Literary studies: poetry and poets Books
Cornell University Press Frame Glass Verse
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 *
£26.59
Cornell University Press I the Poet
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
£45.00
Cornell University Press Homer
Book SynopsisAndrew Ford here addresses, in a manner both engaging and richly informed, the perennial questions of what poetry is, how it came to be, and what it is for. Focusing on the critical moment in Western literature when the heroic tales of the Greek oral tradition began to be preserved in writing, he examines these questions in the light of Homeric poetry. Through fresh readings of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and referring to other early epics as well, Ford deepens our understanding of what poetry was at a time before written texts, before a developed sense of authorship, and before the existence of institutionalized criticism.Placing what is known about Homer''s art in the wider context of Homer''s world, Ford traces the effects of the oral tradition upon the development of the epic and addresses such issues as the sources of the poet''s inspiration and the generic constraints upon epic composition. After exploring Homer''s poetic vocabulary and his fictional and my
£15.99
Cornell University Press One Hundred Autobiographies
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
£17.09
Cornell University Press Lyric as Comedy
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
£37.80
Cornell University Press The Space That Remains
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
£20.39
Cornell University Press PoetMonks
Book Synopsis
£88.33
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
University of Pennsylvania Press The Emergence of Arabic Poetry
Book Synopsis
£48.60
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
£77.60
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
University of Minnesota Press Le Maya Q'atzij/Our Maya Word: Poetics of
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
£72.00
University of Minnesota Press Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes
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
£72.00
University of Minnesota Press Outward: Adrienne Rich’s Expanding Solitudes
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
£19.79
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
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
£21.59
Wilfrid Laurier University Press The Celestial Tradition: A Study of Ezra Pound's The Cantos
Book Synopsis Despite the painstaking work of Pound scholars, the mythos of The Cantos has yet to be properly understood - primarily because until now its occult sources have not been examined sufficiently. Drawing upon archival as well as recently published material, this study traces Pound's intimate engagement with specific occultists (W.B. Yeats, Allen Upward, Alfred Orage, and G.R.S. Mead) and their ideas. The author argues that speculative occultism was a major factor in the evolution of Pound's extraordinary aesthetic and religious sensibility, much noticed in Pound criticism. The discussion falls into two sections. The first section details Pound's interest in particular occult movements. It describes the tradition of Hellenistic occultism from Eleusis to the present, and establishes that Pound's contact with the occult began at least as early as his undergraduate years and that he came to London already primed on the occult. Many of his London acquaintances were unquestionably occultists. The second section outlines a tripartite schema for The Cantos (katabasis/dromena/epopteia) which, in turn, is applied to the poem. It is argued here that The Cantos is structured on the model of a initiation rather than a journey, and that the poem does not so much describe an initiation rite as enact one for the reader. In exploring and attempting to understand Pounds' occultism and its implications to his [Pounds'] oeuvre, Tryphonopoulos sheds new light upon one of the great works of modern Western literature.
£30.56
Wilfrid Laurier University Press Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The
Book Synopsis Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground contains thirty-five of F.R. Scott's poems from across the five decades of his career. Scott's artistic responses to a litany of social problems, as well as his emphasis on nature and landscapes, remain remarkably relevant. Scott weighed in on many issues important to Canadians today, using different terms, perhaps, but with no less urgency than we feel now: biopolitics, neoliberalism, environmental concerns, genetic modification, freedom of speech, civil rights, human rights, and immigration. Scott is best remembered for ""The Canadian Authors Meet,"" ""W.L.M.K,"" and ""Laurentian Shield,"" but his poetic oeuvre includes significant occasional poems, elegies, found poems, and pointed satires. This selection of poems showcases the politics, the humour, and the beauty of this central modernist figure. The introduction by Laura Moss and the afterword by George Elliott Clarke provide two distinct approaches to reading Scott's work: in the contexts of Canadian modernism and of contemporary literary history, respectively. Trade Review``Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground is a fine pick for any world poetry collection, much recommended.'' -- Midwest Bookwatch, The Poetry Shelf, December 2011, 201201``With Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground, the Laurier Poetry series certainly seems to have fulfilled its mandate. There is the hope that more readers will encounter F.R. Scott, an artist who gives a poetic voice to political concerns that are evermore relevant, and who, when he's at his best, writes the kind of poetry you'd like to memorize.'' -- Vanessa Bonneau -- Montreal Review of Books, May 7, 2012, 201206``Scott's poetry humbly argues for a place on our shelves for a Canadian political poetry that is large enough to avoid the petty debate on specifics, yet particular enough not to lose local force.'' -- Andrew Vaisius -- Prairie Fire Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2012, 201210Table of Contents Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott, selected with an introduction by Laura Moss Foreword Neil Besner Biographical Note Introduction Laura Moss Overture Laurentian Shield Coelacanth Orangerie My Amoeba Is Unaware Mural Lakeshore A Grain of Rice Incident at May Pond Miranda Trans Canada To Certain Friends Social Notes I, 1932 Social Notes II, 1935 Lest We Forget For R.A.S. 1925-1943 W.L.M.K. The Canadian Social Register The Canadian Authors Meet Bonne Entente Brébeuf and His Brethren All the Spikes But the Last Saturday Sundae Martinigram A Lass in Wonderland Picture in ""Life"" On Kanbawza Road On the Death of Gandhi For Bryan Priestman Last Rites Ushering in the Quiet Revolution Audacity Fort Smith A New City: E3 On Saying Goodbye to My Room in Chancellor Day Hall Villanelle for Our Time Afterword: Reading ""Canon"" Scott's Canon George Elliot Clarke Acknowledgements
£17.06
Wilfrid Laurier University Press Indigenous Poetics in Canada
