Search results for ""Author Maria Damon""
University of Minnesota Press Dark End Of The Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry
In "The Dark End of the Street", Maria Damon brings a new sensitivity to modern poetic criticism. She adds an important dimension to cultural theory, revealing the struggles of American poets as they address important questions about art, social life, and the oppression they encounter. Taking as her premise that the intensity of poetic language is an appropriate venue for representing the "dark end of the street" of social pain, Damon foregrounds the work and lives of a number of modern American poets in order to argue that the American avant-garde is located in the experimental literary works of social "outsiders." Unlike most literary studies on poetry and poetics, "The Dark End of the Street" examines an unusually wide range of poets and poetic activities. Damon explores avant-garde poetry as writing that pushes at the limits of experience as well as at the limits of conventional form. She argues that the marginalized and oppressed, ostensibly the most expendable members of American society, have produced its truly vanguard literature. Damon brings a sense of social context to a field long dominated by purely formalist criticism, ultimately revealing how time, place, and circumstance affect the creation, distribution, and reception of modern poetry. This book is intended for contemporary American poetry, cultural studies, and American studies.
£21.99
University of Illinois Press Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader
This volume is the first of its kind to collect classic and contemporary work focused on the intersection of poetry and cultural studies, reaching from Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" and W. E. B. Du Bois's "Of the Sorrow Songs" to present-day essays on rap lyrics, queer poetry, folk poetry, and beyond. Rethinking notions of poetic experiences and their roles in popular or mass culture, these essays effectively delineate the relationship between poetry--a stereotypically private endeavor in the post-Enlightenment West--and the public social culture in which it is engendered. The writings in Poetry and Cultural Studies also acknowledge the major contributions of both the Frankfurt School, with its close analyses of reading and writing lyric poetry as social practices, and of the Birmingham School's major contributions toward broadening the field of artifacts permissible for serious study with the primarily literary tools of close reading of textual/textural detail. It is a volume that speaks to students, academics, poetry enthusiasts, and those interested in social movements, including slammers, academics, workshop leaders, and poetry theorists.
£25.19