poetry is to plunge in and read a few Romantic poems. This book guides the new reader through this experience, focusing on canonical authors - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Blake, and Shelley - whilst also including less familiar figures as well. Each chapter explains the history and development of a genre or sets out an important context for the poetry, with a wealth of practical examples. Michael Ferber emphasizes connections between poets as they responded to each other and to great literary, social and historical changes around them. A unique appendix resolves most difficulties new readers of works from this period might face: unfamiliar words, unusual word order, the subjunctive mood and meter. This enjoyable and stimulating book is an ideal introduction to some of the most powerful and pleasing poems in the English language, written in one of the greatest periods in English poetry.
Cambridge University Press, June, 2012
Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction
Explores the definition of the word 'Romantic' and considers its origins
Unravels a complex and confusing subject to help the reader understand the various meanings of Romanticism
Covers a wide range of artistic forms including Romantic literature, music, painting, religion, and philosophy in several European countries
Oxford University Press, October, 2010
The Social Vision of William Blake
This fresh look at the social and political themes of Blake's poetry.
Princeton University Press, 1985
Full Literature Bibliography
Books (Author)
1. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
2. The Poetry of William Blake, a book in the Penguin Critical Studies series. London: Penguin, 1991.
3. The Poetry of Shelley, another in the Penguin Critical Studiesseries. London: Penguin, 1993.
*One chapter reprinted in Donald Reiman and Neil Fraistat, ed., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2001).
4a. A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
*Romanian translation 2001, Lithuanian 2005, Japanese 2005.
4b. A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Second Edition, expanded). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
4c. A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Third Edition, expanded again). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
5. Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
* Chinese (Mandarin) translation 2019, Turkish translation under contract.
* A blog on the OUP website, amounting to a short additional chapter, was chosen to appear in the VSI Blog Book, 2014.
6. The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
7. Poetry and Language: The Linguistics of Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Books (Editor)
8. European Romantic Poetry. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.
9. A Companion to European Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
10. Romanticism:One Hundred Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Articles
1. “Blake’s Idea of Brotherhood.” PMLA 93:3 (May 1978): 438-47.
2. “Blake’s Thel and the Bride of Christ.” Blake Studies 9:1-2 (1981): 45-56.
3. “‘London’ and its Politics.” ELH 48:2 (Summer 1981): 310-38.
4. “Simone Weil’s Iliad.” In George Abbott White, ed. Simone Weil: Interpretations of a Life. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981.
5. “Blake’s America and the Birth of Revolution.” In Stephen C. Behrendt, ed. History and Myth: Essays on English Romantic Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990.
6. “Romantic Anticapitalism: A Response to Sayre and Löwy.” In G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins, ed. Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1990.
7. “The Liberty of Appearing.” In Keith Hanley and Raman Selden, ed. Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf and New York: St. Martin’s, 1990.
8. “The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice.” ELR20:3 (Autumn 1990): 431-64.
*Reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism 40 (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group, 1998).
9. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” In Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson, ed. Blake, Politics, and History. New York: Garland, 1998.
10. “The Orthodoxy of Blake Footnotes.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (Summer 1998): 16-19.
11. “Blake and the Two Swords.” In Steve Clark and David Worrall, ed. Blake in the Nineties. London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
12. “Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as a Hymn.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 34:3 (Winter 2000/01): 82-94.
*Reprinted, translated into Dutch/Flemish, in Kunsttijdschrift Vlaanderen314 (February 2007): 25-32.
13a. “Blake for Children.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 35:1 (Summer 2001): 22-24.
13b. “Not for the Kiddies” (a slightly expanded version of “Blake for Children”). Academe(the AAUP journal) 87:4 (July-August 2001): 50-52.
14. “Shelley and ‘the Disastrous Fame of Conquerors’.” Keats-Shelley Journal 51 (2002): 145-73.
15. “In Defense of Clods.” In Alexander Gourlay, ed. Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 2002.
16. “The Romantic System of the Arts.” In Michael Ferber, ed. A Companion to European Romanticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
17. “The Curse of the Ephesians: A Long Footnote to Byron.” In Byron Journal 33:1 (2005): 43-51.
18. “The Eagles of Romanticism.” Literature Compass (Blackwell) 3-4 (2006): 846-66.
19. “Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘Ozymandias’.” In Michael Hanke, ed. Fourteen English Sonnets: Critical Essays. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007.
20. “Sainte-Beuve’s ‘Imitations’ of Two Sonnets by Wordsworth.” The Wordsworth Circle 38:4 (Autumn 2007): 215-17.
21. “Why Should Graduate Students in English Literature Know Foreign Languages?” ADE Bulletin 145 (Spring 2008): 62-65.