Book SynopsisIndigenous Poetics in Canada broadens the way in which Indigenous poetry is examined, studied, and discussed in Canada. Breaking from the parameters of traditional English literature studies, this volume embraces a wider sense of poetics, including Indigenous oralities, languages, and understandings of place. Featuring work by academics and poets, the book examines four elements of Indigenous poetics. First, it explores the poetics of memory: collective memory, the persistence of Indigenous poetic consciousness, and the relationships that enable the Indigenous storytelling process. The book then explores the poetics of performance: Indigenous poetics exist both in written form and in relation to an audience. Third, in an examination of the poetics of place and space, the book considers contemporary Indigenous poetry and classical Indigenous narratives. Finally, in a section on the poetics of medicine, contributors articulate the healing and restorative power of Indigenous poetry and narratives.Trade Review"'Indigenous Poetics in Canada' is that rare book of scholarship that speaks to the heart and spirit as well as the mind. The selections in this collection offer powerful individual and collective insight into the ways that diverse traditions of Indigenous poetics animate our imaginative possibilities and extend our cultural understandings across time, space, and difference. To study Indigenous poetics is to be forcefully reminded of both our historical traditions and their continuing significance, and the poets, writers, scholars, and story-makers featured in this volume are among the most eloquent and insightful voices on the topic today. This is a transformative intervention in Indigenous literary studies as well as the broader canon of Canadian literature, reminding us that questions of aesthetics are always in dynamic relationship with the lived experience of our politicized imaginations in the world." -- Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture, University of British Columbia"Conversations about Indigenous literatures will be forever enriched by this stunning new collection. Here, the leading voices in Indigenous literary studies draw upon deep currents of inspiration--both ancient and contemporary--as they reflect upon and powerfully perform the act of re-making the world through language. Joyful, humbling, and wonderfully diverse, 'Indigenous Poetics in Canada' welcomes readers and writers into a re-indigenized rhetorical landscape-and I cannot wait to see what takes place there." -- Keavy Martin, Department of English and Film, University of Alberta; author of 'Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature' (2012)``In a fine introduction, McLeod does an admirable job of framing the essays and interviews to come while giving readers less familiar with indigenous poetics insight into some of the tropes and rhetorical strategies practitioners use, including kiskino ('things...pointed to, but never completely articulated'), kakêskihkêmowina ('counselling narratives'), and aniskwâcimopicikêwin ('the process of connecting stories together'). That this collection exists is at once a challenge to the white publishing world that has long refused to recognize indigenous poetic practices as 'poetry' and a testament to the health and vibrancy of the living word of indigenous consciousness.... Summing up: Highly recommended.'' -- B. Carson, Bridgewater State University -- Choice, December 2014, 201412Table of ContentsTable of Contents for Indigenous Poetics in Canada , edited by Neal McLeod Introduction | Neal McLeod Poetics of Memory 1 Achimo | Duncan Mercredi 2 Interview with Armand Garnet Ruffo | Conducted by Neal McLeod 3 Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement | Warren Cariou 4 Pauline Passed Here | Janet Marie Rogers 5 Writer-Reader Reciprocity and the Pursuit of Alliance through Indigenous Poetry | Sam McKegney 6 Remembering the Poetics of Ancient Sound kistêsinâw/wîsahkêcâhk's maskihkiy (Elder Brother's Medicine) | Tasha Beeds 7 On Reading Basso | David Newhouse 8 The Pemmican Eaters | Marilyn Dumont 9 Cree Poetic Discourse | Neal McLeod Poetics of Place 10 âBubbling Like a Beating Heartâ: Reflections on Nishnaabeg Poetic and Narrative Consciousness | Leanne Simpson 11 Getting (Back) to Poetry: A Memoir | Daniel David Moses 12 Kwadây KwaÅdur-Our Shagóon | Alyce Johnson 13 âPimuteuat/ Ils marchent/ They Walkâ: A Few Observations on Indigenous Poetry and Poetics in French | Michèle Lacombe 14 Iskigamizigan (The Sugarbush): A Poetics of Decolonization | Waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy 15 The Power of Dirty Waters: Indigenous Poetics | Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair 16 A Poetics of Place and Apocalypse: Conflict and Contradiction in Poetry of the Red River Resistance and the Northwest Resistance | Jesse Rae Archibald-Barber 17 My Poem Is an Indian Woman | Rosanna Deerchild Poetics of Performance 18 Interview with Marvin Francis | Conducted by Rosanna Deerchild and Shayla Elizabeth 19 Blood Moves with UsâStory Poetry Lives Inside | Janet Rogers 20 Revitalizing Indigenous Swagger: Poetics from a Plains Cree Perspective | Lindsay âEekwolâ Knight 21 A Conversation of Influence, Tradition, and Indigenous Poetics: An Interview with Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm | Conducted by Rhiannon Johnson 22 The âNerve of Cree,â the Pulse of Africa: Sound Identities in Cree, Cree-Métis, and Dub Poetries in Canada | Susan Gingell 23 Poetics of Renewal: Indigenous PoeticsâMessage or Medium? | Lillian Allen Poetics of Medicine 24 Indigenous Poetry and the Oral | Lee Maracle 25 Poems as Healing Bundles | Gregory Scofield 26 Small Birds/Songs Out of Silence | Joanne Arnott 27 Stretching through Our Watery Sleep: Feminine Narrative Retrieval of cihcipistikwân in Louise Halfe's The Crooked Good | Lesley Belleau 28 âLearning to Listen to a Quiet Way of Tellingâ: A Study of Cree Counselling Discourse Patterns in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed | Gail MacKay About the Contributors Index
£30.56
University of Arkansas Press Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt
Book SynopsisExamines the departure from meter and rhyme in modern poetry and the increased use of free verse
£21.56
University of Arkansas Press Questions and Their Retinue: Selected Poems of
Book SynopsisHatif Janabi’s poems are passionate, jolting, apocalyptic, and painful. They deal with war and death, perception and truth, drawing from his family life, his exile in Poland, the Gulf War, violence in Iraq, and his experience in the United States.The speaker in many of Janabi’s poems moves from a confrontational stance to one of resigned desperation, and from coyness to deep longing, where, occasionally, hope surfaces. The associative processes and the often bizarre surreal imagery he employs are very effective in expressing his profound sense of political and spiritual alienation. Janabi is among a generation of Arab poets who, because of censorship, can speak only obliquely about the harsh reality of their lives. In these poems he has created symbolic landscapes that attempt to reveal the political, social, and psychological stresses with which suffering people live.
£17.06
Purdue University Press Food for the Winter
Book SynopsisIn Food for the Winter,Geraldine Connolly recovers the lost world of childhood in the years ofsmall-town America following World War II. The prevailing imagery is that offire, the fire of bombing recollected, the fire of Roman Catholicism, of riflesand steel mills, candles and cigarettes, fires both intellectual and physical,fires of emotion and spirit. Connolly's collection fixes the past and itslosses in place then moves from girlhood themes into the emergence of womanhoodand its passions. The book's real subject is love and the rich and variedpossibilities of human relationships. The rites of passages become more thanthose of an individual life, achieving an identity that both records aparticular moment in time yet transcends a particular human body and names usall as suffers of experience and enjoyers of perceptions.
