Responding to George Lakoff's and Mark Johnson's analysis of metaphor, William Brockliss explores the Homeric poets' use of concrete concepts drawn from the Greek natural environment to aid their audiences' understanding of abstract concepts. In particular, he considers Homeric images that associate flowers with the concepts of deception, disorder, and death, and examines the ways in which the poets engage with natural phenomena such as the brief, diverse blooms of the Greek spring. Taken together, such Homeric images present a more pessimistic depiction of the human condition than we find in the vegetal imagery of other archaic Greek genres. While lyric poets drew on floral imagery to emphasize the beauty of the beloved, the Homeric poets used images of flowers to explore the potentially deceptive qualities of bodies adorned for seduction. Where the Hesiodic poets employed vegetal images to depict the stable structure of the cosmos, the Homeric poets set arboreal imagery of good order against floral images suggestive of challenges or changes to orderliness. And while the elegiac poets celebrated the brief "flower of youth," the Homeric poets created floral images reminiscent of Hesiodic monsters, and thereby helped audiences to imagine the monstrous otherness of death.

Nina Bogin writes of her second collection that she has 'drawn together poems that deal with the personal - family, friendship, love and loss; poems about landscape and place; and, poems that try to come to grips with the larger world and its chaos. Uniting the poems is a common thread: the natural world and its impenetrable presence which, though threatened, remains a source of renewal and, therefore, of faith'.

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

This unusually diverse collection of ten essays, devoted to British and Irish writers and poets from 1895 to the present, explores many aspects of the creative process, from inspiration to publication and beyond. The volume shows how writers' manuscripts and revisions give us a better understanding of their published work by drawing on unpublished archival sources to unveil, across genre and gender, the intricacies of their craft. It examines how the paper medium and writing implements influence the act of composition; reveals the latest developments in such fields as life writing and digital humanities-especially how modern scholars, through the filter of hypertext, revisit modernist texts, or respond to newly-found material; and analyzes the hidden handwork, be it throughout the writer's exhaustive self-editing process or the writer-editor collaboration. Finally, it captures an award-winning poet and a living novelist reflecting upon their craft and work in progress.