22. “Causley’s Version of Rimbaud: Sleeper in a Valley.” In Michael Hanke, ed. Through the Granite Kingdom: Critical Essays on Charles Causley. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2011.
23. “Translating ‘Nänie’ by Friedrich Schiller.” Translation Review 82 (Fall 2011): 11-16.
24. “Wordsworth on the Continent,” in Andrew Bennett, ed. William Wordsworth in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Short Articles
1. “A Possible Source for ‘Thel’s Motto’.” Blake Newsletter 34 (Fall 1975): 43-44.
2. “‘Thel’s Motto’: Likely and Unlikely Sources” (an exchange with Michael Tolley). Blake Newsletter 37 (Summer 1976): 36-38.
3. “Coleridge’s ‘Anacalyptic’ Blake: An Exegesis.” Modern Philology 76:2 (November 1978): 189-93.
4. “Mars and the Planets Three in America.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 59 (15:3) (Winter 1981-82): 136-37.
5. “Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’” (about Yeats and Nerval). The Explicator 66:4 (Summer 2008): 233-35.
* Reprinted in Poetry Criticism129. Gale/Cengage, 2012.
6. “Wordsworth, Jupiter, and Annotation.” The Wordsworth Circle 44:2-3 (Spring/Summer 2013): 164-65.
7. “Too Many Titles.” The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, 10 January 2014: B4-B5.
8. “The the.” Pusteblume 9:1 (Spring 2018), forthcoming. [About the last two words of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump”]
Translations of Poetry
Gérard de Nerval, “Delphica,” in Literary Imagination 5:3 (Fall 2003).
André Chénier, “The Captive Girl,” and Alexander Pushkin, “André Chénier,” in Metamorphoses 11:2 (Fall 2003).
These three poems and another sixty or so, translated from German, French, and Italian, have appeared in my anthology, European Romantic Poetry (2005). Several of these, and others, will appear in The Romantics: One Hundred Poems (2020)
Ugo Foscolo, “To the Muse”; Antoine Vincent Arnault, “The Leaf”; and Théophile Gautier, “The Last Leaf,” in Charles River Journal 7 (Summer 2017).
Reviews
1. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, in Socialist Revolution (now Socialist Review) 33 (May-June 1977), 99-108.
2. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, in American Book Review 1:3 (Summer 1978), 19-20.
3. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, and three other works, in Socialist Review 46 (July-August 1979), 123-41.
4. Two facsimile editions of Blake’s Urizenand Milton, in American Book Review 2:2 (October 1979), 3.
5. Kress and Hodge, Language as Ideology, in Journal of Social Reconstruction 1:2 (April-June 1980), 103-07.
6. Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, in Yale Review 71:2 (January 1982), ix-xiii.
7. Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination, in Criticism 26:4 (Fall 1984), 397-99.
8. Robert Gleckner, Blake and Spenser, in The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography 11 (1985).
9. Nelson Hilton, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of William Blake, 1970-84, in The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography 11 (1985).
10. David Erdman, Commerce des Lumières: John Oswald and the British in France, 1790-93, in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 22:1 (Summer 1988), 26-28.
11. Peter Marshall, William Blake: Visionary Anarchist, in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 24:1 (Summer 1990), 262.
12. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno; or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, in The Nation, October 15, 1990.
*Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 142. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Group (2001): 232-34.
13. Robert N. Essick, William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations: A Catalogue and Study of the Plates Engraved by Blake after Designs by Other Artists, in Word and Image 8:3 (July-September 1992): 283-84.
14. William Blake, Jerusalem, facsimile edited by Morton D. Paley, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience, facsimile edited by Andrew Lincoln (William Blake Trust and Princeton), in Word and Image 9:1 (January-March 1993): 87-90.
15. Vincent De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime, in The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, n.s. 17 (1993): 331-32.
16. E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, in The Nation, November 15, 1993.
17. William Blake, The Early Illuminated Books (Volume 3 of Blake’s Illuminated Books), facsimiles edited with introductions and notes by Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi (The William Blake Trust and Princeton), in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 29:3 (Winter 1995-96): 88-90.
18. Two anthologies about women Romantic writers, in NWSA Journal 8:2 (Summer 1996): 147-51.
19. Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake, in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 32:3 (Winter 1998/99): 81-83.
20. Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs: From Manuscript to Illuminated Printing, in Criticism 43:4 (Fall 2001): 492-96.
21. Jennifer Davis Michael, Blake and the City, in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 41:3 (Winter 2007-08): 125-26.
22. Clayton Koelb, The Revivifying Word: Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe’s Romantic Age, in The German Quarterly 82:4 (Fall 2009): 532-33.
23. Sibylle Erle and Morton D. Paley, ed., The Reception of William Blake in Europe, in Eighteenth-Century Studies, forthcoming (probably January 2020)
September 2019