£7.95
John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical
Book SynopsisThis important new critical biography traces in carefully considered detail what is known of Geoffrey Chaucer's personal life while exploring the fascinating relationship between the man of affairs, who made so many 'improvisations and accommodations' to ensure his own survival, and the poet. A major reexamination of England's greatest narrative poet, it is supplemented with reproductions of Chaucer portraits and other illustrations, including maps of medieval England.Trade Review"Few can write so interestingly, fewer Chaucerians." Notes and Queries "In this rich and comprehensive book, Professor Pearsall combines his expert knowledge of modern Chaucer scholarship and criticism with a refreshing directness in expressing his own opinions. He sees the same `aloof and uncomitted' spirit in Chaucer's poems as in his career; and it is hard to believe that there will ever be a more coherent and convincing account of the life and works of this elusive poet." J. A. Burrow "... highly readable, built on a sound scholarly base with wit and judgment...." Derek Brewer "... it is the merit of Pearsall's book that he returns England's first true poet to the muddle, viciousness and disorder of 14th-century London. He insists continually that we divest ourselves of modern preoccupations... in order to see Chaucer as he was." Peter Ackroyd, The Times "An excellent account." Peter Ackroyd The Times "The life-records are expertly interpreted in terms of social history. The works are placed in their generic frames, and discussed in probable order of composition through the life. The criticism, if at times it has to be summary, is sturdy, candid and well-judged. The scholarship is masterly, that is, unobtrusive, and the lively exposition free from old academic vices, and from modern ones." English "Rife with insights into both the poet's life and his work, this superb book can introduce undergraduates to Chaucer and yet also provide much for seasoned critics and scholars to ponder and debate. A fine reference for the life, times, and works. A must for all libraries." Choice "Is a pleasure to read. An excellent book by a distinguished scholar." Notes and Queries "Pearsall has solved, with elegance and precision, the problem of writing on things which have not only often been considered before, but also frequently discussed." Buchbesprechungen "Pearsall's writing is marked by its firm reasonableness and humour and a confident awareness of contemporary critical thought, and his studies of Chaucer's literary experiments and enquiries as he turned from one visionary poem to another form some of the most stimulating pages of this book." Southern Humanities Review "Often hilarious, by turns, enlightening and provocative. It can be read and appreciated on several levels, as a detailed history of the period, as textual history, and as literary criticism as well as biography." Modern Law Review "Any book-length biography of Chaucer has to be the product of a highly creative imagination, for very little is known about the poets life. This one, highly readable, is fleshed out with a little history and a lot of intelligent and perceptive literary criticism." Sunday Telegraph "Excellent on Chaucer both as a creative writer and a public administrator." The Observer "It is hard to imagine how Derek Pearsall's fine 'critical biography' of Chaucer could be superseded. It will, however, enrage most people some of the time, and some people most of the time; but all for the right reasons. Its originality lies in its refusal to speculate. Pearsall refuses to join the game of invention. Nor will he refashion Chaucer to his own preferred image... this book is a delight to read." Review of English StudiesTable of ContentsList of figures and illustrations. List of Abbreviations. Introduction: Writing a life of Chaucer. 1. Beginnings (c.1340-1360). 2. Early Career (The 1360s). 3. Advances (The 1370s). 4. Fame (1380-1386). 5. Reversals, New Beginnings (1386-1391). 6. Renewal (The 1390s). Epilogue. Appendix I The Chaucer Portraits. Notes. List of Short Titles and Bibliography. Index.
£41.75
University of Massachusetts Press Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's
Book SynopsisA study of the poet's distinctive compositional practices; Debates about editorial proprieties have been at the center of Emily Dickinson scholarship since the 1981 publication of the two-volume Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Many critics have since investigated the possibility that autograph poems might have primacy over their printed versions, and it has been suggested that to read Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation, at one remove from her actual practices. More specifically, it has been claimed that line arrangements, the shape of words and letters, and the particular angle of dashes are all potentially integral to any given poem's meaning, making a graphic contribution to its contents. In Measures of Possibility, Domhnall Mitchell sets out to test the hypothesis of Dickinson's textual radicalism, and its consequences for readers, students, and teachers, by looking closely at features such as spacing, the physical direction of the writing, and letter-shapes in hand-written lyric and epistolary texts. Through systematic contextualization and cross-referencing, Mitchell provides the reader with a critical apparatus by which to measure the extent to which contemporary approaches to Dickinson's autograph procedures can reasonably be formulated as corresponding to the poet's own purposes.Trade ReviewIn this admirable and ambitious study, Domhnall confronts the thorny question of whether any set of editing practices can adequately represent in print the distinctive characteristics of Emily Dickinson's writing.... This book will do for our generation of Dickinson scholars what Franklin's The Editing of Emily Dickinson did in the wake of the Johnson edition, but it will draw a lot more attention because editing issues now claim a tremendous amount of attention in ways that force everyone who proposes to write on Dickinson (or perhaps even to teach her poems) to arrive at some sort of considered justification for individual choices. This will be an important and timely book - and a controversial one. - Jane Donahue Eberwein, editor of An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia; ""Domhnall Mitchell's critical persona is witty and humane, engaging and astute.... the book is sure to have a major impact on Dickinson studies and on editorial politics and practices further afield."" - Vivian Pollak, author of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender
£26.06
University of Massachusetts Press The Emily Dickinson Handbook
Book SynopsisThis book is a source of quick reference containing basic and up-to-date information on the poet's life, her art, the manuscripts, and the current state of Dickinson scholarship in general. For ease of use, individual essays have been structured as follows: Each essay provides a historical overview of the relevant issues under scrutiny. The essays offer detailed discussions of important aspects pertaining of the fields in question. Unlike encyclopedic entries, each of the several essays reflects the authors own perspective, presenting a distinct point of view, at times a controversial one. Trade ReviewThis book presents the most exhaustive and useful summary of Emily Dickinson scholarship in the 20th century-a series of short but amazingly comprehensive essays on almost every aspect of Dickinson studies, written especially for this volume by Dickinson's most formidable contemporary critics. Invaluable to the expert and novice alike, every page of this book is sheer pleasure, in a way comparable to few scholarly texts.-Virginia Quarterly Review; ""The best of recent Dickinson scholarship is gathered together in the multifaceted Emily Dickinson Handbook, a collection of essays that examine Dickinson's life, poetry, poetics, and social perspective.""-Booklist ""Satisfies a long-standing need in 19th-century U.S. literature studies, providing a ready reference guide with essential, up-to-date material about Dickinson's life and art, her manuscripts, and the present state of research.... Highly recommended.""-Choice; ""A single authoritative source for information about Dickinson's historical, cultural, and biographical contexts, as well as the editing and transmission of her texts, their critical reception, and the most recent interpretive, pedagogical, and theoretical approaches within Dickinson scholarship.... This book has it all.""-Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin
