The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

The Evolutions of Modernist Epic PDF Author: Václav Paris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192638653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Modernist epic is more interesting and more diverse than we have supposed. As a radical form of national fiction it appeared in many parts of the world in the early twentieth century. Reading a selection of works from the United States, England, Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, The Evolutions of Modernist Epic develops a comparative theory of this genre and its global development. That development was, it argues, bound up with new ideas about biological evolution. During the first decades of the twentieth century--a period known, in the history of evolutionary science, as 'the eclipse of Darwinism'--evolution's significance was questioned, rethought, and ultimately confined to the Neo-Darwinist discourse with which we are familiar today. Epic fiction participated in, and was shaped by, this shift. Drawing on queer forms of sexuality to cultivate anti-heroic and non-progressive modes of telling national stories, the genre contested reductive and reactionary forms of social Darwinism. The book describes how, in doing so, the genre asks us to revisit our assumptions about ethnolinguistics and organic nationalism. It also models how the history of evolutionary thought can provide a new basis for comparing diverse modernisms and their peculiar nativisms.

Epic

Epic PDF Author: Herbert F. Tucker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199232997
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description
Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.

Epic Reinvented

Epic Reinvented PDF Author: Mary Ellis Gibson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801431333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
For Gibson, the aesthetic Pound and the political Pound, Pound the visionary and Pound the historian, are one.

Modernist Parody

Modernist Parody PDF Author: Sarah Davison
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192849247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It arguesthat parody is central to the whole modernist project. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, definethemselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing.

Romantic Poetry

Romantic Poetry PDF Author: Angela Esterhammer
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027234506
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
Romantic Poetry encompasses twenty-seven new essays by prominent scholars on the influences and interrelations among Romantic movements throughout Europe and the Americas. It provides an expansive overview of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry in the European languages. The essays take account of interrelated currents in American, Argentinian, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Canadian, Caribbean, Chilean, Colombian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Mexican, Norwegian, Peruvian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, and Uruguayan literature. Contributors adopt different models for comparative study: tracing a theme or motif through several literatures; developing innovative models of transnational influence; studying the role of Romantic poetry in socio-political developments; or focusing on an issue that appears most prominently in one national literature yet is illuminated by the international context. This collaborative volume provides an invaluable resource for students of comparative literature and Romanticism.SPECIAL OFFER: 30% discount for a complete set order (5 vols.).The Romanticism series in the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages is the result of a remarkable international collaboration. The editorial team coordinated the efforts of over 100 experts from more than two dozen countries to produce five independently conceived, yet interrelated volumes that show not only how Romanticism developed and spread in its principal European homelands and throughout the New World, but also the ways in which the affected literatures in reaction to Romanticism have redefined themselves on into Modernism. A glance at the index of each volume quickly reveals the extraordinary richness of the series' total contents. Romantic Irony sets the broader experimental parameters of comparison by concentrating on the myriad expressions of “irony” as one of the major impulses in the Romantic philosophical and artistic revolution, and by combining cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies with special attention also to literatures in less widely diffused language streams. Romantic Drama traces creative innovations that deeply altered the understanding of genre at large, fed popular imagination through vehicles like the opera, and laid the foundations for a modernist theater of the absurd. Romantic Poetry demonstrates deep patterns and a sharing of crucial themes of the revolutionary age which underlie the lyrical expression that flourished in so many languages and environments. Nonfictional Romantic Prose assists us in coping with the vast array of writings from the personal and intimate sphere to modes of public discourse, including Romanticism's own self-commentary in theoretical statements on the arts, society, life, the sciences, and more. Nor are the discursive dimensions of imaginative literature neglected in the closing volume, Romantic Prose Fiction, where the basic Romantic themes and story types (the romance, novel, novella, short story, and other narrative forms) are considered throughout Europe and the New World. This enormous realm is seen not just in terms of Romantic theorizing, but in the light of the impact of Romantic ideas and narration on later generations. As an aid to readers, the introduction to Romantic Prose Fiction explains the relationships among the volumes in the series and carries a listing of their tables of contents in an appendix. No other series exists comparable to these volumes which treat the entirety of Romanticism as a cultural happening across the whole breadth of the “Old” and “New” Worlds and thus render a complex picture of European spiritual strivings in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, a heritage still very close to our age.

