The Degenerate Muse

The Degenerate Muse PDF Author: Robin G. Schulze
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199345625
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The early 20th century marked a dramatic shift in the American conception of nature. This book analyzes the ways in which the scientific recasting of American nature as an antidote for degeneration influenced work of important modernist writers Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore.

The Degenerate Muse

The Degenerate Muse PDF Author: Robin G. Schulze
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199920338
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A tide of newfound prosperity swept through America as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Modernity had arrived. Yet amid this climate of progress, concerns over the perils of modernity and civilization began to creep into the national consciousness. Stress, overcrowding, and immigration stoked fears of degeneration among the white middle- and upper classes. To correct course, the Back to Nature movement was born. By shedding the shackles of modernity and embracing the great outdoors, Americans could keep fit and stave off a descent down the evolutionary ladder. Drawing on a wide range of primary and archival sources, Robin Schulze examines how the return to nature altered the work of three modernist poets: Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore. Like other Americans of their day, the trio heeded the widespread national call to head back to nature for the sake of the nation's health, but they faced a difficult challenge. Turning to nature as a means to combat the threat of degeneration in their literary and editorial work, they needed to envision a form of poetry that would be a cure for degeneration rather than a cause. The Degenerate Muse reveals the ways in which Monroe, Pound, and Moore struggled to create and publish poems that resisted degeneration by keeping faith with nature-influenced ideas about what American poetry should be and do in the twentieth century. A combination of environmental history and modernist studies, The Degenerate Muse reveals that the American relationship to nature was a key issue of modernity and an integral part of literary modernism.

Modernism Edited

Modernism Edited PDF Author: Bazin Victoria Bazin
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474417329
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Examines Marianne Moore's editorship of the modernist magazine, the Dial between 1925 and 1929As editor of the Dial, Moore wielded considerable cultural authority in the world of arts and letters, yet cultural histories of modernist magazines have largely overlooked her editorial influence. Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine makes visible Moore's contribution to the production of modernism even as it complicates the concept of editorial agency. It explores the public face of the modernist editor, the image of highbrow distinction circulated by the Dial and embodied by the figure of 'Miss Moore'. It also examines Moore's editorial practice as a form of modernist 'contractility' drawing on her own poetics to understand more fully the motives underpinning her revisions. It returns to the well-known case of Moore's radical cuts to Hart Crane's poem 'The Wine Menagerie' as well as instances of collaborative struggle with Williams Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Paul Rosenfeld and D. H. Lawrence. In doing so, the book conceptualises editorial labour as a form of creative and critical social practice.Key Features:Returns to controversial case of Moore's revisions to Hart Crane's 'The Wine Menagerie'Uncovers evidence that points to Moore's revisions to the work of other well-known modernistsConceptualizes editorial agencyDevelops methodologies for critically engaging with magazine contentUncovers and analyses Moore's advertisements for the DialProduces a sustained analysis of Moore's editorial comments for the DialDraws on Moore's poetics to understand her editorial revisions

The Modernist Art of Queer Survival

The Modernist Art of Queer Survival PDF Author: Benjamin Bateman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190676531
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Drawing on a critical framework informed by queer theory and psychoanalysis, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival offers a new definition of survival, one that means more than merely the continuation of life. This book creates a literary archive of counterarguments to the conventional Darwinian evolutionary protocols of survival in early 20th century thought.

Out of Context

Out of Context PDF Author: Michaela Bronstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190655402
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world and reach the readers of an unknowable future? Modernist writers were eager to think of their books as reaching audiences they could not yet imagine. In recent years however, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. By looking to the future, scholars fear that looking to the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, or apolitical; the worry is that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history. Out of Context suggests an alternative to this scholarship, proposing that literature travels through time not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. The chapters of this book each pair a modernist author with a later reader. In each case, this future reader is also a novelist--someone who reads with an eye to form and craft, and who puts what they see to new use in their own novels. James Baldwin adapts Henry James's modes of characterization; Ngugi wa Thiong'o repurposes Joseph Conrad's nonchronological narratives; and Ken Kesey builds on William Faulkner's use of multiple perspectives. Reading the modernists through these authors' eyes offers a different perspective on them. Literary forms, in this history, do not have intrinsic political meanings; they have a multitude of political uses. Rather than see modernist literary form, in all its fragmentation and complexity, as a source of disruption and doubt, these later authors use modernist forms to distill doubts into conviction. The experiments of modernist fiction stand revealed as tools not of political critique but of political commitment.

America's Darwin

America's Darwin PDF Author: Tina Gianquitto
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820346756
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
An engaging collection of interdisciplinary essays on the distinctive qualities of America's textual engagement with Darwinian evolutionary theory, especially in regard to On the Origin of Species, which highlights the influence of prevalent cultural anxieties on interpretation.

Parting Words

Parting Words PDF Author: Justin A. Sider
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813941830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Valedictory addresses offer a way to conceptualize the relation of self to others, private to public, ephemeral to eternal. Whether deathbed pronouncements, political capitulations, or seafaring farewells, "parting words" played a crucial role in the social imagination of Victorian writing. In this compelling new book, Justin Sider traces these public addresses across a wide range of works, from poems by Byron, Tennyson, and Browning, to essays by Twain and Wilde, to novels by Dickens and Eliot. Ironically, while the Victorian era saw the loss of faith in a unitary national public, it asked poetry to address just such a public. Attending to the form, rather than the discursive content, of poets' engagement with public culture, Parting Words explains how the valedictory allowed Victorian poets to explore the ways their poems might be received by distant and anonymous readers in an emergent mass culture. Using a wide array of materials such as letters and reviews to describe the rapidly changing print culture in which poets were intervening, Sider shows how the growing diversification and destabilization of the Victorian reading public was countered by the demand for a public poetry. Characteristically, the speakers of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna" imagine their farewells as simultaneous entrances into a public space where they and their readers, however distant, might yet meet. This new consciousness anticipated modernist poetry, which in turn used the valedictory to underscore the futility and alienation of such hopes.

A Companion to Modernist Poetry

A Companion to Modernist Poetry PDF Author: David E. Chinitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470659815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.

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.

Experimental

Experimental PDF Author: Natalia Cecire
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421433761
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits. In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or an origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the language of the sciences. Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash, objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may the literary forms through which they manifest. Bringing it up to the 1980s, Cecire reveals the American experimental literary tradition as a concerted and largely successful rewriting of twentieth-century literary history. She shows how the Language poets, a group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was an intellectual and a text that was experimental.

America and Her Commentators

America and Her Commentators PDF Author: Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description