£26.06
University of Massachusetts Press The Poetry of Indifference: From the Romantics to
Book SynopsisIndifference is a common, even indispensable element of human experience. But it is rare in poetry, which is traditionally defined by its direct opposition to indifference-by its heightened emotion, consciousness, and effort. This definition applies especially to English poets of the nineteenth century, heirs to an age that predicated aesthetics on moral sentiment or feeling. Yet it was in this period, Erik Gray argues, that a concentrated strain of poetic indifference began to emerge. The Poetry of Indifference analyzes nineteenth-century works by Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald, among others-works that do not merely declare themselves to be indifferent but formally enact the indifference they describe. Each poem consciously disregards some aspect of poetry that is usually considered to be crucial or definitive, even at the risk of seeming ""indifferent"" in the sense of ""mediocre."" Such gestures discourage critical attention, since the poetry of indifference refuses to make claims for itself. This is particularly true of FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, but one that recent critics have almost entirely ignored. In concentrating on this underexplored mode of poetry, Gray not only traces a major shift in recent literary history, from a Romantic poetics of sympathy to a Modernist poetics of alienation, but also considers how this literature can help us understand the sometimes embarrassing but unavoidable presence of indifference in our lives.Trade ReviewExtraordinary from start to finish. Once I began reading it, I continued reading it almost nonstop, even in a period full of other obligations. The book is electric in its revelations and in its quality of writing a small work of art.-Elaine Scarry, Harvard University; ""A first-rate piece of work: original, daring, witty-just very perceptive page after page. Absolutely free from jargon or pomposity or any of the afflications that beset English study.""-William H. Pritchard, Amherst College
£26.96
University of Massachusetts Press Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters: Critical
Book SynopsisEssays in this collection explore ways that Emily Dickinson adapted nineteenth-century epistolary conventions of women’s culture, as well as how she directed her writing to particular readers, providing subtly tactful guidance to ways of approaching her poetics.
£24.65
University of South Carolina Press Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry:
Book SynopsisWidely known as the winner of the 1966 National Book Award and author of the best-selling novel ""Deliverance"", James Dickey devoted himself as much to the critique of the modern literary tradition as to his participation in it. A writer enthralled by teaching, he lectured at several major universities before settling at the University of South Carolina for nearly three decades as poet-in-residence. After his death in 1997, a transcript of his lectures was found among his papers. Collected here and published for the first time, these lectures reveal judgments and appraisals Dickey would use to great effect in his teaching. They also contribute to the unraveling of Dickey's art from the larger-than-life myth that surrounded him. In a comprehensive introduction to Dickey's remarks, Donald J. Greiner evaluates the relevance of the writer's often sharply worded opinions. The volume brings to life class sessions planned and delivered soon after Dickey took up full-time residence at the University of South Carolina, in the triumphal years following his rapid succession of honours. Full of asides, witticisms and afterthoughts, the sessions suggest not the pontification of a scholar at an academic conference but the confident learning of a practicing poet who happens to enjoy being in the classroom. Clearly setting forth his sense of literary criticism, Dickey repeatedly emphasizes the preeminence of the poet over the critic, the original use of language as a primary criterion for effective poetry, and the centrality of personal reaction to poetry as a measure of its value. Dickey's comments are valuable for their insight into both his own thought processes and those of the poets he reviewed, among them William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, A.E. Housman, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare and Robert Bridges.
£34.15
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman,
Book SynopsisAnalysis of Whitman's reflection of civil rights legislation in his work, 1865-1876. Walt Whitman's prolific Reconstruction project has remained the most uncultivated decade in Whitman studies for over a century. This first book-length analysis seeks to point the way for a needed recovery of Whitman's 1865-1876 publications by embedding them in the legislative discourse of black emancipation and its stormy aftermath. The supposed absence of race relations in Whitman's post-war texts has recently become a source of curiosity and denunciation. However, from 1865 to 1876, the Congressional 'workshop' was seeking to forge interracial civil rights legislation through surveillance of the implementation of such egalitarianism, as manifested in the Civil War Amendments, the Enforcement Acts of 1870-71, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The analysis of the hegemonic shift in Whitman's implementation of his democratic poetics constitutes the innovative contribution in these pages. By welcoming ex-slaves into the Union, as well as ex-Rebel states, Whitman's Reconstruction texts enlisted his representations in the federalizing rhetoric of civil rights protection that would lapse for almost a century, before recovery in the Second Reconstruction of the 1950s and 1960s.Trade ReviewAn important and constructive contribution to Whitman studies. * THE MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW *Mancuso...convincingly, richly, and inspiringly gives us back a strong sense of the Reconstruction Whitman. * AMERICAN STUDIES *
£76.00
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism:
Book SynopsisThis first book-length study of Pound criticism investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. Forty-five years after his death, and more than seventy years after his indictment for treason, Ezra Pound remains a deeply controversial figure. Today it is hard to imagine a poet sparking national debate, but Pound did just that. His receipt in 1949 of the first-ever Bollingen Award for Poetry started a hue and cry that spread to every US periodical that made even a pretense of following "cultural" issues: even Time weighed in. It took two years for things to simmer down, and when they finally did, literary study looked profoundly different. Everyone engaged in the study of poetry today, professors and students alike, works in an environment shaped by that national crisis of conscience. The present book considers this untold story, and investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. It is routine for reception histories to distinguish between professional studies and more popular responses; this book encourages us to consider why we make that distinction and what the costs of doing so might be. Unprofessional responses to Pound have often been ideologically and politically embarrassing for Pound scholars, who have in response policed the distinction between professional and popular readings with extraordinary vigilance. As a result, the history of Pound's reception unfolds as a kind of drama-perhaps the last ongoing theater for McCarthyite cultural-political anxieties.Trade ReviewAs seasoned scholars with a mature capacity for untangling skeins of fact and weaving narrative, considering the big picture steadily and whole, Coyle