Description
Book SynopsisPoetry's Appeal studies the reemergence of a viable poetry in the politicized culture of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. It finds that poetry addresses history and the political through a disjunction between its illusory status as a song of private, lyrical intent and its actual state as a material inscription, inevitably public in character.
Trade Review"
Poetry's Appeal situates itself in what might be considered the single most significant critical debate in Romanticism over the last two or so decades. Its principal concern being the relation between (poetic) language and history, it reconsiders what has been characterized as the retreat of literature, and in particular the lyric, from politics. . . . Burt's readings follow in the line of important critics such as Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and Kevin Newmark, who have brought the most finely tuned rhetorical readings to nineteenth-century French literature." --
European Romantic ReviewTable of ContentsPart I. On Shifting Ground: Poetry's Orders: 1. (Dis)arming Minerva: of performatives and prosthetics in Chenier's 'La Jeune captive'; 2. Mallarmes 'bound action': the orders of the garter; Part II. Memories of the Poem: Histories, Chances: 3. Cracking the code: the poetical and political legacy of Chenier's 'antique verse'; 4. Hallucinatory history: Hugo's Revolution; 5. 'An immoderate taste for truth': censoring history in Baudelaire's 'les bijoux'; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
