Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

3268 products


  • Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists

    University of Toronto Press Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists

    Book SynopsisThe central importance of naturalistic vision – of a sense of man’s life as part of nature – is emphasized in this study of the poetry of Tennyson and Swinburne. In tracing this vision, Professor McSweeney makes a series of qualitative distinctions leading to a revaluation of the achievements of both poets. McSweeney begins with an examination of Swinburne’s critical and creative response to Tennyson, revealing Swinburne’s perception of the effect that Tennyson’s suppression of naturalistic vision and his consequent overemphasis on morality and metaphysical speculation had on his poetry. A brief discussion of Tennyson’s response to Swinburne is followed by an analysis of the literary climate of the 1820s and 1830s, necessary for an understanding of the central feature of Tennyson’s artistic development: the complex mutation which transformed him from a wholly Romantic poet into a largely Victorian one.Tracing the

    £21.59

  • University of Toronto Press Wordsworth as Critic

    Book SynopsisThis book is the first full-scale account of the growth of Wordsworth’s thinking about the theory of poetry. It draws mainly on his formal critical essays but also on unpublished material and personal statements about poetics and the growth and constitution of the poet’s mind in The Prelude, in other verse, and in letters. The foundation of the discussion is an account of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, based on Professor Owen’s edition of that text published in 1957. The chapters on the Essays upon Epitaphs, the Preface or 1815, and the Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, trace a process of development in which the critic silently abandons the more embarrassingly controversial elements of his earliest argument (such as his advocacy of the language of rustics and the language of prose), confirms its more satisfactory features, and progresses to a subtle, intricate, and rewarding account of his psychology of literary creation and of the audience’s reaction t

    £25.19

  • The Prison and the Pinnacle

    University of Toronto Press The Prison and the Pinnacle

    Book SynopsisThis volume brings together five papers read at the University of Western Ontario in 1971 to mark the tercentenary of the publication of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. It commemorates what tradition has regarded as Milton’s final poetic communication.In the first essay, Arthur Barker describes Milton’s progress towards his last two poems, placing his ideas and ideals within a seventeenth-century context. Closely argued, the essay relates Paradise Lost to Samson Agonistes, and both works to Milton’s earlier poetry and prose. Barbara Lewalski, in a seminal essay, explores the complex ways in which the ideas of time and history contribute to Paradise Lost: to develop its thematic subtleties, advance its dramatic action, and assist in the characterization of the principal personages. The editor’s essay reveals how in Samson Agonistes Milton dramatized his idea that an ethic of self-reliance must be made to join hands with a theology of depende

    £17.99

  • Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages

    University of Toronto Press Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages

    Book SynopsisThe well-known reference works and analyses of Old English literature show little agreement about the definition and exemplification of style in the poetry of the period. Medieval poetry, particularly its style, is often described as ‘complex,’ ‘sophisticated,’ ‘extraordinarily compressed,’ or simply ‘as dense and difficult.’ This collection of papers, dedicated to medievalist Constance B. Hieatt, considers the prosody and poetics of Old and early Middle English. The contributors concern themselves with the details of how poems and their metre work and employ a variety of approaches, including traditional text analysis, historiographical consideration of the works and responses to them, linguistics-based analysis, application of pragmatic theory, computer analysis, and a comparative-literature perspective. The writers suggest both implicitly and explicitly that whatever cultural constructions are relevant to the poetry of Anglo

    £21.59

  • Brownings Voices in the Ring and the Book

    University of Toronto Press Brownings Voices in the Ring and the Book

    Book SynopsisToo often the vastness of The Ring and the Book has discouraged modern readers, yet it has become increasingly clear that the meaning of this monumental poem rests on its whole design. In this work the author deals with the poem in its entirety to show the culmination of both Browning’s artistic skill and his moral and aesthetic philosophy. Approaching the whole poem from the point of view of the poet’s role (rather than the “what-happens” approach) this study examines the complex method by which Browning demonstrates how a poet goes about making his audience share his gift of judging human guilt and innocence.The author discusses some of the main questions that have concerned critics for so long – the problem of Browning’s attitude toward “fact,” the real meaning of his “doctrine of commitment,” and the connection between his optimistic philosophy and his fascination with the role of evil in human a

    £21.59

  • Beyond the Family Romance

    University of Toronto Press Beyond the Family Romance

    Book SynopsisGiovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is one of Italy’s most canonical and beloved poets. In Beyond the Family Romance, Maria Truglio offers fresh insight into the uncanny qualities of Pascoli’s domestic verse. As suggested by the Freudian title, this study opens a dialogue between Pascoli’s literature and Freud’s theories, with a particular focus on each author’s interrogation of origins. Through close readings and historical contextualization, themes of regression, memory, and other manifestations of ‘origins’ are analyzed, moving Pascoli’s poetry beyond the biographical strictures that have hitherto confined it.Truglio’s post-structuralist readings question the dichotomy between ‘safety within the home’ and the ‘threatening outside world,’ revealing the ambivalences with which images of the home are fraught in Pascoli’s poetry. In addition to the sustained comparison w

    £26.99

  • Robert Copland

    University of Toronto Press Robert Copland

    Book SynopsisRobert Copland (fl. 1505-1546) had a long career as a poet, translator, and printer, and his achievements were substantial. As a printer, he worked for and with Wynkyn de Worde, and his editions look back to the work of Caxton, de Worde's master, and forward, through the work of his successor William Copland, to the Elizabethan period. As a translator, he worked at a time when foreign languages were becoming increasingly necessary to the average Englishman. John Berdan calls Copland one of the main channels of French influence in England during this period.This book makes available the lively poetry of a pre-Renaissance world. In includes lyl of Braintfords Testament, a bequest of farts poem indebted to Chaucer's Summoner's Tale; The Seuen Sorowes That Women Haue When Theyr Husbandes Be Deade, in which conventional misogynist satire moves into psychological complexity; and Copland's most important work, The Hye Way to the Spyttell Hous, an

    £24.29

  • Brownings Experiments with Genre

    University of Toronto Press Brownings Experiments with Genre

    Book SynopsisOne of the chief characteristics of nineteenth-century poetics was a tendency to test the conventions and techniques of literary genres by shifting, modifying, and combining various styles and forms. Browning fully exploited these changes, because his interests and purposes as a poet seemed to demand more of the lyric, the dramatic, and the narrative than these kinds had traditionally been able to perform. His fascination was with the development of the individual soul and he was determined to evoke in his readers his own insights into the complexity of human concerns; thus he became a constant experimenter with genre. Browning never felt that any experiment, however unsatisfactory the result, was wasted effort; each direction tried made him better prepared to attempt another.This book explores the kinds and modes with which he worked and describes the nature of the experiments he made, concentrating on the earlier poetry and in particular on The Ring and the Book. P

    £20.69

  • Domestic and Heroic in Tennysons Poetry

    University of Toronto Press Domestic and Heroic in Tennysons Poetry

    Book SynopsisTennyson shared the assumptions of his age concerning the value of family life, and treated the domestic as the source of the heroic in both action and character.This book provides a critical examination of these major Victorian themes as they appear in Tennyson's poetry and demonstrates how the poet's assumptions illuminate his use of elegy, idyl, and epyllion and his treatment of romance.Professor Hair analyses In Memoriam, the English Idylls, The Princess, and Idyls of the King; he examines Tennyson's view of the family as the model of social order, a civilizing influence on the nation, and a place where the greater man, or hero, is nurtured; and he reveals how much of Tennyson's poetry explores the link between domestic and heroic.He also discusses the patterns into which these pervasive domestic concerns fall, with emphasis on the most significant: separation and reunions. The myth of Demeter and Persephone, the Biblical

    £23.39

  • The Court of Sapience

    University of Toronto Press The Court of Sapience

    Book SynopsisThe medieval English allegorical poem, The Court of Sapience, was written in the middle of the fifteenth century by an unknown author. It is best described as an encyclopaedia: in the allegory the poet describes the nature and activities of wisdom in all its aspects. He includes a moving account of the fall of a man and his restoration by divine wisdom; then he leads his dreamer through a landscape where all the traditional beauties of nature are catalogued and assigned their properties. The visit to the castle of Sapience, inhabited by all the branches of learning and the seven restorative virtues, completes the poem as we have it.The first edition was an early production of Caxton's press, and it was reprinted by his successor, Wynkyn de Worde. This is a new edition of Caxton's text of the poem. Variant readings from the extant manuscripts have investigated in detail and are discussed in the lengthy introduction and extensive commentary.The poem is an attrac

    £19.79

  • The Poetry of Francisco de la Torre

    University of Toronto Press The Poetry of Francisco de la Torre

    Book SynopsisFrancisco de la Torre has long been praised as an outstanding poet in the mould of Garcilaso de la Vega and his simplicity of style and soft, gentle, Arcadian environment of his poetry have been emphasized. In this volume Professor Hughes attempts to define more accurately the position of Francisco de la Torre's verse in the evolution of Spanish poetry in the sixteenth century, revealing that Torre's vision of the pastoral world and his poetic language show him to be a transitional poet of considerable quality and substance and not merely an imitator of Garcilaso.Hughes demonstrates that while some of Torre's poetry follows a general pastoral pattern, his descriptions are characterized by a sense of movement through a shifting perspective and that even in poems with a traditional pastoral setting, the descriptions sometimes negate the pastoral qualities. The author also shows that Torre, rather than looking back towards Garcilaso and his contemporaries, is already anti

    £17.09

  • University of Toronto Press The Owl and the Nightingale

    Book SynopsisThe Owl and the Nightingale is clearly one of the few major Middle English poems. Despite the clarity and simplicity of its text, however, the poem has occasioned bitter and still unresolved interpretative controversy. Is the key to its meaning to be found in bird lore? the debate form? Is the poem a political or religious allegory? Despite the radical contradictions in the conclusions of previous critics, most of them have implicitly claimed a unique and exclusive validity. Kathryn Hume's purpose in writing this book is to offer a new account of the poem, one based on a systematic attempt to assess the validity and usefulness of various possible approaches to the work. She shows saneness, balance, and humour both in her criticism of previous interpretations and in her own conclusions. We need, she insists, to understand the nature of the poem before we erect elaborate theories about its meaning.The contradictoriness of the relevant avian traditions, the birds

    £17.09

  • Wordsworths Metaphysical Verse

    University of Toronto Press Wordsworths Metaphysical Verse

    Book SynopsisIn his philosophic verse, Woodsworth identifies the history of poetry and geometrical thought as the two chief treasures of the mind and as main sources of his poetic inspiration. He assigns transcendental value to geometry and indicates that he attempts to apply its proportions to the laws of nature. In this book, Professor Johnson demonstrates how Wordsworth also employed geometrical patterns in the metrical construction of his verse and how the character of those patterns can be related to the poet's major philosophical values.Johnson shows how Wordsworth, when writing about the nature and significance of geometrical thought in The Prelude and The Excursion, designs his verse paragraphs in accordance with simple geometrical proportions which are thereby associated with the metaphysical value he attributes to geometry. Wordsworth finds geometrical forms to be hidden in the natural landscape and inherent in the structures of perception itself.This bo