and Preda have developed a magnificent achievement making sense of (and offering a very legible map of) this Poundian world and its major driving vortices. Above all, beyond the controversies and gossip, the cliques, the frequent masculinism, the eccentricity and sometime crankishness, they rightly feature the work of scholarship-the courageous and generous achievement of generations of Pound scholars who always moved to a different rhythm, stubborn against the grain of mainstream academia. * MODERNITY *While this study is valuable for retracing the history of modernism's acceptance in the academy, its exhaustive and far-reaching scope also allows one to move freely in the midst of the wider intellectual context surrounding and permeating both Pound Studies and the manifold, controversial aspects of literary criticism both in and out of the academic milieu. * Make It New *Table of ContentsPreface From Wabash to Washington, 1907-1947 A Prize Fight and Institutionalization, 1948-1951 Kenner, Watts, and Professional Attention, 1951-1961 Sailing after Knowledge, 1962-1971 The Pound Era and Its Monumental Companion, 1971-1985 Ezra Pound Studies and the Postmodern Turn, 1980-1990 Reading Ezra Pound in the New Millennium, 1990-2016 The Many Lives of Ezra Pound: Biographies and Memoirs, 1960-2015 Periodicals on Ezra Pound, 1954-2017 Conclusion Chronology of the Bollingen Controversy Bibliography Index
£87.30
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Image and Influence of America in German
Book SynopsisExamines the image of the US in German poetry and the reception and influence of American poetry in Germany since 1945. This book focuses on the image of the US in German poetry and the reception of American poetry in Germany since 1945. Gregory Divers examines poems by major figures in 20th-century German literature - Benn, Brecht, Bachmann, Jandl, and Grass, among others - and by other poets who shaped America's postwar image in Germany. Divers traces America's postwar status in Germany from the prisoner-of-war poems of Günter Eich to the pop poetry of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann and Peter Handke. Continuing, he finds that although the 1960s protest poems of Erich Fried and others reflect the tarnishing of America's image due to Vietnam, 1970s travel poems by Brinkmann, Kunert, and Kunze confirm the resiliency of that image. Finally, Divers looks at poems by Hartung, Delius, and Kling to illustrate the new heights reached by America's image within German literary circles during the 1980s, and the status of America in Germany after reunification. In charting these developments in postwar German poetry, Divers also shows how American influences are crucial to its understanding, not only surveying postwar German reception of Whitman, Eliot, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, but also examining the influence of such figures as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery, and Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Gregory Divers is Assistant Professor of German at Saint Louis University.Trade ReviewDivers's book is a good resource for those studying both modern and postmodern German poetry. His research is especially valuable because it offers a look into a number of recent decades and their influences on German poets. * CHOICE *For the reader seeking a deeper understanding of this fascinating intercultural relationship, one that lends itself to enthusiastic discussion in the German language and literature classroom, Divers' study is highly recommended. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *... will figure as a precious contribution to the research of national German poetry, carried out with the utmost care and including always well-substantiated, at times even brilliant close readings. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *... [A] meticulous examination of how and to whatdegree German postwar poetry absorbs US-Americanculture.... [It] will figure as a precious contribution to the research of national German poetry, carried out with utmost care and including always well-substantiated, at times even brilliant, close readings. * AMERIKASTUDIEN *Table of ContentsIntroduction Pfannkuchen, Coca-Cola, Hollywood, Harlem: How Do You Like America? Prejudice, Problems, Fragments: Early Postwar Reception of American Poetry The 1960s: Jazz Beats Rhythms of Change O Taste and See the Projective Verse: Höllerer's "Thesen zum langen Gedicht" und Vietnam und Erich Fried: American and the German Political Poem of the 1960s Kilroy Was Here: How Vietnam Changed the Image of America Fiedler Crosses the Border, Brinkmann Closes the Gap: The Origins of German Pop Poetry Travel Destination America: Image and Influence through the mid-1970s Casting Light on Mr. Hopper's America: From the Late 1970s through the 1980s After the Wall: Luftbrücke und heavy metal sounzz Conclusion: Imago America Works Cited Index
£89.10
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke
Book SynopsisIlluminates the major aspects of the works of Germany's greatest 20th-century poet. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is the best-known German poet of his generation and is widely appreciated today by readers in Europe, the United States, and world-wide. Because of the inventiveness and musicality of his poetic language and the visionary intuition of his thinking, Rilke's influence extends well beyond poetry to include religion, philosophy, the social sciences, and the arts. His works have been widely translated into English, and new enderings of such poem cycles as The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus appear frequently. Critics regard Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as a seminal modern novel. The Companion to Rilke provides essential, up-to-date essays by top Rilke scholars on a wide range of the major aspects of Rilke's life and works. The volume follows the chronology of Rilke's career, emphasizing those works that have met with the greatest critical interest. Among the topics covered are: Rilke's life and thought; the writings before 1902; Das Stunden-Buch and Das Buch der Bilder; the Neue Gedichte, The Cornet and other brief narratives; Malte Laurids Brigge; The Duino Elegies; The Sonnets to Orpheus; Rilke as a poet in French; Rilke and the visual arts. Erika and Michael Metzger (SUNY Buffalo) have written extensively on various aspects ofGerman literature and have edited significant Baroque texts.Trade ReviewAn author as intriguing and complex as Rilke has many facets, and the 11 essays in this volume attest to the wealth of possible approaches. * CHOICE *Editors and authors are all renowned Rilke specialists. The broad scope of their academic experience, careers, and area of critical activity guarantees the extremely high level of interest that this book evokes. * ARBITRIUM *The ten essays by eminent Rilke scholars succeed in their intent to move toward a new image of Rilke. * GERMAN QUARTERLY *This study is a wonderful, animated text, a lovely tribute to the poet's great humanity, and it should be included in any study of Rilke. * COLLOQUIA GERMANICA *The cosmopolitan solitary is shown against the background of a developing modernistic culture, to which [Rilke] substantially contributed. The authors show profound insight into the many problems raised ... by work which combines the ineffable with the physical. * MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES *...provides an important correction to popular views of Rilke as 'a visionary visited by muses and angels. * MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH *
£27.89
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Duino Elegies
Book SynopsisRilke's great cycle of ten elegies, perhaps his most profound poetic achievement, had its inception on the morning of January 21, 1912, but was interrupted by the First World War and not completed until a decade later. The Duino Elegies are not only the result of an extraordinary kind of contact with the unseen world; they are an attempt to understand that world in its holistic relationship to the visible, tangible world. This powerful rendering ofthe cycle is a product of the collaboration between a poet, Norris, and a Germanist, Keele.
