Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime

Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime PDF Author: Robert Zaller
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime

Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime PDF Author: Robert Zaller
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers PDF Author: James Karman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804795509
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
“[A] deeply informative biography . . . situates the poet in his time and place, tracing the effect of both contemporary history and wild nature on his work.” —Edwin Cranston, Harvard University The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the California coast come alive in the poetry of John Robinson Jeffers, an icon of the environmental movement. In this concise and accessible biography, Jeffers scholar James Karman reveals deep insights into this passionate and complex figure and establishes Jeffers as a leading American poet of prophetic vision. In a move that would define his life’s work, Jeffers’ family relocated to California from Pennsylvania in 1903 when he was sixteen. At the height of his popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, Jeffers became one of the few poets ever featured on the cover of Time magazine, and posthumously put on a U.S. postage stamp. Writing by kerosene lamp in a granite tower that he had built himself, his vivid and descriptive poetry of the coast evoked the difficulty and beauty of the wild and inspired photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. He was known for long narrative blank verse that shook up the national literary scene, but in the 1940s his interest in the Greek classics led to several adaptations which were staged on Broadway to great success. Inspiring later artists from Charles Bukowski to Czeslaw Milosz and even the Beach Boys, Robinson Jeffers’ contribution to American letters is skillfully brought back out of the shadows of history in this compelling biography of a complex man of poetic genius who wrote so powerfully of the astonishing beauty of nature.

Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers PDF Author: George Sterling
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poets, American
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description


Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes]

Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context [4 volumes] PDF Author: Linda De Roche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440853592
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1563

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Book Description
This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers

The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers PDF Author: James Karman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804794774
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1024

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Book Description
This volume of correspondence, the last in a three-volume edition, spans a pivotal moment in American history: the mid-twentieth century, from the beginning of World War II, through the years of rebuilding and uneasy peace that followed, to the election of President John F. Kennedy. Robinson Jeffers published four important books during this period—Be Angry at the Sun (1941), Medea (1946), The Double Axe (1948), and Hungerfield (1954). He also faced changes to his hometown village of Carmel, experienced the rewards of being a successful dramatist in the United States and abroad, and endured the loss of his wife Una. Jeffers' letters, and those of Una written in the decade prior to her death, offer a vivid chronicle of the life and times of a singular and visionary poet.

Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime

Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime PDF Author: James Maynard
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826358896
Category : Sublime, The, in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book examines three historical phases of the poet Robert Duncan's writing within the aesthetic and philosophical context of a pragmatist sublime. The author traces Duncan's poetics of process - which like process philosophy is predicated on conditions of change and plenitude - to the pragmatist tradition of William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. Working from this theoretical framework, and using the archival resources of the Robert Duncan Collection housed in the University of Buffalo's Poetry Collection, James Maynard examines Duncan's understanding of excess in relation to poetry.

The Wild that Attracts Us

The Wild that Attracts Us PDF Author: ShaunAnne Tangney
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826355773
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The first collection in twenty years of essays on Robinson Jeffers, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, this work signals the sea change in Jeffers scholarship, as well as the increasing breadth and depth of criticism of the literature of the American West. The essays assembled here highlight issues and theories critical to Jeffers studies, among them the advance of ecocriticism, the reimagining of regionalism as place studies, the continuing development of cultural studies and the new historicism, the increasingly poignant vector of science and literature, the new formalism, particularly as it pertains to narrative verse, and the glaring omission of feminist analysis in Jeffers scholarship. Jeffers has always appealed to a wider audience than many twentieth-century poets, and this book will speak to that general readership as well as to scholars and students.

American Sublime

American Sublime PDF Author: Rob Wilson
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299127749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Tracing ideas of the sublime in American literature from Puritan writings to the postmodern epoch, Rob Wilson demonstrates that the North American landscape has been the ground for political as well as aesthetic transport. He takes a distinctly historical approach and explores the ways in which experiences of the American landscape instill desire for other kinds of vastness: self-expansion, national expansion, and American political power. As Wallace Stevens put it, the American will takes "dominion everywhere." Wilson sets the stage for his "genealogy" with a discussion of the classical notion of the sublime (taken primarily from Longinus) and the ways that notion was pragmatically transformed by its American setting and appropriated by American poets. He follows this transformation in successive chapters on the Puritans (Bradstreet) through the Naturalists (Livingston and Bryant), from the epitome of the American sublime (Whitman) to the greatest of the modernists (Stevens) and its present-day incarnations (Ashbery and others). Writing today under the sign of Hiroshima, contemporary writers must struggle with the concept of the sublime within a context of spiralling technologies and nuclear force that calls into question the long-standing American sacralization of power. Throughout American Sublime, Wilson engages in an original theoretical inquiry into "the sublime" as term, topic, complex, and controversial idea in literary and critical history. Furthermore, he undertakes his historical study from an avowedly postmodern perspective, one that draws on and extends the work of Jameson, Lyotard, Foucault, Lentricchia, Harold Bloom, and others.

The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers

The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers PDF Author: James Karman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804781729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1128

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Book Description
The 1930s marked a turning point for the world. Scientific and technological revolutions, economic and social upheavals, and the outbreak of war changed the course of history. The 1930s also marked a turning point for Robinson Jeffers, both in his career as a poet and in his private life. The letters collected in this second volume of annotated correspondence document Jeffers' rising fame as a poet, his controversial response to the turmoil of his time, his struggles as a writer, the growth and maturation of his twin sons, and the network of friends and acquaintances that surrounded him. The letters also provide an intimate portrait of Jeffers' relationship to his wife Una—including a full account of the 1938 crisis at Mabel Dodge Luhan's home in Taos, New Mexico that nearly destroyed their marriage.

How Not to Be Human

How Not to Be Human PDF Author: Matthew Calarco
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1839990406
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
Current debates in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and related fields increasingly revolve around this question: What to do with “the human”? Is the human a category worth preserving? Should it be replaced with the post-human? Should marginalized and minoritarian groups advocate for a universal humanism? What is the relationship between humanism and anthropocentrism? Is a genuinely non-anthropocentric mode of thinking and living possible for human beings? This book argues that the writings of twentieth-century poet Robinson Jeffers offer twenty-first-century readers a number of crucial insights concerning such questions and timely advice about how not to be human. For Jeffers, our tendency to turn inward on ourselves and to indulge in human narcissism is at the heart of the social, economic, and existential ills that plague modern societies. As a remedy, Jeffers recommends turning ourselves outward—beyond the self and beyond the human—and learning to affirm and even love the inhuman cosmos in all of its terrible beauty. In the process, Jeffers helps us find our way back to ourselves, but this time no longer as “human” in the traditional sense but as plain members of the inhuman world.