    £23.39

  • That Invincible Samson

    University of Toronto Press That Invincible Samson

    Book SynopsisThis work examines the more than one hundred analogues of Samson Agonistes, about half of them written earlier than Milton's drama. The author has gone back in every instance to primary sources, and examined all treatments of Milton's theme, in all languages, for their intrinsic interest and merit. While he has not entirely omitted a discussion of source relationships, his concern here has been chiefly with analogues.In Part I of the book the author compares five pre-Miltonic works, which he has translated, in whole or in part, from the original Latin, Dutch, and Italian. In Part II, a descriptive catalogue, he comments on the significance, to Miltonists and to the general reader, of the analogues. He traces the purposes beyond mere theatre in the different versions of the play: versions prior to 1670 contain many overtones of personal, national, or theological significance, while, after 1671, there is a rapid shift away from religious or moral presentation to a more

    £19.79

  • University of Toronto Press The Nature of Early Greek Lyric

    Book SynopsisThree important literary questions in early Greek lyrics are addressed in this study. First, Fowler attempts to determine the extent that Homer and epic poetry generally influenced the lyric poets, with respect to both the style of compositions and their content. Identifying the certain examples of influence – which are far fewer than often thought – he analyses the technique of imitation, tracing a development from simpler to more complex as the archaic period proceeds. Throughout this and the following chapter, he often finds occasion to take issue with the famous and influential view of the early Greek mind championed by Bruno Snell and Hermann Fränkel.In the second chapter Fowler studies the organization of individual poems, identifying compositional principles that may be used to solve literary and textual problems. Some of these principles, like ring-composition, are old familiars; others are not. All are found to be more pervasive than is often realized,

    £15.19

  • Representative French Poetry Second Edition

    University of Toronto Press Representative French Poetry Second Edition

    Book SynopsisThe making of a reasonably comprehensive anthology which is intended to do more than reflect the personal literary tastes of the anthologists is not an easy task, but is certainly an exciting and challenging one. It is important, of course, if it is to have coherence and validity, that its audience be reasonably well defined and kept in mind as the selection proceeds. The anthology offered by Professor Graham has been prepared carefully to meet the needs of students reading French poetry while in the early years of their university course. It does not attempt to be a bulky sample of the whole field of French poetry but rather to be a judicious selection of the works of poets who may be described as typical of the best in their age. From each of them have been included some well-known selections which students must always meet and also some less well known which are nevertheless equal in quality and whose relative unfamiliarity may give them a special appeal to instructors. A particular

    £13.29

  • Writing Anthropologists Sounding Primitives

    University of Nebraska Press Writing Anthropologists Sounding Primitives

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisWriting Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives re-examines the poetry and scholarship of three of the foremost figures in the twentieth-century history of U.S.-American anthropology: Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. While they are widely renowned for their contributions to Franz Boas’s early twentieth-century school of cultural relativism, what is far less known is their shared interest in probing the representational potential of different media and forms of writing. This dimension of their work is manifest in Sapir’s critical writing on music and literature and Mead’s groundbreaking work with photography and film. Sapir, Mead, and Benedict together also wrote more than one thousand poems, which in turn negotiate their own media status and rivalry with other forms of representation. A. Elisabeth Reichel presents the first sustained study of the published and unpublished poetry of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, charting this largely unexTrade Review"This book greatly expands the literary canons of the early 20th century by extensively excavating previously unpublished archival and unexamined published material. Steeping the text in sophisticated theory and detailed history, Reichel demonstrates how these anthropologists' science challenged social Darwinian theories of evolution."—L. D. Baker, Choice"So many of our visions of ourselves, and our images of what constitutes culture, alight on the written. Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives interrupts this narrative with a thoughtful intervention."—James Dowthwaite, American Literary History"Reichel has made a signal contribution both to the history of anthropology and to anthropology today."—Richard Handler, Anthropological Quarterly“The only scholarly work with access to the complete archive, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives offers the first sustained literary study of the published and unpublished poetry written by three of the iconic figures of twentieth-century cultural anthropology. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s nuanced readings of individual poems and her persuasive explanation of their transdisciplinary relevance are certain to promote further scholarly engagement with the remarkably variegated array of creative projects that these anthropologists produced.”—Donald E. Pease, author of The New American Exceptionalism“Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives is the definitive study of the often-noted but rarely examined poetry of three important and complexly interrelated Boasian anthropologists. In this innovative analysis, A. Elisabeth Reichel focuses on the broader perspectives of inter-media relations and anthropological notions of Primitivism.”—Ira Jacknis, research anthropologist at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley“Harnessing intermediality and sound studies theories, A. Elisabeth Reichel explores Sapir’s, Mead’s, and Benedict’s poetry alongside their multi-media anthropological research. This timely interdisciplinary American studies monograph astutely elucidates highly problematic practices and politics of sound production and listening when imagining ‘Others.’”—Nassim W. Balestrini, professor of American studies and intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria“The poet-anthropologist cuts a dashing figure in the pages of this book. . . . A. Elisabeth Reichel’s close readings through a critical lens of the published and unpublished poems and correspondence of the Benedict-Sapir-Mead trio bring out the underlying currents connecting their poetry to their anthropology, and vice versa. Given the recent vogue for ‘multimodal anthropologies,’ Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives represents a groundbreaking contribution to the ‘archaeology’ of the current conjuncture by exploring the first, tentative forays of these three illustrious figures across cultures via multiple media and genres.”—David Howes, professor of anthropology and co-director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal“A groundbreaking transdisciplinary work. Uncovering and collecting an invaluable archive, A. Elisabeth Reichel provides the first extensive literary analyses of these key anthropologists-artists’ poems and their relation to cultural theory and modernist aesthetics. Setting this work in the context of their broader multimedia experiments Reichel further illuminates, with complexity and nuance, larger debates over media alterity and cultural alterity.”—Eric Aronoff, author of Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies and the Problem of Culture“Thoughtfully argued and painstakingly researched, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives shows why three of the twentieth century’s most influential anthropologists turned to poetry to express their ideas about cultural difference. A. Elisabeth Reichel’s work gives new meaning to the truism that ethnography is a form of writing worthy of literary analysis. . . . A compelling, informative read.”—Brian Hochman, author of Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media TechnologyTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Series Editors’ Introduction Acknowledgments Editorial Note on Archival Sources Introduction: Poets, Anthropologists, Primitives 1. Of Mumbling Melody, Soft Singing, and Slow Speech: Constructions of Sonic Otherness in the Poetry of Edward Sapir 2. On Alternating Sounds: Musical Alterities in Sapir’s Poetry and Critical Writings Interlude: French Canadian Folk Songs in Translation 3. “For You Have Given Me Speech!”: Gifted Literates, Illiterate Primitives, and Margaret Mead 4. Toward Unnerving the Us: The Poetry and Scholarship of Ruth Benedict Conclusion: Cultural and Media Evolutionism in Boasian Anthropology and Beyond Appendix: The Complete Poetry of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead The Poetry of Edward Sapir The Poetry of Ruth Benedict The Poetry of Margaret Mead Notes Bibliography Index

    1 in stock

    £52.70

  • The Beauty Hunters

    University of Nebraska Press The Beauty Hunters

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisNamed a Notable African Book of 2023 byBrittle Paper The Beauty Hunters offers a rare insight into Sudanese Bedouin poetry, its evolution, aesthetics, and impact. Through an in-depth profile of al-?ardallo, the doyen of this art form, Adil Babikir explores the attributes that established him as a poet of international stature. The life of al-?ardallo was a series of journeys in pursuit of beauty. From wandering across the Bu?ana wilderness to his adventures with women, he documented the ups and downs of his life using superb verse. In addition to its aesthetic value, al-?ardallo’s poetry offers rich material for Sudanese studies as it carries glimpses of the sociopolitical developments in Sudan during his lifetime, having lived through three distinct eras: Turco-Egyptian rule (1820–1885), Mahdist rule (1885–1898), and part of the Anglo-Egyptian era (1898–1956). Reading Bedouin poetry in a hybrid context, as a major contributor to what Babikir Trade Review“The clouds of neglect have parted, and an enchanting book of classical African poetry has come forth shining. The Bedouin poetry of Sudan, a descendant perhaps of the pre-Islamic poetry of Arabia, can also sit alongside the Chinese Book of Songs and Hāla’s Sattasaī of India, pure poetry bearing the scent of the land and woven with silk-fine imagery and exquisite lyricism. The Beauty Hunters is a tour de force, proving once again that Africa is the heart of the world’s beauty and light. Thank you, Adil Babikir, for this wonder of a book.”—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas“Here the legacy and enduring appeal of al-Ḥārdallo, Sudan’s preeminent nineteenth-century poet, is showcased with thoroughness and panache. Oryxes, heavy rains, and dancing women blaze through a vivid pastoral landscape of nomadic tribes and journeys guided by the stars. Adil Babikir’s moving and vibrant translations capture the exuberance and pathos of this Afro-Arab poet, caught in the crosshairs of imperialism. The Beauty Hunters bears witness to the richness and range of Arabic as it mingles with the local Beja and Nubian languages of Africa.”—Leila Aboulela, author of Minaret and The TranslatorTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Notes on Transliteration Introduction: A Life’s Journey in Search of Beauty 1. Al-Ḥārdallo’s Time 2. Romance 3. The Nature Lover 4. Al-Ḥārdallo’s Style 5. The Musdār: A Historical Context 6. Musdār al-Nijūm: A Journey across the Stars 7. Musdār Rufāʾa: A Terrestrial Journey across the Buṭāna 8. The Role of Bedouin Poetry in Shaping Sudan’s Aesthetic Taste 9. The Bedouin Poem: A Living Legacy 10. The Musdār and the Ḥaqība 11. Contemporary Musdārs 12. Al-Ḥārdallo’s Poems Musdār al-Ṣayd Miscellaneous Quatrains Nostalgia Romance Heartbreak The Ordeal Farewell Arabic Glossary of Local Terms Notes Bibliography Index

    3 in stock

    £21.59

  • Conversations with Donald Hall

    MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Donald Hall

    Book SynopsisOffers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Donald Hall's evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years.

    £81.75

  • Conversations with Donald Hall

    University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Donald Hall

    Book SynopsisConversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall''s evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928-2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of Ox Cart Man to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon''s death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful colle

    £22.50

  • MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with John Berryman

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe poetry of John Berryman (1914-1972) is primarily concerned with the self in response to the rapid social, political, sexual, racial, and technological transformations of the twentieth century. Collected in here are all of Berryman's major interviews, personality pieces, profiles, and local interest items.

    1 in stock

    £81.75

  • The African American Sonnet

    University Press of Mississippi The African American Sonnet

    Book SynopsisSome of the best known African American poems are sonnets: Claude McKay's 'If We Must Die,' Countee Cullen's 'Yet Do I Marvel,' Gwendolyn Brooks's 'First fight. Then fiddle.' Yet few readers realize that these poems are part of a rich tradition that formed after the Civil War and comprises more than a thousand sonnets by African American poets. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Rita Dove all wrote sonnets.Based on extensive archival research, The African American Sonnet: A Literary History traces this forgotten tradition from the nineteenth century to the present. Timo Müller uses sonnets to open up fresh perspectives on African American literary history. He examines the struggle over the legacy of the Civil War, the trajectories of Harlem Renaissance protest, the tensions between folk art and transnational perspectives in the thirties, the vernacular modernism of the postwar period, the cultural nationalism of the Black

    £26.10

  • Conversations with Diane di Prima

    MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Conversations with Diane di Prima

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisDiane di Prima was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, and her career is distinguished by strong contributions to both literature and social justice. This volume presents twenty interviews ranging from 1972 to 2010 that chart di Prima’s intellectual, spiritual, and political evolution.

