Author: Kellie Wells
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 1573661708
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
Not only the story of a colossus of a woman living in Kansas, Fat Girl, Terrestrial is also a meditation on God, treachery, and blind love. In Kingdom Come, Kansas, a town from which children once mysteriously disappeared, there lives a giant woman. Wallis Armstrong is not a pituitary mutant or a person battling a rare medical condition; she’s just an improbably large woman ill at ease in a world built for shrimps. Paradoxically, Wallis builds miniatures of crime scenes, and her specialty is staged suicides. She constructed her first diorama as a child when a boy in her fourth-grade class went suddenly missing. Wallis’s brother, Obie, believes the only explanation for his sister’s amplitude is that she is the incarnation of God on Earth, and he is her one true ardent disciple. Until he too disappears. Kellie Wells’s story of Wallis’s odyssey through this tight-fitting world is a churlish meditation on the existence and nature of God as well as an exploration of the treachery of childhood and the destructive nature of the most blindly abiding kind of love: that of a love-struck brother for a big sister, a disciple for an unwilling prophet, and a bone-weary god for a savage and disappointing flock.
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801491856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Offers authoritative readings of the major long poems and sequences, exploring their relationship to one another and to the works of Stevens' precursors.
Author: Margaret Dickie
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512801658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
In Lyric Contingencies Margaret Dickie brings Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson together to explore the ways in which the lyric genre is eccentric to, even disruptive of, the Emersonian tradition that has shaped American literary history. Dickie contends that although Stevens and Dickinson represent different moments of cultural crises, different genders, and different and private lives, they faced similar problems of expression and similar formal and cultural restraints in their devotion to the lyric genre. Dickie considers those elements of the lyric that set it apart from both prose and narrative poetry: its speaker, its insistence on artifice, and its relation to an audience. By concentrating on these, she examines the radically experimental ways in which Dickinson and Stevens used the genre to question cultural certainties of gender, language, and the nature of the individual.
Author: Frank Lentricchia
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 412
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Book Description
DIVA reader intended for courses, presenting the continuity of close reading from New Criticism through poststructuralism./div
Author: Thomas C. Grey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674945777
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
Wallace Stevens was not only one of America's outstanding modernist poets but also a successful insurance lawyer--a fact that continues to intrigue many readers. Though Stevens tried hard to separate his poetry from his profession, legal theorist Thomas Grey shows that he did not ultimately succeed. After stressing how little connection appears on the surface between the two parts of Stevens's life, Grey argues that in its pragmatic account of human reasoning, the poetry distinctively illuminates the workings of the law. In this important extension of the recent law-and-literature movement, Grey reveals Stevens as a philosophical poet and implicitly a pragmatist legal theorist, who illustrates how human thought proceeds through "assertion, qualification, and qualified reassertion," and how reason and passion fuse together in the act of interpretation. Above all, Stevens's poetry proves a liberating antidote to the binary logic that is characteristic of legal theory: one side of a case is right, the other wrong; conduct is either lawful or unlawful. At the same time as he discovers in Stevens a pragmatist philosopher of law, Grey offers a strikingly new perspective on the poetry itself. In the poems that develop Stevens's "reality-imagination complex"--poems often criticized as remote, apolitical, and hermetic--Grey finds a body of work that not only captivates the reader but also provides a unique instrument for scrutinizing the thought processes of lawyers and judges in their exercise of social power.
Author: James Merrill
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1524711349
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
For the first time in a stand-alone edition, the acclaimed poet's classic poem about his communication with Ephraim, a guiding spirit in the Other World, is here introduced and annotated by poet and Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser. "The Book of Ephraim," which first appeared as the final poem in James Merrill's Pulitzer-winning volume Divine Comedies (1976), tells the story of how he and his partner David Jackson (JM and DJ as they came to be known) embarked on their experiments with the Ouija board and how they conversed after a fashion with great writers and thinkers of the past, especially in regard to the state of the increasingly imperiled planet Earth. One of the most ambitious long poems in in English in the twentieth century, originally conceived as complete in itself, it was to become the first part of Merrill's epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the multiple prize-winning volume still in print. Merrill's "supreme tribute to the web of the world and the convergence of means and meanings everywhere within it" is introduced and annotated by one of his literary executors, Stephen Yenser, in a volume that will gratify veteran readers and entice new ones.
Author: Richard Fleming
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838751275
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
Each essay in this collection focuses on an individual classical American author--Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Moore, and Stevens--and the author's primary works. Traditional interpretations are reassessed based on close study of source texts and criticism.
Author: Harold Kaplan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351499386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 455
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Book Description
A salient feature of modern poetics is its direct connection with cultural history and politics. Among the great American poets of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams offer a significant contrast with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Where the latter advocated a theocentric or reactionary response to the cultural crises of modernity, the former affirmed an essentially humanist and democratic social and aesthetic ethos. In Poetry, Politics, and Culture, Harold Kaplan offers a penetrating comparative study of these representative and distinctively influential poets.All four poets wrote in an atmosphere of cultural crisis following World War I, caught as they were between outmoded belief systems and various forms of artistic and political nihilism. While each believed in poetry as a source of cultural values and beliefs, they nevertheless experienced loss of confidence in their own vocation in a world characterized by scientific, rationalist thinking and the mundane struggle for survival. For each, therefore, the poetic imagination was a means of restoring order, or building a new civilization out of chaos. In trying to define a revitalized culture, the four exemplified the perennial quarrel between Europe and America.
Author: Irene Ramalho-Santos
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666903140
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
Fernando Pessoa and the Lyric: Disquietude, Rumination, Interruption, Inspiration, Constellation is an in-depth exploration of Pessoa’s major innovations in lyric writing and thinking. This book is an original contribution to comparative literature and poetic theory that puts Pessoa side by side with several other poets. It delves into Pessoa’s poetic theory, with an emphasis on Livro do desassossego and the heteronymic drama, and discovers new approaches to reading and appreciating the lyric. Such Pessoan literary concepts as disquietude, rumination, interruption, inspiration, and constellation are carefully examined in relation to a number of different poets, yielding unprecedented results in comparative poetics.
Author: Kate Bernheimer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 081434173X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
Form is fairy tale, fairy tale is form.
