Derek Attridge obtained degrees from the universities of Natal and Cambridge and he taught at Southampton, Strathclyde, and Rutgers universities before moving to the University of York, where is he Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature. He is the author or co-author of fifteen books on poetic form, literary theory, and South African and Irish literature, and has edited or co-edited eleven collections on similar topics. He has held fellowships or visiting professorships in the USA, South Africa, France, Italy, Egypt, and Australia and he is a Fellow of the British Academy.

• Preface Introduction PART ONE: Ancient Greece 1: Homeric Greece: Courts and Singers 2: Archaic to Classical Greece: Festivals and Rhapsodes 3: Classical Greece to Ptolemaic Alexandria: Writers and Readers PART TWO: Ancient Rome and Late Antiquity 4: Ancient Rome: The Republic and the Augustan Age 5: Ancient Rome: The Empire after Augustus 6: Late Antiquity: Latin and Greek, Private, Public, Popular PART THREE: The Middle Ages 7: Early Medieval Poetry: Vernacular Versifying 8: The Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Performing Genres 9: Lyric, Romance, and Alliterative Verse in Fourteenth-Century England 10: Chaucer, Gower, and Fifteenth-Century Poetry in English PART FOUR: The English Renaissance 11: Early Tudor Poetry: Courtliness and Print 12: Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry: The Circulation of Verse 13: Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry: The Idea of the Poet Bibliography

It is bracing to follow a prominent senior scholar in his exploration of so many centuries—millennia encountered not with any ex cathedra jadedness but with open enthusiasm that should immediately engage readers at every academic level.