    1 in stock

    £81.75

  • Start a Riot  Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement

    MP-MPP University Press of Mississippi Start a Riot Civil Unrest in Black Arts Movement

    2 in stock

    Book SynopsisAnalyses riot iconography and its usefulness as a political strategy of protestation. Through a mixed-methods approach of literary close-reading, historical, and sociological analysis, Casarae Lavada Abdul-Ghani considers how BAM artist-writers challenge misconceptions regarding Black protest through experimental explorations in their writings.

    2 in stock

    £26.06

  • Heroic Poets Poetic Heroes

    Cornell University Press Heroic Poets Poetic Heroes

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisAn astonishingly rich oral epic that chronicles the early history of a Bedouin tribe, the Sirat Bani Hilal has been performed for almost a thousand years. In this ethnography of a contemporary community of professional poet-singers, Dwight F. Reynolds reveals how the epic tradition continues to provide a context for social interaction and commentary. Reynolds's account is based on performances in the northern Egyptian village in which he studied as an apprentice to a master epic-singer. Reynolds explains in detail the narrative structure of the Sirat Bani Hilal as well as the tradition of epic singing. He sees both living epic poets and fictional epic heroes as figures engaged in an ongoing dialogue with audiences concerning such vital issues as ethnicity, religious orientation, codes of behavior, gender roles, and social hierarchies.Trade ReviewThe richness of Reynolds’s text and his scholarly accomplishment serve as poignant reminders of how little we know about Arab folk performances and how difficult it is to teach these great traditions to our students. -- Virginia Danielson * Middle East Studies Association Bulletin *Reynolds’s book both complements the works of his predecessors and surpasses them in the area on which he focuses. With it, we have a full and methodologically sophisticated treatment of the social poetics of Sirat Bani Hilal performance that is a model of how such research should be conducted. -- Peter Heath * International Journal of Middle East Studies *

    1 in stock

    £16.13

  • Frame Glass Verse

    Cornell University Press Frame Glass Verse

    4 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thoughtfrom framing to perspective to reflectionRayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. ReaTrade ReviewIn Frame, Glass, Verse, Rayna Kalas shows the way the mindset worked when poesis was still the same as techne. In the figurative language and its subtle complexity and multiple meanings of Renaissance literature, she finds the conceptual frame, the reflective mirror or 'perspective glass,' the power of prosody and what Coleridge was to call 'the esemplastic power of the imagination.'... The result is nothing less than a new window opening on Renaissance literature. We see through this 'magic casement,' as Keats put it, the way those texts were first intended to be seen, not distorted by our more modern ways of thought or ideas about the nature and use of literature which was constructed and intended as a 'through-shine' communication but created by minds rather unlike our twenty-first century ones. * Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance *A welcome and persuasive book, not only for Renaissance scholars but for all readers of poetry and poetics. * Renaissance Quarterly *Probably the most exciting insight Kalas makes is that to frame meant, in essence, to make rather than to delineate, and that a revision in our understanding of the term necessitates a reconsideration of poetic making: words were understood as material and temporal matter, as distinguished from divine essence.... Overall this is an innovative, wide-ranging and provocative book. * Comitatus *Kalas is finely tuned to the work that words do. Throughout the book, Kalas unpacks poetic conceits, spins out elaborate etymologies, and follows Raymond Williams and Reinhart Koselleck in considering the ways in which key words can teach us about social and conceptual structures.... Frame, Glass, Verse will appeal to more than editors and critics: a contribution to the history of optics and philosophy as well as literature, this lucid and wide-ranging book has much to teach scholars who are interested in all aspects of Renaissance word and worldmaking. * Shakespeare Studies *This intelligent and subtle book joins a growing body of work that reinterprets Renaissance culture in light of the material conditions of lived experience.... Like a good steel glass, [this book] reflects an abundance of hard work and exquisite craftsmanship. * Modern Philology *

    4 in stock

    £26.59

  • I the Poet

    Cornell University Press I the Poet

    3 in stock

    Book SynopsisFirst-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studiesincluding the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic I-voice.In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part bTrade ReviewI, the Poet is an excellent, thought-provoking, and significant contribution to the study of Latin poetry. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Voices on the Page 1. Poetry as Conversation 2. Poetry as Performance 3. Poetry That Says "Ego" 4. Poetry as Writing Epilogue: Ovid in Exile

    3 in stock

    £45.00

  • One Hundred Autobiographies

    Cornell University Press One Hundred Autobiographies

    5 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.This fake memoir, as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke''s Letters to a Young Poet.Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. DostoTrade ReviewPoet and critic Lehman...brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Lehman's exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. -- Starred Review * Publisher's Weekly *Lehman's memoir pulses with life and memory. * The New York Jewish Week *While in throes of fighting cancer, David Lehman wrote every day he could, as a way of imaginatively affirming his existence and escaping the terrible ordeals of pain, dread, and emotional chaos. First of all figuring out a formal strategy, as expert poets do, Lehman then crafts a brilliant, inventive portrait of a mind, in language in which everything counts. The book's moral seriousness and theological and ancestral powers provide extreme aesthetic pleasure—Lehman's forms of language are forms of life, always life. One Hundred Autobiographies teaches and instructs its fortunate readers, like all great literature, which it is. * Literary Hub *Table of ContentsPreface 1. Execution Poem Expert 2. Spots of Time 3. Café Loup 4. No Big Deal 5. Cancer Alley 6. The Crisis 7. The Aftermath 8. The Procedure 9. The Protocol 10. The Good Kind 11. The Diarist 12. None But the Strong 13. Tropic of Cancer 14. Hospitals and Airports 15. Back to the Waiting Room 16. "Hurry up, please, it's time" 17. Why 1963? 18. Good Friday 19. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate! 20. The Weekend Before 21. "Bladder cancer: Isn't that what Sinatra died of?" 22. In a Technical Sense 23. Five O'Clock Rush 24. A Heart Event 25. Good Show 26. Metaport 27. If You Were an English Poet 28. The Regimen 29. A Few Beacons in the Quicksand 30. What's the Story? 31. Time Is on My Side 32. Rush Job 33. Final Call 34. And Then You Crash 35. Chemo 36. Roid Rage 37. Under the Garden 38. The End 39. Falling in Love Again 40. Nothingness 41. Syllabus 42. Commencement Speech 43. The Exquisite Corpse 44. The Editorial "We" 45. Oblivion 46. Dostoyevsky 47. The Spiritual Connection 48. "Myself, When Stoned" 49. Bloomsday 50. Tom Collins 51. The Admissions Officer 52. Columbia 53. Classic Koch 54. The Poem Team 55. Shakespeare's Birthday 56. Recovery Room 57. The Rebbe 58. Life Beings at Forty 59133. Search for Meaning 60. The Old Religion 61. The Problem of Evil 62. Dean Martin's Hat 63. 740 Francs 64. Shalom Aleichem Rides to the Rescue 65. The Arrival of the Messiah 66. Sabbath Services 67. A Complicated Guy 68. The Patient Next to You 69. Cambridge 70. Armistice Day, 1970 71. The Sublime Pain of Being 72. The Glass Skeleton 73. Why Does the Bridge Not Progress? 74. Q & A 75. Ludlowville, 1981 76. Bio Note (Alt.) 77. Wedding Ceremony 78. Moscow, 2007 79. Group Therapy 80. Fort Tryon Park 81. Fine Invention 82. Identity Theft 83. A Routine Visit 84. Doctor Jew 85. "Except for the cancer..." 86. The Heart Knows 87. A Black Dress 88. Heisenberg as Hero 89. Cheers! 90. Walter Lehmann 91. Rowing in Eden 92. I Remember Mama 93. No Regrets 94. If I Could 95. The Scar 96. The Secret 97. Like a Hurricane 98. In the Eyes of the Beholder 99. Champagne Cocktails 100. In the Swim

    5 in stock

    £17.09

  • Lyric as Comedy

    Cornell University Press Lyric as Comedy

    7 in stock

    Book SynopsisA poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet''s thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McTrade ReviewThe poets examined are diverse, as are the poems McRae discusses, and gender and race awareness play a significant role in her conversation. McRae writes in a relaxed style with a wit and humor that belies the deep knowledge that informs her observations. A solid resource for those interested in poetry and current critical theory and practice. * Choice *McRae's scholarly exposition of the comic in contemporary lyric is exhibited by her close-readings of poets in the later chapters of her book. * Intertext *Lyric as Comedy is a sophisticated and challenging study that usefully draws our attention to the myriad ways that poets use the paradigm of the conventional lyric as a foil and source of humor, especially in their writing about the self. The book's incisive central idea—that contemporary poems are often funny because they resist the genre conventions and expectations of the form—opens the door to further exploration of the many comic modes flourishing across the landscape of contemporary US poetry. * ALH Online Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Consider What That Feels Like 1. Comedy in an Age of Close Reading: John Berryman's Dream Songs 2. Robert Lowell: The Noise of One's Own Voice 3. A. R. Ammons: Comic Badness 4. Terrance Hayes: Floundering Interiors 5. Coming to Terms with Our Self: Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, Monica Youn

    7 in stock

    £37.80

  • The Space That Remains

    Cornell University Press The Space That Remains

    10 in stock

    Book SynopsisIn The Space That Remains, Aaron Pelttari offers the first systematic study of the major fourth-century poets since Michael Robert''s foundational The Jeweled Style. It is the first book to give equal attention to both Christian and Pagan poetry and the first to take seriously the issue of readership.As Pelttari shows, the period marked a turn towards forms of writing that privilege the reader''s active involvement in shaping the meaning of the text. In the poetry of Ausonius, Claudian, and Prudentius we can see the increasing importance of distinctions between old and new, ancient and modern, forgotten and remembered. The strange traditionalism and verbalism of the day often concealed a desire for immediacy and presence. We can see these changes most clearly in the expectations placed upon readers. The space that remains is the space that the reader comes to inhabit, as would increasingly become the case in the literature of the Latin Middle Ages.Trade ReviewThe analysis itself is sharp and to the point, with each passage deftly handled to serve its point. The conclusions are thought-provoking. * Comitatus *Pelttari's project is thought-provoking... The Space that Remains will be fundamental to future discussions of Latin textuality, compositional practices, and the horizons of readers' expectations in Late Antiquity. * Journal of Roman Studies *This book is destined to be quoted in every discussion on late antique literary studies and it makes a significant contribution to the debate on Latin poetry of the 4th century. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *The Space That Remains is an exciting book...Throughout it all, the author himself is excited, passionate, engaged... As a vision of strong readers in late antiquity, and as its own example of strong reading, The Space That Remains is promising and illuminating new work. * Classical World *In recent criticism of Late Antique poetry, Aaron Pelttari's book stands out because it has a theoretical focus on fourth-century literature. It is not a study of a particular poet, nor of a particular genre. Pelttari seeks to understand the special character of writing and reading poetry during this time period—what he describes as a "shift." * The Medieval Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Late Antique Poetry and the Figure of the Reader1. Text, Interpretation, and Authority2. Prefaces and the Reader's Approach to the Text3. Open Texts and Layers of Meaning4. The Presence of the Reader: Allusion in Late AntiquityConclusionReferences General Index Index of Passages Cited

