Ghostly Parallels

Ghostly Parallels PDF Author: Randolph Runyon
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572334656
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
America's most eminent man of letters in his later years, and certainly one of the greatest Southern writers, Robert Penn Warren has increasingly come to be known for his poetry. Ghostly Parallels is a close examination of the heart of his poetic corpus-the eight collections published between 1935 and 1976: Thirty-Six Poems; Eleven Poems on the Same Theme; Promises; You, Emperors, and Others; Tale of Time; Incarnations; Or Else; and Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Ghostly Parallels shows how Warren constructed collections of poems based on common subjects and contexts and also contends that, while the poems are distinctive, taken together they reveal intricate patterns of theme, imagery, and diction within explicit sequences. Runyon demonstrates that Warren's collections are integrated, well-crafted wholes, and each poem references its predecessor-sometimes in intriguingly self-referential ways. Runyon shows that despite the many changes in diction, tone, and subject that Warren underwent in his long career, his concern for writing his poems in such a way that they could reach out beyond themselves to other poems remained remarkably constant. In the arrangement Warren gave them, his poems form “ghostly parallels”-an expression that appears in “The Return: An Elegy,” where they refer to the railroad tracks that bring the poet home to his dying mother. This return to the mother is a persistent leitmotif in the poems and forms the other major theme of this study: Warren's personal poetic myth, in which such images as golden light and mirror images are signs of the mother's presence as both Danae, mother of Perseus, and Medusa, whom Perseus confronted. Through pursuing sequential patterns as well as echoes and myth, GhostlyParallels brings a wealth of insights to the work of this prolific novelist, critic, and essayist. An important guide for undergraduate and graduate students alike, Ghostly Parallels will also appeal to anyone with an interest in Robert Penn Warren and southern literature.

Ghostly Parallels

Ghostly Parallels PDF Author: Randolph Runyon
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572334656
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
America's most eminent man of letters in his later years, and certainly one of the greatest Southern writers, Robert Penn Warren has increasingly come to be known for his poetry. Ghostly Parallels is a close examination of the heart of his poetic corpus-the eight collections published between 1935 and 1976: Thirty-Six Poems; Eleven Poems on the Same Theme; Promises; You, Emperors, and Others; Tale of Time; Incarnations; Or Else; and Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? Ghostly Parallels shows how Warren constructed collections of poems based on common subjects and contexts and also contends that, while the poems are distinctive, taken together they reveal intricate patterns of theme, imagery, and diction within explicit sequences. Runyon demonstrates that Warren's collections are integrated, well-crafted wholes, and each poem references its predecessor-sometimes in intriguingly self-referential ways. Runyon shows that despite the many changes in diction, tone, and subject that Warren underwent in his long career, his concern for writing his poems in such a way that they could reach out beyond themselves to other poems remained remarkably constant. In the arrangement Warren gave them, his poems form “ghostly parallels”-an expression that appears in “The Return: An Elegy,” where they refer to the railroad tracks that bring the poet home to his dying mother. This return to the mother is a persistent leitmotif in the poems and forms the other major theme of this study: Warren's personal poetic myth, in which such images as golden light and mirror images are signs of the mother's presence as both Danae, mother of Perseus, and Medusa, whom Perseus confronted. Through pursuing sequential patterns as well as echoes and myth, GhostlyParallels brings a wealth of insights to the work of this prolific novelist, critic, and essayist. An important guide for undergraduate and graduate students alike, Ghostly Parallels will also appeal to anyone with an interest in Robert Penn Warren and southern literature.

Haunted Heaney

Haunted Heaney PDF Author: Ian Hickey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100041681X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Haunted Heaney: Spectres and the Poetry looks at the ghosts and spectres present within the poetry of the Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney. Covering Heaney’s work from his first collection, Death of a Naturalist, to his final collection, Human Chain, this volume analyses Heaney’s poetry through the lens of hauntology as presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. This book presents spectres and ghosts not in the conventional sense, as purely supernatural, physical manifestations haunting a place, but instead as having a non-physical presence. In this sense past cultures, societies, texts, poets, and memories are examined as having a spectral influence on Heaney’s writing. His work is indebted to hauntedness as the past in all its forms sutures itself within the present of his thinking and writing, and our reading of the poetry. Topics for discussion include the Norse spectres in the early poetry; British colonialism and its haunting influence on the poet; a renewed look at the bog poems as being influenced by the spectral; the classical influence of Virgil and Dante; and a reading of ‘Route 110’ that incorporates the major instances of Heaney’s career into a singular poem. The book also incorporates Heaney’s prose work and interviews into the discussion and uses these works as a metacommentary to the poetry offering a deeper insight into the mind of one of Ireland’s greatest writers.