£22.49
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine
Book SynopsisA collection of new essays treating the most important aspects of the work of the most famous late Romantic, Heinrich Heine. As the most prominent German-Jewish Romantic writer, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) became a focal point for much of the tension generated by the Jewish assimilation to German culture in a time marked by a growing emphasis on the shared ancestry of the German Volk. As both an ingenious composer of Romantic verse and the originator of modernist German prose, he defied nationalist-Romantic concepts of creative genius that grounded German greatness in an idealist tradition of Dichter und Denker. And as a brash, often reckless champion of freedom and social justice, he challenged not only the reactionary ruling powers of Restoration Germany but also the incipient nationalistideology that would have fateful consequences for the new Germany--consequences he often portended with a prophetic vision born of his own experience. Reaching to the heart of the `German question,' the controversies surrounding Heine have been as intense since his death as they were in his own lifetime, often serving as an acid test for important questions of national and social consciousness. This new volume of essays by scholars from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the United States offers new critical insights on key recurring issues in his work: the symbiosis of German and Jewish culture; emerging nationalism among the European peoples; critical views of Romanticism and modern philosophy; European culture on the threshold to modernity; irony, wit, and self-critique as requisite elements of a modern aesthetic; changing views on teleology and the dialectics of history; and final thoughts and reconsiderations from his last, prolonged years in a sickbed. Contributors: Michael Perraudin, Paul Peters, Roger F. Cook, Willi Goetschel, Gerhard Höhn, Paul Reitter, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Anthony Phelan, Joseph A. Kruse, and George F. Peters. Roger F. Cook is Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.Trade ReviewUnusual for the range it provides. * CHOICE *...presents intellectually rigorous essays geared to graduate students and scholars.... In sum, this anthology provides the reader with well-written articles reflecting the current concerns of Heine scholars, and the conceptual planning behind this Companion volume gives readers the impression that they are reading not a series of separate essays, but a well-organized book. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[An] engrossing, wide-ranging collection of essays by distinguished scholars.... These fine essays ... make us aware of how modern a poet and thinker Heine remains, how remarkably dependent, and in his own way, how free. * GOETHE YEARBOOK *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Roger F. Cook Illusions Lost and Found: The Experiential World of Heine's Buch der Lieder - Michael Perraudin A Walk on the Wild Side: Heine's Eroticism - Paul Peters The Riddle of Love: Romantic Poetry and Historical Progress - Roger F. Cook Nightingales Instead of Owls: Heine's Joyous Philosophy - Willi Goetschel Eternal Return or Indiscernable Progress? Heine Conception of History after 1848 - Gerhard Hoehn Heinrich Heine and the Discourse of Mythology - Paul Reitter Troubled Apostate: Heine's Conversion and Its Consequences - Robert C. Holub Heine and Jewish Culture: The Poetics of Appropriation - Jeffrey A. Grossman Mathilde's Interruption: Archetypes of Modernity in Heine's Later Poetry - Anthony Phelan Late Thoughts: Reconsiderations from the "Matratzengruft" - Joseph A. Kruse Heine and Weimar -
£31.34
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A Companion to the Works of Friedrich Schiller
Book SynopsisNew essays providing a in-depth view of the many facets of the great world poet's work. Friedrich Schiller is not merely one of Germany's foremost poets. He is also one of the major German contributors to world literature. The undying words he gave to characters such as Marquis Posa in Don Carlos and Wilhelm Tell in the eponymous drama continue to underscore the need for human freedom. Schiller cultivated hope in the actualization of moral knowledge through aesthetic education and critical reflection, leading to his ideal of a more humane humanity. At the same time, he was fully cognizant of the problems that attend various forms of idealism. Yet for Schiller, ultimately, love remains the gravitational center of the universe and of human existence, and beyond life and death joy prevails. This collection of cutting-edge essays by some of the world's leading Schiller experts constitutes a milestone in scholarship. It includes in-depth discussions of the writer's major dramatic and poeticworks, his essays on aesthetics, and his activities as historian, anthropologist, and physiologist, as well as of his relation to the ancients and of Schiller reception in 20th-century Germany. Contributors: Steven D.Martinson, Walter Hinderer, David Pugh, Otto Dann, Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels, J. M. van der Laan, Rolf-Peter Janz, Lesley Sharpe, Norbert Oellers, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl S. Guthke, Wulf Koepke. Steven D.Martinson is Professor of German at the University of Arizona.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Schiller and the New Century - Steven D. Martinson Schiller's Philosophical Aesthetics in Anthropological Perspective - Walter Hinderer Die Räuber: Structure, Models, and an Emblem - Werner von Stransky-Stranka-Greifenfels Kabale und Liebe Reconsidered - James M. van der Laan On the Shores of Philosophy: Schiller's Later Lyric Poetry - Norbert Oellers Great Emotions -- Great Criminals? Schiller's Don Carlos - Rolf-Peter Janz Concerning Aesthetic Education - Lesley Sharpe Wallenstein - Dieter Borchmeyer Maria Stuart: The Physiology of Politics - Steven D. Martinson Die Jungfrau von Orleans - Karl S. Guthke Wilhelm Tell - Karl S. Guthke Schiller and Classical Antiquity - David V. Pugh Schiller the Historian - Otto Dann The Reception of Schiller in the Twentieth Century - Wulf Koepke Schiller in America: His Reception from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Century - Steven D. Martinson
£29.69
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A Companion to the Works of Stefan George