    10 in stock

    £20.39

  • PoetMonks

    Cornell University Press PoetMonks

    1 in stock

    Book Synopsis

    1 in stock

    £88.33

  • Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End

    Stanford University Press Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End

    Book SynopsisA literary history of the Great Acceleration, Remainders examines an archive of postwar American poetry that reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis. These poems portray various forms of remainders—from obsolescent goods and waste products to atmospheric pollution and melting glaciers—that convey the ecological consequences of global economic development. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, Margaret Ronda highlights the ways that poetry explores other dimensions of ecological relationships. The poems she considers engage in more ambivalent ways with the problem of human agency and the limits of individual perception, and they are attuned to the melancholic and damaging aspects of environmental existence in a time of generalized crisis. Her method, which emphasizes the material histories and uneven effects of capitalist development, models a unique critical approach to understanding the causes and conditions of ongoing biospheric catastrophe.Trade Review"This haunting and deftly executed book tracks the traces and effects of postwar consumption-driven capitalism in American poetry in unexpected ways. Margaret Ronda proves to be an ecocritical scholar of keen poetic insight, originality, and range." -- Rob Wilson * University of California, Santa Cruz *"With precise and unsparing attention, Remainders shows us how the very things that make poetry 'untimely'—bearing old forms into the present, making present the discarded or lost, investing in barely conceivable futures—can make it the timeliest of arts, best attuned to the ecological calamity of our era." -- Oren Izenberg * University of California, Irvine *"Margaret Ronda makes a persuasive case for poetry's continued relevance as a response to the ecological outrages of late capitalist development. Remainders sheds light on a literary tradition whose exegetical, affective, and political intractability reflects the planetary crisis that surrounds us, while rejecting any facile narrative of repair. This is a timely book about the radical possibilities of untimeliness." -- Jennifer Scappettone * University of Chicago *"Ronda's expansive rubric of the remainder has the advantage of accentuating the ecological resonance of poems by figures not traditionally situated within ecological circles...Ronda's precise interpretations, above all else, dazzle." -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Twentieth-century and contemporary US poets, Ronda shows, have a vivid sense of the human predicament and the consequences of anthropogenic climate change, which they register and route through the remainders of poetic traditions....[She leads] readers through extended, difficult, and detailed readings of literary texts, but[attaches] these readings to intuitive research questions about poetry's place in the world." -- Walt Hunter * American Literary History *"Ronda lucidly articulates and examines...changing paradigms, and the histories which provoked them, under the heading 'the Great Acceleration', which encompasses the huge raft of changes to the post-1945 world....Moreover, she forcefully conceptualizes the specifics of this history as part of late capitalism's seemingly inexorable spread." -- Stephen Grace * The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *"Ronda's book is an important contribution to ecocriticism and poetry studies in these grim times, and most likely it will remain so for years to come." -- Scott Knickerbocker * ISLE *"Ronda's contribution forges a conceptual tool for tracking what Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin collaboratively theorize as natural history.[Her] book offers literary history and environmentalism each a new path for considering what remains." -- Brent Ryan Bellamy * American Literature *"[T]he source of this book's real value [is] a reinvention of the radical register of thought and action for our historical present – because nothing less will be sufficient if we are to survive the storms to come." -- Mark Steven * Journal of American Studies *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Great Acceleration Poetics chapter abstractThe Introduction lays out the historical framework of the Great Acceleration. Rather than aligning the Great Acceleration with the discourse of the Anthropocene, this introduction argues that the particular historical model of the Great Acceleration is more attentive to the explosive economic growth in this period and its ecological ramifications. Postwar American poetry's interest in leftovers, residual matter and life, and unredeemable goods makes it a particularly keen chronicler of the larger ecohistorical changes of this era. At the same time, this interest in remainders rather than natural externality becomes a measure of the increasing inaccessibility of the master-concept of nature as an imaginative resource and a cultural concept in this time. It also reveals the changing self-conceptions of the cultural work and status of poetry after modernism. 1North Central, South Side: Postwar Ecologies in Niedecker and Brooks chapter abstractThe opening chapter reads two mid-century poets, Lorine Niedecker and Gwendolyn Brooks, as chroniclers of socioecological transition in the immediate postwar period. While environmental historians have recently turned attention to the suburbs as the key site of inquiry into changing postwar conditions, the chapter emphasizes the rural and urban peripheries as locales that reveal many of the emerging characteristics of the Great Acceleration. Turning first to Lorine Niedecker, the chapter describes her development of a poetics attentive to uneven development, residual forms of life, and ecosystemic degradation in the mixed economy of rural Wisconsin. The second half of the chapter moves from Niedecker's rural Wisconsin to Brooks's urban Chicago. Brooks explores the production of space in relation to the forms of environmental racism emerging in South Side housing and neighborhood conditions after 1945. 2"The Advancing Signs of the Air": Ashbery's Atmospheres chapter abstractThis chapter begins with a discussion of the new forms of environmental consciousness emerging in the 1960s and early 1970s around pollution and systemic toxicity. It focuses specifically on Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, discussing their approaches to ecological interconnection under the sign of crisis but also the ways in which this interconnection is difficult to perceive or understand. The chapter then turns from their reflections on the scarcely perceptible intimacies of ecological interconnection to an examination of John Ashbery's poetry, which explores these thresholds. Exploring Ashbery's portrayals of waste and air as phenomena undergoing change, this chapter argues that Ashbery's work depicts various forms of environmental consciousness. His poetry unfolds an affirmative embrace of ecological uncertainty that involves neither critique nor attempt to repair damage, nor even an attempt to understand the causes of emergent crisis. Instead, he traces the way crisis can be sensed in his poetic surrounds. 3"NOT PEOPLE'S PARK / PEOPLE'S PLANET": 1970s Revolutionary Pastoral chapter abstractThis chapter engages with two poetic works of the early 1970s, Gary Snyder's Turtle Island (1974) and Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (1st ed. 1971), which were essential reading for the countercultural left. These books envisage an ecological commons that is grounded in nonmodern or "primitive" ways of living but is also figured as not yet existent, requiring revolutionary change in order to come into being. Holding images of ecological catastrophe alongside visions of living lightly on the earth, these poems create a distinctive friction between tumult and ease that this chapter calls "revolutionary pastoral." These books repurpose the pastoral's opposition to acquisitive logics and the concept of property for an era confronting new forms of capital expansion and environmental enclosure. The chapter closes by examining the historical conditions that led to the decline of radical ecological politics by the late 1970s and the corporatization of the environmental movement. 4Mourning and Melancholia at the End of Nature chapter abstractThis chapter begins with a consideration of the development of the discourse of the "end of nature" and its implications for understanding ecological relations. Pointing to the elegiac dimensions of this discourse, the chapter turns to Juliana Spahr's long poem "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache" as an example of a literary exploration of the consequences of this conceptual absence. The chapter draws on the Romantic philosophy of Schiller as well as more recent psychoanalytic accounts of elegy and mourning to argue that the operations of elegy become the subject of investigation in Spahr's work. "Gentle Now" serves as a representative eco-elegy that dwells in melancholia rather than moving toward the completion of the mourning process. The chapter closes with a consideration of a more recent poem by Spahr, co-written with Joshua Clover, that investigates the affective and political limits of melancholy as a response to present conditions. 5"A Rescue That Comes Too Late": Figure and Disfiguration in Contemporary Ecopoetics chapter abstractThis chapter turns to the contemporary mode of ecopoetics as an exploration of the problems of poiesis in a time of accelerating ecological destruction. Ecopoetics as a distinctive mode emerges in the post-Kyoto Protocol era, when the problem of how to respond to planetary environmental degradation has become increasingly urgent. The ecopoetics texts of the chapter present an extended redescription of human capacities and aesthetic making in light of anthropogenic crisis. Discussing works by Brenda Hillman, Hoa Nguyen, Brenda Coultas, and Allison Cobb, the chapter highlights how their use of prosopopoeia and apostrophe dramatizes uncanny and defamiliarized dimensions of relationality. These portrayals raise questions regarding the culpability for environmental destruction and the limits of anthropogenic ingenuity to fix, remake, or salvage. Coda: On Storms to Come chapter abstractThe Coda argues that storms are one key way to register the unfathomable earth-systemic changes characteristic of the Great Acceleration. It points to the intensifying weather patterns of this time and offers examples of some recent cultural works—poetry, film, photography—that represent these storms. In these representations, the spectator confronts the bewildering sense of change without any narrative arc that might point to recovery or renewal. One documentary text by Cheena Marie Lo on Hurricane Katrina offers a powerful investigation of these conditions of aftermath. The coda explores Lo's orientation toward the nonredemptive and the lost as a model of approaching the larger ethos of this study's poetry. The Coda ends with a turn toward the forms of connectivity that these works have charted, despite their larger historical pessimisms, and points to the ways these connections are materializing in contemporary struggles for the ecological commons.

    £49.30

  • Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research

    Stanford University Press Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research

