Allegories of One's Own Mind

Allegories of One's Own Mind PDF Author: David G. Riede
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210082
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"-we might refer to it as depression-and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive. David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age's most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning. David G. Riede is professor of English at The Ohio State University.

Allegories of One's Own Mind

Allegories of One's Own Mind PDF Author: David G. Riede
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210082
Category : English poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Perhaps because major Victorians like Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold proscribed Romantic melancholy as morbidly diseased and unsuitable for poetic expression, critics have neglected or understated the central importance of melancholy in Victorian poetry. Allegories of One's Own Mind re-directs our attention to a mode that Arnold was rejecting as morbid but also acknowledging when he disparaged the widely current idea that the highest ambition of poetry should be to present an allegory of the poet's own mind. This book shows how early Victorian poets suffered from and railed against what they perceived to be a "disabling post-Wordsworthian melancholy"-we might refer to it as depression-and yet benefited from this self-absorbed or love-obsessed state, which ironically made them more productive. David G. Riede argues that the dominant thematic and formal concerns of the age, in fact, are embodied in the ambivalence of Carlyle, Arnold, and others, who pitted a Victorian ideology of duty, rationality, and high moral character against a still compelling Romantic cultivation of the deep self intuited as melancholy. Such ambivalence, in fact, is in itself constitutive of melancholy, long understood as the product of conscience raging against inchoate desire, and it constitutes the mood of the age's most important poetry, represented here in the major works of Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even in the notoriously "optimistic" Robert Browning. David G. Riede is professor of English at The Ohio State University.

The Play of the Self

The Play of the Self PDF Author: Ronald Bogue
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791420799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
"The book covers extraordinary ground in literature, the arts, philosophy, and even the social sciences. The concern about the issue of self and the representations of self brings far-reaching ideas together in the most surprising and mutually illuminating ways. Poststructuralist and postmodernist critiques of self-identity have made the topic controversial and broadly relevant to all the fields represented. Extreme statements abound on both sides of the argument, and this book succeeds in marshaling subtle and nuanced thought on the topic. Each essay is neatly self-contained, remarkably relevant to other essays in the collection, and a model of illuminating argument, careful scholarship, and attractive writing." -- Book cover.

Allegory and Enchantment

Allegory and Enchantment PDF Author: Jason Crawford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191092118
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry

Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004484965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
The rich and varied nature of twentieth-century Anglo-Irish and Irish poetry is reflected in the essays presented in Politics and the Rhetoric of Poetry: Perspectives on Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry. The linguistic and theoretical observations formulated in close readings of apparently non-political texts disclose implied political positions and suggest to what extent rhetoric and the nature of language are at the root of such questions as how should we read contemporary poetry. How can poems play a part in the resolution of the political and historic conflict? Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's versions of The Táin, Brendan Kennelly's Cromwell, Paul Muldoon's Madoc and Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti are analysed in detail, as is the relationship between rhetoric and politics in Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon. Earlier twentieth-century poets such as Thomas Kinsella, John Hewitt, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Louis MacNeice and Padraic Colum are also examined. The contingent nature of language is recognized by many of these poets, and the seventeen essays bring out the political charge hidden in the poetry. This includes the deliberate choice of the poetic form, the internal dialogue or the complexity of voices in the poem and a particular preoccupation with endings. These essays demonstrate Yeats's contention that Deliberation can be so intensified that it becomes synonymous with inspiration.

Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil

Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil PDF Author: Andrew Webber
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 9780947623333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description


Women Making Modernism

Women Making Modernism PDF Author: Erica Gene Delsandro
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813057302
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Challenging the tendency of scholars to view women writers of the modernist era as isolated artists who competed with one another for critical and cultural acceptance, Women Making Modernism reveals the robust networks women created and maintained that served as platforms and support for women’s literary careers. The essays in this volume highlight both familiar and lesser-known writers including Virginia Woolf, Mina Loy, Dorothy Richardson, Emma Goldman, May Sinclair, and Mary Hutchinson. For these writers, relationships and correspondences with other women were key to navigating a literary culture that not only privileged male voices but also reserved most financial and educational opportunities for men. Their examples show how women’s writing communities interconnected to generate a current of energy, innovation, and ambition that was central to the modernist movement. Contributors to this volume argue that the movement’s prominent intellectual networks were dependent on the invisible work of women artists, a fact that the field of modernist studies has too long overlooked. Amplifying the reality of women’s contributions to modernism, this volume advocates for an “orientation of openness” in reading and teaching literature from the period, helping to ease the tensions between feminist and modernist studies.

Purple Passages

Purple Passages PDF Author: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
At once passionate and dispassionate, Rachel Blau DuPlessis meticulously outlines key moments of choice and debate about masculinity among writers as disparate as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg, choices that construct consequential models for institutions of poetic practice.

Charles Olson

Charles Olson PDF Author: Tom Clark
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781556433429
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
An incandescent biography of the inventor of "projective" verse, this comprehensive portrait distinguishes the convivial, bluff public figure from the tormented inner man. A lapsed Catholic, Olson (1910-1970) turned to Sumerian myths, Mayan legends and Islamic mysticism for cosmic insights that would inform poems of cyclic sweep. Torn by contradictory feelings toward his proud, stern father—a Swedish immigrant postman in Worcester, Mass.—the poet found a father-figure in mentor Edward Dahlberg and later in Ezra Pound. Reclusive self-absorption sapped his two common law marriages; he harbored enormous guilt over his neglect of his two children and over second wife Betty Kaiser's death (in a car accident), which may have been self-inflicted during a severe depression. Clark, author of books on Kerouac, Celine and Ted Berrigan, reveals that Olson grappled with homosexual impulses, took hallucinogens and dominated those around him, seeking periodic release from inner demons in frenzied floods of images.

Translation and the Poet's Life

Translation and the Poet's Life PDF Author: Paul Davis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191559318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Between the Civil War and the early decades of the eighteenth century, English poets of the first rank devoted more of their time and creative energies to translating than they had ever done before or have ever done since. Paul Davis's Translation and the Poet's Life is the first study to range across the entirety of this golden age of poetic translation in England, taking as its organizing principle and object of inquiry the significances of translating itself as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct. Composed of case studies of the five leading poet-translators of the age - John Denham, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope - it explores the part translation played in their lives as poets and thence in modelling 'the poet's life' during what was a period of transition between early-modern and modern constructions of it. The argumentative method of the book is metaphorical. Each chapter explores the impact on the theory and practice of the poet at issue of a metaphor or group of metaphors broadly current in contemporary translation discourse: in particular, figurations of the translator as an exile, as a child, as a code-breaker, and as a slave; and comparisons of translation to friendship, sexual congress, metamorphosis and trade. The majority of these metaphors were wholly or potentially pejorative: translation remained a controversial practice throughout this period, widely depreciated and stigmatized. Turning translator accordingly forced the five major poets considered in Translation and the Poet's Life to undertake strenuous efforts of self-inquiry and self-presentation; to find new answers to questions integral to their understandings of themselves and their standing in their culture: questions about vocation and career, fame and happiness, responsibility and freedom. Translation and the Poet's Life tells the stories of these personal and public remakings.

Dido's Daughters

Dido's Daughters PDF Author: Margaret W. Ferguson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226243115
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. Margaret Ferguson reveals in this text that this is inadequate, because it fails to help understand heated conflicts over literature during the emergence of print culture.