Heroes with a Hundred Names

Heroes with a Hundred Names PDF Author: Leverett Butts
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476649243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Author Robert Penn Warren's fiction captures centuries worth of mythology and folklore from all across the globe--from Hebrew, Norse, Roman and Caribbean mythology, to Arthurian legends. This work explores the inspirations and hidden heroes in his works, beginning with his first novel, Night Rider, and extending through his fifth, Band of Angels. The fascinating ways, both blatant and obscure, that Warren incorporates religious practices and ancient legends into his early works are revealed.

Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren

Selected Letters of Robert Penn Warren PDF Author: Robert Penn Warren
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807152846
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
In the last decade of his life, Robert Penn Warren remained a vibrant force in American literature, producing new works of poetry and nonfiction while also dealing courageously with the gradual decline of his health and the diminishment of his poetic powers. Toward Sunset, at a Great Height, 1980--1989, the sixth and final volume of the author's selected letters, provides crucial documentation of this period, containing Warren's correspondence with friends, family, fellow writers, editors, critics, and the scholars studying his works. Warren published several volumes of poetry, including Being Here (1980), Rumor Verified (1981), and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983), and returned to nonfiction prose with Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980) and the memoir Portrait of a Father (1988). His letters reveal that he tried to begin writing a novel but was unable to make substantial progress on it, and that from 1985 on he became increasingly dissatisfied with his new poems. Until his death at age eighty-four, however, Warren maintained an active correspondence filled with news about his writings and travels, accounts of the lives of his wife and children, and a stoic attitude about his own physical decline as well as a solicitousness regarding the health of others, such as his brother, Thomas, and sister, Mary. He communicated with rising young scholars and encouraged younger poets he admired. Toward Sunset, at a Great Height offers rich insights into the closing chapter of Robert Penn Warren's professional and personal life, making it an essential resource for understanding the full scope of the author's contribution to American letters.

Robert Penn Warren after Audubon

Robert Penn Warren after Audubon PDF Author: Joseph R. Millichap
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807146994
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Despite nearly universal critical acclaim for Robert Penn Warren's later poetry, much about this large body of work remains unexplored, especially the psychological sources of these poems' remarkable energy. In this groundbreaking work, Warren scholar Joseph R. Millichap takes advantage of current research on developmental psychology, gerontology, and end-of-life studies to offer provocative new readings of Warren's later poems, which he defines as those published after Audubon: A Vision (1969). In these often intricate poems, Millichap sees something like an autobiographical epic focused on the process of aging, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of transcendence. Thus Warren's later poetry reviews an individual life seen whole, contemplates mortality and dissolution, and aspires to the literary sublime. Millichap locates the beginning of Warren's late period in the extraordinary collection Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968--1974, basing his contention on the book's complex, indeed obsessive sequencing of new, previously published, and previously collected poems unified by themes of time, memory, age, and death. Millichap offers innovative readings of Or Else and Warren's five other late gatherings of poems -- Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand?: Poems 1975; Now and Then: Poems 1976--1978, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Being Here: Poetry 1977--1980; Rumor Verified: Poems 1979--1980; and Altitudes and Extensions 1980--1984. Among the autobiographical elements Millichap brings into his careful readings are Warren's loneliness in these later years, especially after the deaths of family members and friends; his alternating feelings of personal satisfaction and emptiness toward his literary achievements; and his sense of the power, and at times the impotence, of memory. Millichap's analysis explores how Warren often returned to images and themes of his earlier poems, especially those involving youth and midlife, with the new perspective given by advancing age and time's passage. Millichap also relates Warren's work to that of other poets who have dealt profoundly with memory and age, including Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and, at times, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and the whole English and American nineteenth-century Romantic tradition. An epilogue traces Warren's changing reputation as a poet from the publication of his last volume in 1985 through his death in 1989 and the centennial of his birth in 2005, concluding persuasively that the finest of all of Warren's literary efforts can be found in his later poetry, concerned as it is with the work of aging and the quest for transcendence.