    Book SynopsisNarrowcast explores how mid-century American poets associated with the New Left mobilized tape recording as a new form of sonic field research even as they themselves were being subjected to tape-based surveillance. Media theorists tend to understand audio recording as a technique for separating bodies from sounds, but this book listens closely to tape's embedded information, offering a counterintuitive site-specific account of 1960s poetic recordings. Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Larry Eigner, and Amiri Baraka all used recording to contest models of time being put forward by dominant media and the state, exploring non-monumental time and subverting media schedules of work, consumption, leisure, and national crises. Surprisingly, their methods at once dovetailed with those of the state collecting evidence against them and ran up against the same technological limits. Arguing that CIA and FBI "researchers" shared unexpected terrain not only with poets but with famous theorists such as Fredric Jameson and Hayden White, Lytle Shaw reframes the status of tape recordings in postwar poetics and challenges notions of how tape might be understood as a mode of evidence.Trade Review"Each page of this book contains some new insight, some unlikely connection, some reframing of a familiar problem thought long settled. Narrowcast not only challenges us to reconceive the relationships between poetry, technology, and state surveillance; it ignites new thinking about the intersections of politics and poetics in the 1960s." -- Anthony Reed * Yale University *"Lytle Shaw's examinations of the unexpected interactions between seemingly disparate figures are revealing and suggestive, groundbreaking and completely compelling. His deep forays into particular archives course with centrifugal energy, illuminating wide vistas around them and revealing the far-reaching implications of his fine-grained analyses." -- Drayton Nabers * Brown University *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Third Personism: The FBI's Poetics of Immediacy in the 1960s chapter abstractThis chapter uses the reel-to-reel recordings Allen Ginsberg made on a cross-country trip in 1966 to focalize the contested status of audio research as it was then fought over by the New Left and the U.S. state. Reframing Frank O'Hara's suggestion in "Personism" that greater immediacy with his friends "Allen" (Ginsberg) and "Roi" (LeRoi Jones) might be achieved by calling them, the chapter considers what it means for postwar poetics that such New Left poets were often under state audio surveillance. Bringing poets, literary critics and the state into unexpected proximity, the chapter offers an account of the guiding assumptions and pitfalls associated with the CIA and FBI's often Yale-trained literary critics, demonstrating how all three confront the overwhelming of voice by its noisy sonic environment and how the state's theory of totality might be compared to that of famous literary theorists like Fredric Jameson. 2The Eigner Sanction: Keeping Time from the American Century chapter abstractChapter two explores Larry Eigner's development of a counter-temporality in relation to his dominant reception, the domestic mediascape he daily negotiated, the surrounding cold war defense infrastructure, and the Luce media empire's regulation of Americans' experience of time. Presenting Eigner's reflexive daily neighborhood sound and sight monitoring as a counterpoint to the Cold War surveillance jets that performed the same function over his neighborhood, the chapter shows how the urgent events that course through Eigner's airspace get recast by the poet's horizontal model of time. Eigner's role as an alternate broadcasting system then gets drawn out through an analysis of the ways that the Luce media (referenced by Eigner) took on the roll of organizing national time at the level of the week, month, year and even century. 3Olson's Sonic Walls: Citizenship and Surveillance from the OWI to the Nixon Tapes chapter abstractChapter three positions Charles Olson's education in American studies at Harvard and his work for the OWI in relation to postwar area studies and models of evidence, research and network building demonstrated on his recordings, whose confrontational dynamics and insistence on the real time of research are related to postwar sound and performance art. The chapter then uses Henry Kissinger's Harvard education, including Paul de Man's French tutoring, as a way to study the infrastructure of postwar area studies that underlay Kissinger's later audio surveillance, including his taping of Allen Ginsberg. Comparing Kissinger's understanding of tape to Olson's, the chapter draws out the "avant-garde" nature of Kissinger's audio research in which documentation transcends a hypothesis, a claim that gets tested by considering a 1975 court case in which Hayden White brought suit against the LAPD for planting officer pretending to be students in his class at UCLA. 4"The Strategic Idea of North: Glenn Gould, Sergeant Jones and White Alice" chapter abstractConsidering the sound documentaries of R. Murray Schafer and Glenn Gould, this chapter first places the origins of sound studies within nationalist Canadian conceptions of geography and culture before then outlining the American Cold War technological infrastructure that preceded these musicians' movements into Canadian space, especially the three lines of radar stations erected to monitor Soviet incursions into the North American continent. The chapter then considers the mechanics of this system via a case study of one of its functionaries, sergeant LeRoi Jones, whose practice missions of atomic reprisal aboard a B36 peacemaker were signaled by a hellish siren particularly noted by the sergeant. The chapter concludes by following this siren-sound into the poet and music critic's later work, as Amiri Baraka, fashioning exemplary sounds of Black Nationalism.

    £26.99

  • The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem:

    Stanford University Press The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem:

    Book SynopsisThomas Wyatt didn't publish "They Flee from Me." It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells—in vivid and compelling detail—of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across 500 turbulent years. Wyatt's poem becomes an occasion to ask and answer numerous questions about literature, culture, and history. Itself about the passage of time, it allows us to consider why anyone would write such a thing in the first place, and why anyone would care to read or remember the person who wrote it. From the deadly, fascinating circles of Henry VIII's court to the contemporary classroom, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also introduces us to a series of worlds. We meet antiquaries, editors, publishers, anthologizers, and critics whose own life stories beckon. And we learn how the poem came to be considered, after many centuries of neglect, a model of the "best" English has to offer and an ideal object of literary study. The result is an exploration of literature in the fine grain of the everyday and its needs: in the classroom, in society, and in the life of nations.Trade Review"We take great poems to have survived history by virtue of their excellence. Peter Murphy shows how wrong we are. He tells a vivid, compelling story of one poem's survival across five centuries of reckless printers, contentious critics, warring editors, and devoted readers, and of all the good luck that's kept it alive." -- Jeff Dolven * Princeton University *"Murphy turns the story of a single work into a moving, lyrical meditation on the vicissitudes of poetry as it enters the unpredictable worlds of readers, collectors, editors, and scholars. Beautifully attuned to what can and cannot be known about a poem's history, this book provides a model for understanding what it means for literature to endure." -- Andrew Elfenbein * University of Minnesota *"Beautifully written and utterly original, Peter Murphy's study of Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me' as it passes through the hands and minds of readers from the sixteenth century to the present is a profound meditation on how we remember and forget the past, on everything that makes us truly human." -- John Guillory * New York University *"Peter Murphy's superb book takes Wyatt's perhaps most famous poem, "They flee from me,' and turns it into a parable of loss, rediscovery, and the fragility and chance of how the lyric poem's small proportions generate capacious meaning over time and vastly different cultural contexts. Murphy's work is admirable in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin....[It] provides singular access to the 'vse of Poesie' as the original cause for what it means to be human." -- Daniel Fischlin * Renaissance and Reformation *"Murphy's study and style are subtly and pleasurably convincing in their discussion of fine prosodic and stylistic distinctions....[One] of the most interesting provocations in the English Renaissance this year." -- Ryan Netzley * Studies in English Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPart I: Thomas Wyatt Writes a Poem and Shows It to Others chapter abstractThe first section of the First Part is about the making of "They Flee from Me" and its participation in the daily life of people nearby. It focuses on the manuscript books in which "They Flee from Me" is first recorded, the "Egerton" and "Devonshire" manuscripts, and describes the performance and transformation of traditional poetic modes that Thomas Wyatt accomplishes. It then moves to a discussion of the first printing of the poem in Tottel's Miscellany. This part ends with a discussion of the poem's lapsing out of culture and memory, conducted by considering a seventeenth-century user of the Egerton manuscript who wrote over and crossed out many of the poems. Broader questions about the functions of poetry are raised through a consideration of some algebra written next to the poem and a comparison of the languages of poetry and mathematics. Part II: A Century of Learning, and the Invention of Literature chapter abstractThe Second Part begins by discussing the first reprinters of Thomas Wyatt's poetry, circa 1720, and uses these reprintings to present the many challenges and impossibilities involved in trying to represent the past accurately. It then moves to the story of the main focus of the Second Part, the eighteenth-century cleric and editor Thomas Percy, whose career provides an opportunity to show how reprinting old poetry gets entangled with the eighteenth-century project of nation and empire building. The troubled nature of Percy's work is dramatized through his bitter conflict with Joseph Ritson, a rival editor and a fierce, contrarian Jacobin. Percy also writes on the page in the Egerton manuscript on which "They Flee from Me" appears, and meditation on this use of the manuscript allows for broader consideration of issues of editing, printing, poetry, and personal ambition. Part III: More Learning, the British Library, and the Song of the Professor chapter abstractThe Third Part traces the profound reanimation of old poetry that coincides with the invention of English Literature as a school subject. The first section of this part concerns George Frederic Nott, a gifted editor who comprehensively reprinted Wyatt's poetry and "They Flee from Me" along the way. Further reflection on the life of the Egerton manuscript provides a context for the entry of the manuscript into the British Library, its current home. This part concludes by discussing the work of Arthur Quiller-Couch, the editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse and the first Professor of English at Cambridge University. The modern University and its associated culture is depicted as a new kind of Court, and the Professor as a new kind of (cultural) courtier, using poetry as the subject and object of ambition. Part IV: Coming to America and Making it Big chapter abstractIn the twentieth century "They Flee from Me" becomes the Wyatt poem people know and reprint, when it becomes a kind of hero of the burgeoning industry of English teaching. This Part describes the full maturation of academic culture in the twentieth-century United States and the important place the study of old poetry was given in this culture. It focuses on Cleanth Brooks, a Yale English Professor who put "They Flee from Me" in his profoundly influential first textbook, in 1936. This Part argues that while methods have changed since the demise of Brooks and his "New" criticism, the reading and reprinting of old poetry are still primarily driven by the elaborate culture of testing, evaluation, and moral instruction, both for Professors and for students, resident in the contemporary education industry. The last reprinting considered at length is that of Stephen Greenblatt, in his era-creating Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Conclusions chapter abstractThe final part meditates on several of the big questions that have been in play throughout the book. Is an old poem a form of heritable knowledge? Do people get "better" at poetry? Is it possible to be "right" when saying what an old poem is about and what function it had in the past? What kind of object does an old poem become when it is the target of schooling and evaluation? It argues that the reprinting of old poetry is always instrumental and always both wrong and right about the abject and triumphant individual old poem. It argues that "They Flee from Me" survived because it functions so well in the environment of the school and university—and that is because this environment is so similar to the (deadly, interesting) environment of Henry VIII's court.

    £86.40

  • Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin

    Stanford University Press Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin

    Book SynopsisTwo Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin shows how the poet enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique and still groundbreaking concept of revolution, one that begins with a revolutionary understanding of language. The product of an intense engagement with both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the book presents Werner Hamacher's major attempts at developing a critical practice commensurate with the immensity of Hölderlin's late writings. These essays offer an incisive and innovative combination of critical theory and deconstruction while also identifying where influential critics like Heidegger fail to do justice to the poet's astonishing radicality. Readers will not only come away with a new appreciation of Hölderlin's poetic and political-theoretical achievements but will also discover the motivating force behind Hamacher's own achievements as a literary scholar and political theorist. An introduction by Julia Ng and an afterword by Peter Fenves provide further information about these studies and the academic and theoretical context in which they were composed.Trade Review"These texts constitute a unique and highly significant contribution to Hölderlin studies, as well as a fitting tribute to Werner Hamacher, a singularly gifted and original thinker. His writings here stand alone in their scholarly mastery and philological brilliance."—Susan Bernstein, Brown University"This is an extraordinary book, in which the brilliance of literary interpretation and the force of critical argument can hardly be told apart. Each of its two 'studies' shines a bright light on Hölderlin's poetry and poetics, and each bears witness to the exceptional subtlety, precision, and originality for which Werner Hamacher's own work is known."—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University"Hamacher examines works of philosophy and literature with a rigorous philological attention attuned to subtleties of language and poetics....The essays in the present volume...are models of rigorous literary-philosophical criticism and a deserving memorial to Hamacher's work in this area. Recommended."—R. Bledsoe, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Versing, Ending: Hölderlin in 1971 1. Version of Meaning: A Study of Hölderlin's Late Lyric 2. Parousia, Stone-Walls: Mediacy and Temporality, Late Hölderlin Afterword: Toward a "Non-Metaphysical 'Concept' of Revolution"

    £100.00

  • The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem:

    Stanford University Press The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem:

