Search results for ""Author Justin Quinn""

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) has been acknowledged by writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Adrienne Rich and R.S. Thomas as one of the central poets of the 20th century. Justin Quinn offers a fundamental reassessment of Stevens's work and the connections it makes between nature, community and art. He engages fully with the recent wave of historicist criticism, and displays the shortcomings of this approach, not only for a reading of Stevens, but also for literature in general. Quinn asks in his introduction "why shouldn't there be a criticism which attends to the societal contexts of poetry without reneging on responsibilities to poetry as a discourse distinct from politics and ideology, one with its own special rhetorical funds and resources, which can nevertheless allow it to comment on the political aspects of our lives in special ways?" His book responds to that requirement and is a valuable contribution to the critical debate on Wallace Stevens's poetry.

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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) has been acknowledged by writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Adrienne Rich and R.S. Thomas as one of the central poets of the 20th century. Justin Quinn offers a fundamental reassessment of Stevens's work and the connections it makes between nature, community and art. He engages fully with the recent wave of historicist criticism, and displays the shortcomings of this approach, not only for a reading of Stevens, but also for literature in general. Quinn asks in his introduction "why shouldn't there be a criticism which attends to the societal contexts of poetry without reneging on responsibilities to poetry as a discourse distinct from politics and ideology, one with its own special rhetorical funds and resources, which can nevertheless allow it to comment on the political aspects of our lives in special ways?" His book responds to that requirement and is a valuable contribution to the critical debate on Wallace Stevens's poetry.

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A rethinking of the factors which led to the American entry into the war. The complicated situation which led to the American entry into the First World War in 1917 is often explained from the perspective of public opinion, US domestic politics, or financial and economic opportunity. This book, however,reasserts the importance of diplomats and diplomacy. Based on extensive original research, the book provides a detailed examination of British, German, and American diplomacy in the period 1914-17. It argues that British and German diplomacy in this period followed the same patterns as had been established in the preceding decades. It goes on to consider key issues which concerned diplomats, including the international legality of Britain's economic blockade of Germany, Germany's use of unrestricted submarine warfare, peace initiatives, and Germany's attempt to manipulate in its favour the long history of distrust in Mexican-American relations. Overall, the book demonstrates thatdiplomats and diplomacy played a key role, thereby providing a fresh and original approach to this crucially important subject. JUSTIN QUINN OLMSTEAD is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma.

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American Errancy is a wide-ranging study of the connection between ideology and the sublime in the work of twentieth-century poets, all American with two, or perhaps three important exceptions. The poets chosen are in debate with the Romantic individualism of Emerson - some reject it outright, but the remainder have devoted substantial work to adjusting to the changed circumstances of their century. The link between Romantic individualism and ideological contexts has preoccupied much criticism of American literature in the last twenty years. For the most part, critics arraign this tradition, suggesting that the writers abscond from difficult political dilemmas to the realm of transcendence. In consequence, the sublime as category for thinking about literary texts has been largely abandoned. Emerson's transcendence is considered at best naive, at worst as providing the nascent corporate capitalism of the late nineteenth century with an iconography with which to execute its agenda. Justin Quinn argues that this critical approach distorts the achievement of poets in the twentieth century: many of the poets discussed extend the tradition of Romantic individualism, but they are not ideologically naive in the above sense. Their work anticipated historicist criticism of the 1980s and 1990s as they began to 'socialise' the sublime, and to explore the ways in which the inheritance of Romantic individualism could engage with ideological contexts. For some of the poets, these explorations supported their oppositional politics (i.e., Allen Ginsberg); for others, paradoxically, the explorations supported conservative politics (i.e., A. R. Ammons); others rejected the Emersonian inheritance outright (Eliot, Hill), but that rejection itself has left an enduring mark on their work.

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Springtide A chaffinch in a tree of cherry sings merrily spring's introit. Its blazing bobble dwells in leaves, alive, and swells in scarlet. The flowers are flares of white. The chaffinch has gone quiet and turned sky-gazer. My eyes close on the day: an orb revolves in grey and red and azure. Poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek spent most of his life in the relative obscurity of the Czech-Moravian Highlands; although he suffered at the hands of the Communist regime, he cannot be numbered among the dissident poets of Eastern Europe who won acclaim for their political poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, Reynek belongs to an older pastoral-devotional tradition a kindred spirit to the likes of English-language poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Robert Frost, and Edward Thomas. The first book of Reynek's poetry to be published in English, The Well at Morning presents a selection of poems from across his life and is illustrated with twenty-five of his own color etchings. Also featuring three essays by leading scholars that place Reynek's life and work alongside those of his better-known peers, this book presents a noted Czech artist to the wider world, reshaping and amplifying our understanding of modern European poetry.

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