Description
Book SynopsisReading with John Clare argues that poetry and its repression lies at the heart of biopolitical thinking. By rereading the emergence of biopolitics and focusing on the exemplary case of John Clare, it renews our understanding of the relation between aesthetics and politics from romanticism to the present.
Trade Review"Guyer's analysis of Clare is a stroke of genius. The study of Romanticism has long been undertaken without Clare. His life and poetry seemed suited to a marginal status. However, Guyer profoundly changes our understanding of Clare and changes how we approach the field of Romanticism itself. A powerful book." -- -Forest Pyle University of Oregon "Reading with John Clare is a gem of a book, both compact and evocative, brimming with generative implications not only for Clare scholarship but also for Romantic criticism as a whole. If there is a 'Clare' for the twenty-first century, it begins here." -- -David Clark McMaster University "Who is romantic? Is it the poet, John Clare and his attachment to people's life, or the philosopher, Agamben's characterization of such an attachment as a form of sovereignty? What is romanticism? The literary name to biopolitics, or the literary deconstruction of biopolitics itself? Bravely opening these immense and singular questions, Sara Guyer achieves what remained to be achieved since Foucault: the reevaluation of the part played by the biological within the symbolic. 'Biopoetics' is born." -- -Catherine Malabou author of The New Wounded
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Life of Reading 1. The Viability of Poetry 2. The Origins and Ends of Genius 3. Can the Poet Speak? 4. Inventions of Self Identity 5. The Poetics of Homelessness Coda: The Reading of Life Notes Index