    Book SynopsisThomas Wyatt didn't publish "They Flee from Me." It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells—in vivid and compelling detail—of the accidents of fate that kept a great poem alive across 500 turbulent years. Wyatt's poem becomes an occasion to ask and answer numerous questions about literature, culture, and history. Itself about the passage of time, it allows us to consider why anyone would write such a thing in the first place, and why anyone would care to read or remember the person who wrote it. From the deadly, fascinating circles of Henry VIII's court to the contemporary classroom, The Long Public Life of a Short Private Poem also introduces us to a series of worlds. We meet antiquaries, editors, publishers, anthologizers, and critics whose own life stories beckon. And we learn how the poem came to be considered, after many centuries of neglect, a model of the "best" English has to offer and an ideal object of literary study. The result is an exploration of literature in the fine grain of the everyday and its needs: in the classroom, in society, and in the life of nations.Trade Review"We take great poems to have survived history by virtue of their excellence. Peter Murphy shows how wrong we are. He tells a vivid, compelling story of one poem's survival across five centuries of reckless printers, contentious critics, warring editors, and devoted readers, and of all the good luck that's kept it alive." -- Jeff Dolven * Princeton University *"Murphy turns the story of a single work into a moving, lyrical meditation on the vicissitudes of poetry as it enters the unpredictable worlds of readers, collectors, editors, and scholars. Beautifully attuned to what can and cannot be known about a poem's history, this book provides a model for understanding what it means for literature to endure." -- Andrew Elfenbein * University of Minnesota *"Beautifully written and utterly original, Peter Murphy's study of Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me' as it passes through the hands and minds of readers from the sixteenth century to the present is a profound meditation on how we remember and forget the past, on everything that makes us truly human." -- John Guillory * New York University *"Peter Murphy's superb book takes Wyatt's perhaps most famous poem, "They flee from me,' and turns it into a parable of loss, rediscovery, and the fragility and chance of how the lyric poem's small proportions generate capacious meaning over time and vastly different cultural contexts. Murphy's work is admirable in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin....[It] provides singular access to the 'vse of Poesie' as the original cause for what it means to be human." -- Daniel Fischlin * Renaissance and Reformation *"Murphy's study and style are subtly and pleasurably convincing in their discussion of fine prosodic and stylistic distinctions....[One] of the most interesting provocations in the English Renaissance this year." -- Ryan Netzley * Studies in English Literature *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPart I: Thomas Wyatt Writes a Poem and Shows It to Others chapter abstractThe first section of the First Part is about the making of "They Flee from Me" and its participation in the daily life of people nearby. It focuses on the manuscript books in which "They Flee from Me" is first recorded, the "Egerton" and "Devonshire" manuscripts, and describes the performance and transformation of traditional poetic modes that Thomas Wyatt accomplishes. It then moves to a discussion of the first printing of the poem in Tottel's Miscellany. This part ends with a discussion of the poem's lapsing out of culture and memory, conducted by considering a seventeenth-century user of the Egerton manuscript who wrote over and crossed out many of the poems. Broader questions about the functions of poetry are raised through a consideration of some algebra written next to the poem and a comparison of the languages of poetry and mathematics. Part II: A Century of Learning, and the Invention of Literature chapter abstractThe Second Part begins by discussing the first reprinters of Thomas Wyatt's poetry, circa 1720, and uses these reprintings to present the many challenges and impossibilities involved in trying to represent the past accurately. It then moves to the story of the main focus of the Second Part, the eighteenth-century cleric and editor Thomas Percy, whose career provides an opportunity to show how reprinting old poetry gets entangled with the eighteenth-century project of nation and empire building. The troubled nature of Percy's work is dramatized through his bitter conflict with Joseph Ritson, a rival editor and a fierce, contrarian Jacobin. Percy also writes on the page in the Egerton manuscript on which "They Flee from Me" appears, and meditation on this use of the manuscript allows for broader consideration of issues of editing, printing, poetry, and personal ambition. Part III: More Learning, the British Library, and the Song of the Professor chapter abstractThe Third Part traces the profound reanimation of old poetry that coincides with the invention of English Literature as a school subject. The first section of this part concerns George Frederic Nott, a gifted editor who comprehensively reprinted Wyatt's poetry and "They Flee from Me" along the way. Further reflection on the life of the Egerton manuscript provides a context for the entry of the manuscript into the British Library, its current home. This part concludes by discussing the work of Arthur Quiller-Couch, the editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse and the first Professor of English at Cambridge University. The modern University and its associated culture is depicted as a new kind of Court, and the Professor as a new kind of (cultural) courtier, using poetry as the subject and object of ambition. Part IV: Coming to America and Making it Big chapter abstractIn the twentieth century "They Flee from Me" becomes the Wyatt poem people know and reprint, when it becomes a kind of hero of the burgeoning industry of English teaching. This Part describes the full maturation of academic culture in the twentieth-century United States and the important place the study of old poetry was given in this culture. It focuses on Cleanth Brooks, a Yale English Professor who put "They Flee from Me" in his profoundly influential first textbook, in 1936. This Part argues that while methods have changed since the demise of Brooks and his "New" criticism, the reading and reprinting of old poetry are still primarily driven by the elaborate culture of testing, evaluation, and moral instruction, both for Professors and for students, resident in the contemporary education industry. The last reprinting considered at length is that of Stephen Greenblatt, in his era-creating Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Conclusions chapter abstractThe final part meditates on several of the big questions that have been in play throughout the book. Is an old poem a form of heritable knowledge? Do people get "better" at poetry? Is it possible to be "right" when saying what an old poem is about and what function it had in the past? What kind of object does an old poem become when it is the target of schooling and evaluation? It argues that the reprinting of old poetry is always instrumental and always both wrong and right about the abject and triumphant individual old poem. It argues that "They Flee from Me" survived because it functions so well in the environment of the school and university—and that is because this environment is so similar to the (deadly, interesting) environment of Henry VIII's court.

    £23.39

  • Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin

    Stanford University Press Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin

    Book SynopsisTwo Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin shows how the poet enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique and still groundbreaking concept of revolution, one that begins with a revolutionary understanding of language. The product of an intense engagement with both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the book presents Werner Hamacher's major attempts at developing a critical practice commensurate with the immensity of Hölderlin's late writings. These essays offer an incisive and innovative combination of critical theory and deconstruction while also identifying where influential critics like Heidegger fail to do justice to the poet's astonishing radicality. Readers will not only come away with a new appreciation of Hölderlin's poetic and political-theoretical achievements but will also discover the motivating force behind Hamacher's own achievements as a literary scholar and political theorist. An introduction by Julia Ng and an afterword by Peter Fenves provide further information about these studies and the academic and theoretical context in which they were composed.Trade Review"These texts constitute a unique and highly significant contribution to Hölderlin studies, as well as a fitting tribute to Werner Hamacher, a singularly gifted and original thinker. His writings here stand alone in their scholarly mastery and philological brilliance."—Susan Bernstein, Brown University"This is an extraordinary book, in which the brilliance of literary interpretation and the force of critical argument can hardly be told apart. Each of its two 'studies' shines a bright light on Hölderlin's poetry and poetics, and each bears witness to the exceptional subtlety, precision, and originality for which Werner Hamacher's own work is known."—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University"Hamacher examines works of philosophy and literature with a rigorous philological attention attuned to subtleties of language and poetics....The essays in the present volume...are models of rigorous literary-philosophical criticism and a deserving memorial to Hamacher's work in this area. Recommended."—R. Bledsoe, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction: Versing, Ending: Hölderlin in 1971 1. Version of Meaning: A Study of Hölderlin's Late Lyric 2. Parousia, Stone-Walls: Mediacy and Temporality, Late Hölderlin Afterword: Toward a "Non-Metaphysical 'Concept' of Revolution"

    £26.99

  • Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation

    Stanford University Press Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation

    Book SynopsisCritics have long understood the development of Romantic aesthetics as a turning point in the history of literary theory, a turn that is responsible for theories of mind and body that continue to inform our understandings of subjectivity and embodiment today. Yet the question of what aesthetic experience can "do" grates against the fact that much Romantic writing represents subjects as not actually in charge of the feelings they feel, the dreams they dream, or the actions they take. In response to this dilemma, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation argues that being moved contrary to one's will is itself an aesthetic phenomenon explored by Romantic poets whose experiments with poetic form and genre provoke unanticipated feelings through verse. By analyzing how Romantic poets intervene, affectively and aesthetically, in readerly expectations of form and genre, Mathes shows how provocations disrupt and invite, disturb and compel—interrupting or suspending or retreating in ways that ask readers to orient themselves, materially and socially, in relation to literary experiences that are at once virtual and embodied. Examining the formal tactics of Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, alongside their reactions to historical events such as Toussaint Louverture's revolt and the Peterloo Massacre, Mathes reveals that an aesthetics of radical openness is central to the development of literary theory and criticism in Romantic Britain.Trade Review"An elegant, sharply argued, and engaging intervention in conversations on affect studies, ontologies, and materialism."—Jacques Khalip, Brown University"With stunning formal readings of the poetics of anticipation and disappointment, and a transformative account of Romanticism's Spinozist undercurrents, Mathes's elegant book offers a new and exciting framework for thinking about the intertwining of poetry and affect."—Lily Gurton-Wachter, Smith College"In contributing to dynamic inquiries at the core of contemporary Romantic literary studies, Poetic Form and Romantic Provocation is a significant achievement. The book introduces new approaches to Romantic literature and opens opportunities for further scholarship."—Stephen Dedeschi, Review 19"Mathes's keenly immersive, glittering formalist readings do not eschew politics, nor poetry's instrumental potential. Her study deliberately draws upon the musical language underlying critics' approach to poetry's material presence in order to unsettle the sociopolitical resonances that have accrued around notions of harmony and discord—here, crucial to conveying the tentative shape and space of our shared world."—Samantha Botz, European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: "Provocation's Means" 1. "Hope Against Hope in Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets" 2. "The Disappointment Aesthetic" 3. "Coleridge Tripping" 4. "Reciprocal Keats" 5. "The Politics of Provocation" 6. Coda: "Provocation's Ends"

    £50.40

  • Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century

    Stanford University Press Literary Authority: An Eighteenth-Century

    Book SynopsisThis book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power. We take for granted, now, that authority dwells in literature and in being its author. This state of affairs was not naturally occurring, but deliberately invented. This book tells the story of that invention. The story's central figures are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. But its narrative begins in the 1680s, with the last gasp of the bond linking literary to political authority. While Jacobite poets celebrated (and mourned) the Stuart dynasty, Whig writers traced the philosophical and aesthetic consequences of the accession of William of Orange. Both groups left behind sets of literary devices ready-made to confer and validate authority. Claude Willan challenges the continued reign of the "Scriblerian" model of the period and shows how that reign was engineered. In so doing he historicizes the relationship between "good" and "bad" writing, and suggests how we might think about literature and beauty had Pope and Johnson not taken literary authority for themselves. What might literature have looked like, and what could we use it for, he provocatively asks.Trade Review"This is an important and scholarly treatment of a significant puzzle in literary studies. Compelling, polemical, bold, maybe even dangerous, this is a book that all literary critics should read." —Joseph Hone, Newcastle University"Willan's provocative genealogy shows how prolific were the mutations in literary authority as it migrated across print cultures from the age of Pope to the age of Johnson. An authoritative rethinking of the making of modern literary authority in the eighteenth century."—Joseph Roach, Yale University"This book is an important contribution to the framing of mainstream literary authority and power in the so-called Ages of Pope and Johnson."—Emily C. Friedman, Auburn University"Literary Authority is grounded in both established and recent scholarship; it is densely argued but clearly written and often quotable. It is also thoughtfully organized, so a large argument develops over the course of the book.... Recommended."—J. T. Lynch, CHOICETable of Contents(i): Introduction 1. Whig Prose Cultures 2. I love with all my heart : Jacobite poetry in manuscript 3. Dipt in Ink: Pope without Pope in his early career 4. Pope's Moderate Ascendancy 5. Johnson's Struggle with Pope Coda: Coda