Book SynopsisNew, wide-ranging essays on the controversial poet, who was both a harbinger of Modernism and a critic of modernity. Stefan George (1868-1933) is along with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke one of the pre-eminent German poets of the twentieth century. He also had an important, albeit controversial and provocative role in German cultural history. It is generally agreed that he played a significant part in the transition of German literature to Modernism, particularly in poetry. At the same time he was an outspoken critic of modernity. He believed that only anall-encompassing cultural renewal could save modern man. Although George is often linked with the l'art pour l'art movement, and although his artistic consciousness was formed by European aestheticism, his poetry and the writings that emerged from the poets and intellectuals he gathered around him in the George Circle are above all a scathing commentary on the political, social, and cultural situation in Germany at the turn of the century. George, who was imbued with the idea of the poet as a prophet and priest, saw himself as the Messiah of a New Hellenism and a New Reich led by an intellectual and aesthetic elite consisting of men who were bonded together through their allegiance to a charismatic leader. Some of the values that George proclaimed, among them a glorification of power, of heroism and self-sacrifice, were seized upon by the National Socialists, and subsequently his writings andthose of his circle were considered by some to be proto-fascist. It did not help his reputation that after the Second World War much of the criticism of his works was practiced by uncritical, hagiographic George worshippers. In recent years, however, there has been a renewed and unbiased interest among scholars and critics in George and his circle. The wide-ranging and original essays in this volume explore anew George's poetry and his contribution to Modernism, the relation between his vision of a New Reich and fascist ideology, and his importance as a cultural critic. Jens Rieckmann is Professor of German at the University of California, Irvine.Trade ReviewThe wise plan of the book is well realized: those who would like to be introduced to the world of Stefan George -- and not just in the Anglo-Saxon realm -- will find in the Companion a well-versed guide. * CASTRUM PEREGRINI *This collection of nine essays is a rare addition to George scholarship in English. The editor's introduction gives welcome attention to George's early years... as well as an account of the George-Kreis, the troubled relationship with Hofmannsthal, and the poet's encounter with Maximin. * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *The Companion provides an accessible, intelligent, and wide-ranging introduction to George's works for Anglo-American readers. * MLR, 2006 *An accessible, intelligent, and wide-ranging introduction to George's works.... * MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH *[P]rovides an accessible, intelligent, and wide-ranging introduction to George's work for Anglo-American readers. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Jens Rieckmann Stefan George's Poetics - William Waters Stefan George's Early Works 1890-1895 - Robert Vilain In Praise of Illusion: Das Jahr der Seele and Der Teppich des Lebens - Karla L. Schultz In Zeiten der Wirren: Stefan George's Later Works - Michael Metzger Stefan George and Two Types of Aestheticism - Jeffrey Todd Master and Disciple: The George Circle - Michael Winkler Stefan George and the Munich Cosmologists - Paul Bishop George, Nietzsche, and Nazism - Ritchie Robertson Übergeschlechtliche Liebe: Stefan George's Concept of Love - Marita Keilson-Lauritz
£29.69
Boydell & Brewer Ltd A Poet's Reich: Politics and Culture in the
Book SynopsisA re-examination of the George Circle in the cultural and political contexts of Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Germany. Stefan George (1868-1933) was one of the most important figures in modern German culture. His poetry, in its originality and impact, has been ranked with that of Goethe and Hölderlin. Yet George's reach extended beyond the sphereof literature. In the early 1900s, he gathered around himself a circle of disciples who subscribed to his vision of comprehensive cultural-spiritual renewal and sought to turn it into reality. The ideas of the George Circle profoundly affected Germany's educated middle class, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, when their critique of bourgeois liberalism, materialism, and scholarship (Wissenschaft) as well as their call for new formsof leadership (Herrschaft) and a new Reich found wider resonance. The essays collected in the present volume critically re-examine these ideas, their contexts, and their influence. They provide new perspectives on the intersection of culture and politics in the works of the George Circle, not least its ambivalent relationship to National Socialism. Contributors: Adam Bisno, Richard Faber, Rüdiger Görner, Peter Hoffmann, Thomas Karlauf, Melissa S. Lane, Robert E. Lerner, David Midgley, Robert E. Norton, Ray Ockenden, Ute Oelmann, Martin A. Ruehl, Bertram Schefold. Melissa S. Lane is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Martin A. Ruehl is Lecturerin German Thought and Fellow of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.Trade ReviewIt is the enormous service of this collection to let . . . contradictory theses and argumentations have their effect on the reader, and what is more, to have brought together authors of very different disciplines. Thereby an informative and comprehensive work has come into existence that spans a wide arc: from the lyric poetry to the Blätter-Society, science, and economics; from mythologizing to politics; from homosexuality to misogyny; from antisemitism to National Socialism. The volume delivers thusly many specific points of departure for new research into George and the George Circle, yet remains accessible to a broader readership as an advanced introduction. In its abundance this book opens to the Anglophone world a nuanced access to George the poet and the social figure. -- Max Kramer * H-GERMAN, H-NET REVIEWS *A . . . stimulating and mostly very readable volume that, it is to be wished, will not only carry forth outside Germany the extremely productive discussions there about the George Circle, but will also have an effect on them. * STEFAN GEORGE JAHRBUCH *What makes this volume . . . so eminently enjoyable is the fact that while this new crop of George scholars largely agree to ignore the ideological pitched battles that marked George's postwar reception, they agree on little else. There is a spirited debate between the different contributors, and while none of them offer the simple answers to the question of the George circle's politics that proved so seductive after 1945, they each accentuate their answers differently. * MONATSHEFTE *This volume tackles important questions. . . . [Some of the essays] provide incisive contributions to English-language research on George and the relationship between poetry, ethics, and politics. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *This book is another in a long line of excellent Camden House publications. Highly recommended. -- Mark McCulloh * CHOICE *Table of ContentsIntroduction - Melissa S. Lane and Martin A. Ruehl The George Circle: From Künstlergesellschaft to Lebensgemeinschaft - Ute Oelmann Stefan George's Homoerotic Erlösungsreligion, 1891-1907 - Adam Bisno The Secret Germany of Gertrud Kantorowicz - Robert Lerner The Poet as Idol: Friedrich Gundolf on Rilke and Poetic Leadership - Ruediger Goerner Kingdom of the Spirit: The Secret Germany in Stefan George's Later Poems - Ray Ockenden The Absentee Prophet: Public Perceptions of George's Poetry in the Weimar Period - David Midgley The Platonic Politics of the George Circle: A Reconsideration - Melissa S. Lane Political Economy as Geisteswissenschaft: Edgar Salin and Other Economists around George - Bertram Schefold "Imperium transcendat hominem": Reich and Rulership in Ernst Kantorowicz's Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite - Martin A. Ruehl Third Reich and Third Europe: Stefan George's Imperial Mythologies in Context - Richard Faber From Secret Germany to Nazi Germany: The Politics of Art before and after 1933 - Robert E. Norton The George Circle and National Socialism - Peter Hoffmann Stauffenberg: The Search for a Motive - Thomas Karlauf Notes on the Contributors Index