Lyric Trade

Lyric Trade PDF Author: Julia Bloch
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389433
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Lyric Trade digs into how poems use lyric in relation to race, gender, nation, and empire. Engaging with poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim, it argues that lyric in the postwar long poem not only registers the ideological contradictions of modernism's insistence on new forms, but that it also maps spaces for formal reimaginings of the subject.

Satiric Modernism

Satiric Modernism PDF Author: Kevin Rulo
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979903
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.

Poems Containing History

Poems Containing History PDF Author: Gary Grieve-Carlson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739167561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Ezra Pound’s definition of an epic as “a poem containing history” raises questions: how can a poem “contain” history? And if it can, does it help us to think about history in ways that conventional historiography cannot? Poems Containing History: Twentieth-Century American Poetry’s Engagement with the Past, by Gary Grieve-Carlson, argues that twentieth-century American poetry has “contained” and helped its readers to think about history in a variety of provocative and powerful ways. Tracing the discussion of the relationship between poetry and history from Aristotle’s Poetics to Norman Mailer’s The Armiesof the Night and Hayden White’s Metahistory, the book shows that even as history evolves into a professional, academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, and as its practitioners emphasize the scientific aspects of their work and minimize its literary aspects, twentieth-century American poets continue to take history as the subject of their major poems. Sometimes they endorse the views of mainstream historians, as Stephen Vincent Benét does in John Brown’s Body, but more often they challenge them, as do Robert Penn Warren in Brother to Dragons, Ezra Pound in TheCantos, or Charles Olson in TheMaximus Poems. In Conquistador, Archibald MacLeish illustrates Aristotle’s claim that poetry tells more philosophical truths about the past than history does, while in Paterson, William Carlos Williams develops a Nietzschean suspicion of history’s value. Three major American poets—T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, Hart Crane in TheBridge, and Carolyn Forché in The Angel of History—present different challenges to professional historiography’s assumption that the past is best understood in strictly material terms. Poems Containing History devotes chapters to each of these poets and offers a clear sense of the seriousness with which American poetry has engaged the past, as well as the great variety of those engagements.

The Venice Myth

The Venice Myth PDF Author: David Barnes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317317505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Venice holds a unique place in literary and cultural history. Barnes looks at the themes of war, occupation, resistance and fascism to see how the political background has affected the literary works that have come out of this great city. He focuses on key British and American writers, including Byron, Ruskin, Pound and Eliot.

Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism

Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism PDF Author: Michael Coyle
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571131922
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Forty-five years after his death, and more than seventy years after his indictment for treason, Ezra Pound remains a deeply controversial figure. Today it is hard to imagine a poet sparking national debate, but Pound did just that. His receipt in 1949 of the first-ever Bollingen Award for Poetry started a hue and cry that spread to every US periodical that made even a pretense of following "cultural" issues: even Time weighed in. It took two years for things to simmer down, and when they finally did, literary study looked profoundly different. Everyone engaged in the study of poetry today, professors and students alike, works in an environment shaped by that national crisis of conscience. The present book considers this untold story, and investigates not just what critics have had to say about Pound but also why they have asked the questions they have asked. It is routine for reception histories to distinguish between professional studies and more popular responses; this book encourages us to consider why we make that distinction and what the costs of doing so might be. Unprofessional responses to Pound have often been ideologically and politically embarrassing for Pound scholars, who have in response policed the distinction between professional and popular readings with extraordinary vigilance. As a result, the history of Pound's reception unfolds as a kind of drama - perhaps the last ongoing theater for McCarthyite cultural-political anxieties. Michael Coyle is Professor of English at Colgate University and has published widely on Pound. Roxana Preda is Leverhulme Fellow in American Literature at the University of Edinburgh and President of the Ezra Pound Society.