    £57.60

  • Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time

    Stanford University Press Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time

    Book SynopsisIn this revisionist account of romantic-era poetry and language philosophy, Tristram Wolff recovers vibrant ways of thinking language and nature together. Wolff argues that well-known writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau offer a radical chronopolitics in reaction to the "uprooted word," or the formal analytic used to classify languages in progressive time according to a primitivist timeline of history and a hierarchy of civilization. Before the bad naturalisms of nineteenth-century race science could harden language into place as a metric of social difference, poets and thinkers try to soften, thicken, deepen, and dissolve it. This naturalizing tendency makes language more difficult to uproot from its active formation in the lives of its speakers. And its "gray romanticism" simultaneously gives language different kinds of time—most strikingly, the deep time of geologic form—to forestall the hardening of time into progress. Reorienting romantic studies to consider colonialism's pervasive effects on theories of language origin, Wolff shows us the ambivalent position of romantics in this history. His reparative reading makes visible language's ability to reimagine social forms. Trade Review"Against the Uprooted Word is a splendid piece of scholarship. It will be a welcome arrival to students across disciplines (including language studies and anthropology) in addition to charting the future of the literary field—romanticism—in which it is most immediately grounded."—William Galperin, author of The History of Missed Opportunities"Wolff reclaims the literary imaginary as a rich archive for rethinking linguistics and philology. This erudite, ranging, and provocative book has helped me to learn—and unlearn—a lot."—Maureen McLane, author of My Poets"The compelling conjunctions of imaginative literature and linguistic, philological, and proto-anthropological theories that [Against the Uprooted Word] presents make the most convincing case for the discrepant force of Romantic-era writing, and Wolff is an impressively erudite guide to this richly comparative, interdisciplinary, and trans-Atlantic Romanticism."—Nancy Yousef, European Romantic Review"The book's arguments are extraordinarily complex and nuanced. Wolff marshals an impressive erudition, an original theoretical synthesis (drawing on thinkers from Denise Ferreira da Silva to Valentin Voloshinov), and a fine sensitivity to minute inflections and reverberations of linguistic and poetic form."—Joseph Albernaz, Nineteenth-Century Contexts"Against the Uprooted Word is an original, incisive study, a perceptive weaving together of various threads in recent Romanticist scholarship that revisits the familiar terrain of Romantic language theory in a consequential, disorienting, and ultimately hopeful way."—Jacob Risinger, Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Pulling Roots 1. Giving Language Time 2. The Transported Word: Wheatley's Part 3. Voices of the Ground: Blake's Language in Deep Time 4. Radical Diversions: Wordsworth's Overgrowth 5. The Primitive Today: Thoreau in the Wild Conclusion: Deracination

    £50.40

  • Auden and the Muse of History

    Stanford University Press Auden and the Muse of History

    Book SynopsisConcentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in light of industrialized murder, this startling new study reveals the intensity of the poet's struggles with the meanings of history. Through meticulous readings, significant archival findings, and critical reflection, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb presents a new image and understanding of Auden's achievement and reveals how his version of modernism illuminates urgent contemporary issues and theoretical paradigms: from the meaning of marriage equality to the persistence of fascism; from critical theory to psychoanalysis; from precarity to postcolonial studies. "The muse does not like being forced to choose between Agit-prop and Mallarmé," Auden writes with characteristic lucidity, and this study elucidates the probity, humor, and technical skill with which his responses to historical reality in the mid-twentieth century illuminate our world today. Trade Review"The beauty of Gottlieb's copiously productive engagement with Auden's 'marriage of inconvenience' between the poetic and the historic lies in her refusal to offer us any consolation in the turbulence of meanings or morals. In staying with Auden's anxiety of tone and temper, Gottlieb reveals her own integrity as an impeccable scholarly reader with a fine understanding of the give and take, the ebb and flow, of the performance of poetic justice."—Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University"Auden and the Muse of History brings new depths to Auden studies, while bringing Auden's work into sharp and revelatory focus. Gottlieb shows how the poems speak forcefully to today's world, while also showing how deeply rooted they were in the world where they were written."—Edward Mendelson, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. States of Marriage 2. Poetry, Prose, and a Forgotten Practice 3. "Civilization Must Be Saved" Interlude: Interlude: The Falling Empire 4. Isotopes of Love 5. From Poem to Volume 6. Anthropology, Hell, "Goodbye" Coda: Closing and Opening Thoughts

    £64.80

  • The Emergence of Arabic Poetry

    University of Pennsylvania Press The Emergence of Arabic Poetry

    Book Synopsis

    £48.60

  • The Poem Electric: Technology and the American

    University of Minnesota Press The Poem Electric: Technology and the American

    5 in stock

    Book SynopsisAn enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.Trade Review"What happens to the lyric imagination in our new ‘computational environment’? Seth Perlow confronts a central paradox of postmodernity: a poem, on the one hand understood as ‘a small (or large) machine made of words’ (William Carlos Williams), is, on the other, devoted to resisting the inherent rationalism of that machine. Indeed, the ‘afterlife of the lyric,’ as Perlow argues in a series of fascinating case studies ranging from Emily Dickinson to Jackson Mac Low and Amiri Baraka, is one of lyric exemption—the resistance to absorption into normative discourse channels. Frank O’Hara’s poems, for example, may well claim to be ‘like’ telephone calls, but their actual articulation is one of depersonalization and replacement rather than imitation. Casting a wide net, The Poem Electric is a highly original investigation of how ‘electronics enable poets and their readers to animate and rework, rather than reject and surpass, familiar lyric norms.’"—Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice and Unoriginal Genius"Seth Perlow presents a magnificent challenge to the current fashion of ‘big data’ and mathematized literary analysis. The Poem Electric shows how qualitative, lyric intensities embody dispositions that are of indispensable value to us, and which are in productive tension with the world of screens and memes that we inhabit. It represents a wonderful challenge to so many of our assumptions about the value of technology to the humanities and the place of the lyric in our technologized lifeworlds."—Joel Nickels, author of World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance"By examining the ‘afterlives of the lyric’ through their relation to modern positivism—or, more accurately, the ‘equipment’ of rationalism—Seth Perlow ventures into territory rarely visited by theorists and critics. He seeks to identify the rationalized ‘objecthood’ of the lyric poem by pairing it with a series of electronic tools. He does so by repeatedly tracing a dialectical movement by which poetry’s ‘exemption from rationalism’ is exposed as a fallacy by its transactions with various devices and emblems of techno-rationalism: digital archives of audio and visual files, for example, or computer-generated lists of random numbers. Perlow’s critical anatomies can produce startling effects, as when his examination of the figure of the telephone in Frank O’Hara’s poetry reveals not O’Hara’s ebullient sociality (as we have been taught to believe), but a disturbing condition of anonymity and a-sociality. Remarkable for its close reflections and readings of unfamiliar texts, The Poem Electric helps to articulate a field of compelling interest."—Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric"Instead of emphasizing quantitative data and empirically oriented interpretive methods, Perlow prefers to hone in on, “electronics’ messier, more complex influences upon how people read and write.” Whereas the Digital Humanities tends to privilege a machine’s ability to render literary texts as informational fields, Perlow’s approach—focusing on how writers and readers interact with literary equipment—is one that expands critical lenses and realms of investigation thus far practiced in that academic discipline."—Rain TaxiTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Technologies of Lyric Exemption1. Affect: The Possessions of Emily Dickinson2. Chance: Gertrude Stein, Jackson Mac Low, and A Million Random Digits3. Anonymity: Frank O’Hara Makes Strangers with Friends4. Improvisation: Amirit Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Spontaneous PoeticsConclusion: Lyric and ObjecthoodNotesIndex

    5 in stock

    £77.60

  • The Poem Electric: Technology and the American

    University of Minnesota Press The Poem Electric: Technology and the American

    Book SynopsisAn enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.Trade Review"What happens to the lyric imagination in our new ‘computational environment’? Seth Perlow confronts a central paradox of postmodernity: a poem, on the one hand understood as ‘a small (or large) machine made of words’ (William Carlos Williams), is, on the other, devoted to resisting the inherent rationalism of that machine. Indeed, the ‘afterlife of the lyric,’ as Perlow argues in a series of fascinating case studies ranging from Emily Dickinson to Jackson Mac Low and Amiri Baraka, is one of lyric exemption—the resistance to absorption into normative discourse channels. Frank O’Hara’s poems, for example, may well claim to be ‘like’ telephone calls, but their actual articulation is one of depersonalization and replacement rather than imitation. Casting a wide net, The Poem Electric is a highly original investigation of how ‘electronics enable poets and their readers to animate and rework, rather than reject and surpass, familiar lyric norms.’"—Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice and Unoriginal Genius"Seth Perlow presents a magnificent challenge to the current fashion of ‘big data’ and mathematized literary analysis. The Poem Electric shows how qualitative, lyric intensities embody dispositions that are of indispensable value to us, and which are in productive tension with the world of screens and memes that we inhabit. It represents a wonderful challenge to so many of our assumptions about the value of technology to the humanities and the place of the lyric in our technologized lifeworlds."—Joel Nickels, author of World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance"By examining the ‘afterlives of the lyric’ through their relation to modern positivism—or, more accurately, the ‘equipment’ of rationalism—Seth Perlow ventures into territory rarely visited by theorists and critics. He seeks to identify the rationalized ‘objecthood’ of the lyric poem by pairing it with a series of electronic tools. He does so by repeatedly tracing a dialectical movement by which poetry’s ‘exemption from rationalism’ is exposed as a fallacy by its transactions with various devices and emblems of techno-rationalism: digital archives of audio and visual files, for example, or computer-generated lists of random numbers. Perlow’s critical anatomies can produce startling effects, as when his examination of the figure of the telephone in Frank O’Hara’s poetry reveals not O’Hara’s ebullient sociality (as we have been taught to believe), but a disturbing condition of anonymity and a-sociality. Remarkable for its close reflections and readings of unfamiliar texts, The Poem Electric helps to articulate a field of compelling interest."—Daniel Tiffany, author of Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric"Instead of emphasizing quantitative data and empirically oriented interpretive methods, Perlow prefers to hone in on, “electronics’ messier, more complex influences upon how people read and write.” Whereas the Digital Humanities tends to privilege a machine’s ability to render literary texts as informational fields, Perlow’s approach—focusing on how writers and readers interact with literary equipment—is one that expands critical lenses and realms of investigation thus far practiced in that academic discipline."—Rain TaxiTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Technologies of Lyric Exemption1. Affect: The Possessions of Emily Dickinson2. Chance: Gertrude Stein, Jackson Mac Low, and A Million Random Digits3. Anonymity: Frank O’Hara Makes Strangers with Friends4. Improvisation: Amirit Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Spontaneous PoeticsConclusion: Lyric and ObjecthoodNotesIndex