£99.00
Boydell & Brewer Ltd Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents
Book SynopsisAn examination of the past half-century's critical reassessments of one of the most-studied American poets. When Klaus Lubbers's meticulously detailed Emily Dickinson: The Critical Revolution appeared in 1968, examining Dickinson criticism up to 1962, a second revolution in Dickinson criticism was already gathering force, as a new generation of scholars representing a wide spectrum of critical perspectives began reassessing the poet's life and work. In the intervening forty years, approximately 100 books about Dickinson and her oeuvre have appeared, making her one of the most extensively studied American poets in history. Approaching Emily Dickinson provides an objective examination of that vast body of scholarship. It gives detailed attention to the principal trends in Dickinson scholarship during the past half-century: biographical studies; feminist perspectives on the poet's life and work; rhetorical and stylistic analyses; textual studies of the bound and unbound fascicles and the so-called worksheet drafts; studies of Dickinson's social and cultural milieu, including influences on her spirituality, and of her theories of poetry. Fred White also examines Dickinson's artistic reception -- an area of ever-growing fascination, not only among Dickinson scholars but among artists, creative writers, dramatists, and musicians for whom Dickinson's genius has proven to be a powerful conduit for insights into the human condition. A fundamental research tool for both scholars and students, Approaching Emily Dickinson also enables fruitful comparisons both among and within the different critical and artistic perspectives. Fred D. White is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. His studies of Emily Dickinson have been published in College Literature and in the Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.Trade ReviewWhite's comprehensive and engaging book so effectively unites a balanced assessment of relevant scholarship with insight into prevailing trends that it is destined to become essential reading for both students coming to Dickinson for the first time and scholars long familiar with the field of Dickinson studies. White helps experienced scholars acknowledge those whose work has made their own thought possible at the same time that he provides those new to Dickinson with a lively sense of the expanding panorama of interpretive possibilities that continues to define the field of Dickinson scholarship. -- Paul Crumbley, Utah State University, president of The Emily Dickinson International SocietyFred White's survey of Dickinson scholarship since 1960 is an essential resource for both long-term readers of Dickinson and those coming to her work for the first time. Readers interested in knowing how Dickinson criticism developed from 1960 to the present will find this book a highly informative and stimulating read. * THE EMILY DICKINSON JOURNAL *Table of ContentsIntroduction Approaching Dickinson's Rhetoric, Poetics and Stylistics Trends in Dickinson Biography and Biographical/Psychoanalytic Criticism The Feminist Revolution in Dickinson Crticism The Manuscripts of a Non-Print Poet Dickinson in Cultural Context: Principal Critical Insights Dickinson's Poetic Spirituality Scholarship on Archetypal and Philosophical Themes in Dickinson's Poetry Reassesing Dickinson's Poetic Project: A Postmodern Perspective Emily Dickinson in Belles Lettres, Music, and Art Concluding Reflections Selected Editions of Emily Dickinson's Poems and Lettres Works Cited Index Index of First Lines
£26.09
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry
Book SynopsisThe poet as an inheritor of an Emersonian tradition, and Paterson as an ethical autobiography in progress. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is the most influential figure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His simple language and focus on the familiar objects and voices of everyday life pulled poetry out of the past and restored its ability to express contemporary experience. Williams believed passionately in poetry's usefulness, abhorring its perception as an esoteric pursuit and insisting on the impact it could have on the life of a reader if only made relevant to his or her experience. Examining the sources of this belief, Ian Copestake breaks new ground by tracing the enduring impact of Williams's youthful experience of Unitarianism on his poetry and arguing that Williams is a poet in an Emersonian tradition. Two chapters focus on Williams's long poem Paterson, arguing that its long gestation -- from 1927 to 1951 -- reflects its role asan ethical autobiography in progress. Copestake investigates sources that point to the ethical heart of Williams's poetry and to his lifelong belief that "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." Ian D. Copestake is a Lecturer at the University of Bamberg, Germany and editor of the William Carlos Williams Review.Trade ReviewMixing biography (with a light dose of psychology), historical contextualisation and careful, evocative close readings, Copestake traces the lineages of Williams's iconoclasm, his empathic imagination and his belief in the affordances of poetry. . . . [T]he utility of poetry is a central ethical concern for Copestake; indeed, he bookends his study with versions of the question, can poetry matter? and looks to Williams to help us answer, yes. * ENGLISH STUDIES *What emerges from Copestake's treatment of Williams is a man of honest and dedicated ambition, a poet continually struggling to find an appropriate form and structure for his poetic voice. . . Over five thematized chapters, moving between intellectual context and textual analysis, the manifold complexities of Williams's intellectual and poetic legacy are given due attentiveness and care. This careful handling of the central subject, together with the directness of Copestake's approach . . . offers a refreshing contribution to Williams studies, and to the broader scholarship of poetic modernism. * JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES *Copestake's monograph on William Carlos Williams's poetry offers a well-informed and well-documented insight into the connection between Williams's writing with Unitarianism and Emersonian thinking. . . At the end of this study, one comes to appreciate the sense of commitment and creativity that characterizes Williams's work, making him both a man and a poet of his time. . . This is a study that will appeal to scholars, students and the general public. * EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES *[A] well-informed and accessibly written study [that] adds an important and generally neglected facet to Williams's reception by drawing attention to the impact of the poet's Unitarian background on his writing. . . . Readers will always have sensed a notion of moral commitment underlying Williams's work. It is Copestake's merit to have traced some of the substantial roots of this commitment. * ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR ANGLISTIK UND AMERIKANISTIK *
£76.00