Imagining Our Americas

Imagining Our Americas PDF Author: Sandhya Shukla
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389959
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a broad region transcending both national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume’s substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and a historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S. American Studies and Latin American Studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas’ most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neoliberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as of anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. Among the essays are explorations of the varied histories of African Americans’ presence in Mexican and Chicano communities, the different racial and class meanings that the Colombian musical genre cumbia assumes as it is absorbed across national borders, and the contrasting visions of anticolonial struggle embodied in the writings of two literary giants and national heroes: José Martí of Cuba and José Rizal of the Philippines. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii’s plantation labor system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Building on and moving beyond previous scholarship, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas. Contributors. Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, John D. Blanco, Alyosha Goldstein, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Ian Lekus, Caroline F. Levander, Susan Y. Najita, Rebecca Schreiber, Sandhya Shukla, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Nick Turse, Rob Wilson

Queer Chivalry

Queer Chivalry PDF Author: Tison Pugh
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807151858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
For the U.S. South, the myth of chivalric masculinity dominates the cultural and historical landscape. Visions of white southern men as archetypes of honor and gentility run throughout regional narratives with little regard for the actions and, at times, the atrocities committed by such men. In Queer Chivalry, Tison Pugh exposes the inherent contradictions in these depictions of cavalier manhood, investigating the foundations of southern gallantry as a reincarnated and reauthorized version of medieval masculinity. Pugh argues that the idea of masculinity -- particularly as seen in works by prominent southern authors from Mark Twain to Ellen Gilchrist -- constitutes a cultural myth that queerly demarcates accepted norms of manliness, often by displaying the impossibility of its achievement. Beginning with Twain's famous critique of "the Sir Walter disease" that pilloried the South, Pugh focuses on authors who questioned the code of chivalry by creating protagonists whose quests for personal knighthood prove quixotic. Through detailed readings of major works -- including Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come To, Walker Percy's novels, and Gilchrist's The Annunciation -- Pugh demonstrates that the hypermasculinity of white-knight ideals only draws attention to the ambiguous gender of the literary southern male. Employing insights from gender and psychoanalytic theory, Queer Chivalry contributes to recent critical discussions of the cloaked anxieties about gender and sexuality in southern literature. Ultimately, Pugh uncovers queer limits in the cavalier mythos, showing how facts and fictions contributed to the ideological formulation of the South.

The H.D. Book

The H.D. Book PDF Author: Robert Duncan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520272625
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
"What began in 1959 as a simple homage to the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) developed into an expansive and unique quest for a poetics that would fuel Duncan's great work into the 1960s and 1970s. A meditation on both the roots of modernism and its manifestation in the writings of H.D., Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and many others, Duncan's wide-ranging work is especially notable for illuminating the role women played in creating literary modernism"--From publisher description.

Modern Poetry and the Tradition

Modern Poetry and the Tradition PDF Author: Cleanth Brooks
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469639386
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This study presents the revolutionary thesis that English poetry and poetic theory were deflected from their richest line of development by the scientific rationalism that came with Hobbes and has continued its restrictive influence to the present day, when such poets as Yeats and Eliot have begun the reestablishment of the earlier line of development. Originally published in 1939. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Outsider

Outsider PDF Author: John Rockwell
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9780879103675
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
(Limelight). Now available in paperback, this compilation by longtime New York Times music and arts critic John Rockwell features the creme de la creme of the renowned journalist's arts criticism and commentary over the past 40 years. Taken mostly from the Times , but also including pieces from 17 other sources, such as the Los Angeles Times , The New Republic , the San Francisco Examiner , High Fidelity , Opera , and the Village Voice , these writings present Rockwell's unique vision of the arts scene over the past 40 years, with essays on classical music (including the breadth of contemporary works), rock, dance, art, film, theater, general arts topics, and reports from abroad. Rockwell's analysis includes parallels among the arts, insights from one to another, as he brilliantly communicates his aesthetic experiences to the reader.