    £20.69

  • Le Maya Q'atzij/Our Maya Word: Poetics of

    University of Minnesota Press Le Maya Q'atzij/Our Maya Word: Poetics of

    1 in stock

    Book SynopsisBringing to the fore the voices of Maya authors and what their poetry tells us about resistance, sovereignty, trauma, and regeneration In 1954, Guatemala suffered a coup d’etat, resulting in a decades-long civil war. During this period, Indigenous Mayans were subject to displacement, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing. Within the context of the armed conflict and the postwar period in Guatemala, K’iche’ Maya scholar Emil’ Keme identifies three historical phases of Indigenous Maya literary insurgency in which Maya authors use poetry to dignify their distinct cultural, political, gender, sexual, and linguistic identities.Le Maya Q’atzij / Our Maya Word employs Indigenous and decolonial theoretical frameworks to critically analyze poetic works written by ten contemporary Maya writers from five different Maya nations in Iximulew/Guatemala. Similar to other Maya authors throughout colonial history, these authors and their poetry criticize, in their own creative ways, the continuing colonial assaults to their existence by the nation-state. Throughout, Keme displays the decolonial potentialities and shortcomings proposed by each Maya writer, establishing a new and productive way of understanding Maya living realities and their emancipatory challenges in Iximulew/Guatemala.This innovative work shows how Indigenous Maya poetics carries out various processes of decolonization and, especially, how Maya literature offers diverse and heterogeneous perspectives about what it means to be Maya in the contemporary world.Trade Review "This book offers brilliantly conceptualized and well-grounded readings on the work of Maya poets in times of colonial, patriarchal, and racial violence in Guatemala. Emil’ Keme's critical journey is permeated by a powerful sense of anti-colonial resistance and an imaginary of Indigenous liberation that is both poetic and political."—Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche "With Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word, Emil’ Keme has given us a brilliant analysis of how Maya literary production constitutes resistance to the ongoing imposition of settler capitalist colonization in Iximulew/Guatemala. From the perspective of a Maya scholar, Keme offers a sophisticated and insightful read of works by K’iche’, Kaqchikel, Q’eq’chi’, Q’anjob’al, and Pop’ti poets in their political context, guided throughout by a clear and decisive love of le Maya tzij, or the Maya word. This book makes a valuable contribution not only to Maya studies and literary studies, but also to Native and Indigenous studies hemispherically and globally."—Shannon Speed (Chickasaw), University of California, Los Angeles "Le Maya Q’atzij / Our Maya Word is an energetic attempt to recover and promote Mayan identity, culture, and language from over five hundred years of encroachment. The author critically analyzes poetry that delves into the challenges of the Mayan people in the land claimed as Mayan: Iximulew "—Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature "It is clear both from the studied works and from Keme's analysis that contemporary Mayan literature has a complexity that seems not only to evolve but is constantly differentiating and diversifying itself."—The Canadian Journal of Native Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Iximulew’s/Guatemala’s Indigenous Poetry since 19601. Kaqchikel Maya Identity: Francisco Morales Santos and Luis de Lión2. Strategic Essentialism against State Terrorism: Humberto Ak’abal, Victor Montejo, and Gaspar Pedro González3. Xib’alba and Globalism: Rosa Chávez, Pablo García, and Sabino Esteban Francisco4. Maya Feminism and Queer Poetics: Maya Cu and Manuel TzocConclusion: The Maya Word Will Never DieAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

    1 in stock

    £72.00

  • Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes

    University of Minnesota Press Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes

    4 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich’s full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships Adrienne Rich is best known as a feminist poet and activist. This iconic status owes especially to her work during the 1970s, while the distinctive political and social visions she achieved during the second half of her career remain inadequately understood. In Outward, poet, scholar, and novelist Ed Pavlić considers Rich’s entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on “within us” but also what goes on “between us.” Guided by this insight, Pavlić shows how Rich’s most radical work depicts our lives—from the public to the intimate—in shared space rather than in owned privacy.Informed by Pavlić’s friendship and correspondence with Rich, Outward explores how her poems position visionary possibilities to contend with cruelty and violence in our world. Employing an innovative framework, Pavlić examines five kinds of solitude reflected in Rich’s poems: relational solitude, social solitude, fugitive solitude, dissident solitude, and radical solitude. He traces the importance of relationships to her early writing before turning to Rich’s explicitly antiracist and anticapitalist work in the 1980s, which culminates with her most extensive sequence, “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” Pavlić concludes by examining the poet’s twenty-first century work and its depiction of relationships that defy historical divisions based on region, race, class, gender, and sexuality.A deftly written engagement in which one poet works within the poems of another, Outward reveals the development of a major feminist thinker in successive phases as Rich furthers her intimate and erotic, social and political reach. Pavlić illuminates Rich’s belief that social divisions and the power of capital inform but must never fully script our identities or our relationships to each other. Trade Review"In Outward, Ed Pavlić uncovers new layers in Adrienne Rich’s poems as he traverses the long arc of her career. His work contemplates Rich’s engagement with the individual and the collective through a lyrical give-and-take with Rich’s poems that offers fresh insights into her poetic development, substantively furthering our understanding of one America’s foremost poets."—Jeannette E. Riley, author of Understanding Adrienne Rich"Ed Pavlić maps Adrienne Rich’s path as a citizen poet in his Outward, surveying the underpinning of this activist’s life and poetry. In this sense, Outward serves as an overlay that clarifies theories through details. Pavlić shows us the paths taken—until Rich arrives at a place called ‘radical solitude.’"—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth"Outward offers a compelling new framework for approaching Adrienne Rich's six-decade-long poetic career. In its focus on Rich's unstinting lyrical and ethico-political development, Pavlić's book offers a much-needed corrective to the scarcity of critical attention to the last three decades of Rich's writing life. At once a moving tribute to a mentor-friend and a robust critical assessment of her poetry, Outward will expand the scholarly conversation and introduce new generations of readers to the fullness of Rich's poetic legacy and her ‘radical vitality’ as one of the nation's greatest poets."—Cynthia R. Wallace, author of Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering"While the level of granularity make this best suited for scholars, this will nonetheless provide that crowd with a new framework for understanding the celebrated poet."—Publishers Weekly "Outward is a very important step forward for Rich scholarship, and a lively read for anyone interested in Rich’s poetry and development. "—News and Letters Committees"This excellent, gracefully written book is enhanced by the author’s personal connection to his subject. "—CHOICETable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: “How we are with each other”Charting a Radical Geography“Our words misunderstand us.”Poems toward an Aesthetics of Experience, 1951–1970“look at her closely if you dare”Feminism and a Relational Solitude, 1970–1981“solitude of no absence”The Fugitive Condition of Social Solitude, 1981–1991“so are we thrown together”Fugitive and Dissident Solitude Mobilized, 1991–2006“Voices from open air”Mutually Embodied in Radical Solitude, 2006–2012CodaAcknowledgmentsSources of QuotationsBibliographyIndex

    4 in stock

    £72.00

  • Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes

    University of Minnesota Press Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes

    20 in stock

    Book SynopsisThe first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich’s full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships Adrienne Rich is best known as a feminist poet and activist. This iconic status owes especially to her work during the 1970s, while the distinctive political and social visions she achieved during the second half of her career remain inadequately understood. In Outward, poet, scholar, and novelist Ed Pavlić considers Rich’s entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on “within us” but also what goes on “between us.” Guided by this insight, Pavlić shows how Rich’s most radical work depicts our lives—from the public to the intimate—in shared space rather than in owned privacy.Informed by Pavlić’s friendship and correspondence with Rich, Outward explores how her poems position visionary possibilities to contend with cruelty and violence in our world. Employing an innovative framework, Pavlić examines five kinds of solitude reflected in Rich’s poems: relational solitude, social solitude, fugitive solitude, dissident solitude, and radical solitude. He traces the importance of relationships to her early writing before turning to Rich’s explicitly antiracist and anticapitalist work in the 1980s, which culminates with her most extensive sequence, “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” Pavlić concludes by examining the poet’s twenty-first century work and its depiction of relationships that defy historical divisions based on region, race, class, gender, and sexuality.A deftly written engagement in which one poet works within the poems of another, Outward reveals the development of a major feminist thinker in successive phases as Rich furthers her intimate and erotic, social and political reach. Pavlić illuminates Rich’s belief that social divisions and the power of capital inform but must never fully script our identities or our relationships to each other. Trade Review"In Outward, Ed Pavlić uncovers new layers in Adrienne Rich’s poems as he traverses the long arc of her career. His work contemplates Rich’s engagement with the individual and the collective through a lyrical give-and-take with Rich’s poems that offers fresh insights into her poetic development, substantively furthering our understanding of one America’s foremost poets."—Jeannette E. Riley, author of Understanding Adrienne Rich"Ed Pavlić maps Adrienne Rich’s path as a citizen poet in his Outward, surveying the underpinning of this activist’s life and poetry. In this sense, Outward serves as an overlay that clarifies theories through details. Pavlić shows us the paths taken—until Rich arrives at a place called ‘radical solitude.’"—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth"Outward offers a compelling new framework for approaching Adrienne Rich's six-decade-long poetic career. In its focus on Rich's unstinting lyrical and ethico-political development, Pavlić's book offers a much-needed corrective to the scarcity of critical attention to the last three decades of Rich's writing life. At once a moving tribute to a mentor-friend and a robust critical assessment of her poetry, Outward will expand the scholarly conversation and introduce new generations of readers to the fullness of Rich's poetic legacy and her ‘radical vitality’ as one of the nation's greatest poets."—Cynthia R. Wallace, author of Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering"While the level of granularity make this best suited for scholars, this will nonetheless provide that crowd with a new framework for understanding the celebrated poet."—Publishers Weekly "Outward is a very important step forward for Rich scholarship, and a lively read for anyone interested in Rich’s poetry and development. "—News and Letters Committees"This excellent, gracefully written book is enhanced by the author’s personal connection to his subject. "—CHOICETable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: “How we are with each other”Charting a Radical Geography“Our words misunderstand us.”Poems toward an Aesthetics of Experience, 1951–1970“look at her closely if you dare”Feminism and a Relational Solitude, 1970–1981“solitude of no absence”The Fugitive Condition of Social Solitude, 1981–1991“so are we thrown together”Fugitive and Dissident Solitude Mobilized, 1991–2006“Voices from open air”Mutually Embodied in Radical Solitude, 2006–2012CodaAcknowledgmentsSources of QuotationsBibliographyIndex

    20 in stock

    £19.79

  • The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics

    University of Minnesota Press The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics

    Book SynopsisBringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offer—and that nature offers.As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.Trade Review"Situating early modern poetry in conversation with Lucretius and Lacan, The Environmental Unconscious resists conventional critical distinctions between linguistic and materialist turns. Steven Swarbrick argues that matter, no less than the unconscious, is structured like a language: lively nonhuman matter, no less than the disembodied Cartesian cogito, is characterized by loss and self-estrangement. Because early modern poets take the environmental unconscious as the model for human desire (rather than vice-versa), Swarbrick shows, this body of work offers an overlooked yet urgent mode of theorizing life beyond the human."—Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania"An overdue methodological detour from historicist business as usual, this sharply original book binds Spenser and Derrida, Ralegh and Glissant, Marvell and Deleuze, and Freud and Milton into vivid new relationships. Steven Swarbrick’s ‘environmental unconscious’—a structurally consequential but radically inhospitable alterity lodged within both conceptions of matter and their literary analogues—drives thrilling new readings of early modern literature as it renews the possibilities offered by psychoanalysis for thinking poetic form."—Drew Daniel, author of Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

    £80.00

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