The Regenerate Lyric

The Regenerate Lyric PDF Author: Elisa New
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521430210
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Elisa New examines the poems in great detail, offering searching readings and concluding finally that "it is 'regeneracy' rather than 'originality' that is the American poet's modus operandi and native mandate."

The Regenerate Lyric

The Regenerate Lyric PDF Author: Elisa New
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521430210
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Elisa New examines the poems in great detail, offering searching readings and concluding finally that "it is 'regeneracy' rather than 'originality' that is the American poet's modus operandi and native mandate."

The Poetics of the Everyday

The Poetics of the Everyday PDF Author: Siobhan Phillips
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

The Environmental Imagination

The Environmental Imagination PDF Author: Lawrence Buell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674262433
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
With the environmental crisis comes a crisis of the imagination, a need to find new ways to understand nature and humanity's relation to it. This is the challenge Lawrence Buell takes up in The Environmental Imagination, the most ambitious study to date of how literature represents the natural environment. With Thoreau's Walden as a touchstone, Buell gives us a far-reaching account of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship of attempting to imagine a more "ecocentric" way of being. In doing so, he provides a major new understanding of Thoreau's achievement and, at the same time, a profound rethinking of our literary and cultural reflections on nature. The green tradition in American writing commands Buell's special attention, particularly environmental nonfiction from colonial times to the present. In works by writers from Crevecoeur to Wendell Berry, John Muir to Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson to Leslie Silko, Mary Austin to Edward Abbey, he examines enduring environmental themes such as the dream of relinquishment, the personification of the nonhuman, an attentiveness to environmental cycles, a devotion to place, and a prophetic awareness of possible ecocatastrophe. At the center of this study we find an image of Walden as a quest for greater environmental awareness, an impetus and guide for Buell as he develops a new vision of environmental writing and seeks a new way of conceiving the relation between human imagination and environmental actuality in the age of industrialization. Intricate and challenging in its arguments, yet engagingly and elegantly written, The Environmental Imagination is a major work of scholarship, one that establishes a new basis for reading American nature writing.

The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism

The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism PDF Author: Joel Myerson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199716129
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 790

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism offers an ecclectic, comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the immense cultural impact of the movement that encompassed literature, art, architecture, science, and politics.

Out of the Sixties

Out of the Sixties PDF Author: David Wyatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521446891
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This study looks at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War.

The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain

The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain PDF Author: Susan K. Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521556507
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Passionate readers both, Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain courted through books, spelling out their expectations through literary references as they corresponded during their frequent separations. Surprisingly, in the process Olivia Langdon reveals herself not as a hypochondriacal hysteric, as many twentieth-century critics have portrayed her, but as a thoughtful intellectual, widely read in literature, history and modern science. Not so surprisingly, Samuel Clemens reveals himself as a critic and a sceptic, lampooning Langdon's physics lessons and her literary heroines. He also shows himself as an astute strategist, carefully manipulating Langdon and her parents. At the same time, Clemens's letters exhibit his own conservatism about women's nature and women's roles, while Langdon's show her carefully choosing from her culture's array of possible role models.

Whitman's Ecstatic Union

Whitman's Ecstatic Union PDF Author: Michael Sowder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135470243
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
First Published in 2005. Whitman's Ecstatic Union rereads the first three editions of Leaves of Grass within the context of a nineteenth-century antebellum evangelical culture of conversion. Though Whitman intended to write a new American Bible and inaugurate a religion, contemporary scholarship has often ignored the religious element in his poetry. But just as evangelists sought the redemption of America through the reconstruction of individual subjects in conversion, Leaves of Grass sought to redeem the nation by inducing ecstatic, regenerating experiences in its readers. Whitman's Ecstatic Union explores the ecstasy of conversion as a liminal moment outside of language and culture, and-employing Althusser's model of ideological interpellation and anthropological models of religious ritual-shows how evangelicalism remade subjects by inducing ecstasy and instilling new narratives of identity. The book analyzes Whitman's historical relationship to preaching and conversion and reads the 1855 Song of Myself as a conversion narrative. A focus on the 1856 edition and the poem To You explores the sacred seductions at the heart of Whitman's poetry. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Whitman's vision of a world of perfect miracles are then connected to a conception of universal affection, uncannily paralleling Jonathan Edward's ideal of love to being in general. A conclusion looks toward the transformations of Whitman's vision in the 1860 edition.

Urban Triage

Urban Triage PDF Author: James Kyung-Jin Lee
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816641819
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In the 1980s, America witnessed an explosion in the production, popularity, and influence of literary works by people of color and a decade-long economic downturn that severely affected America's inner cities and the already disadvantaged communities of color that lived there. Marked by soaring levels of unemployment, homelessness, violence, drug abuse, and despair, this urban crisis gave the lie to the American dream, particularly when contrasted with the success enjoyed by the era's iconic stockbrokers and other privileged groups, whose fortunes increased dramatically under Reaganomics.In Urban Triage, James Kyung-Jin Lee explores how these parallel trends of literary celebration and social misery manifested themselves in fictional narratives of racial anxiety by focusing on four key works: Alejandro Morales's The Brick People, John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire, Hisaye Yamamoto's "A Fire in Fontana," and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Each of these fictions, he finds, addresses the decade's racial, ethnic, and economic inequities from differing perspectives: Morales's revisions of Chicano identity, Yamamoto's troubled invocation of the affinities between African Americans and Asian Americans, the problematic connections between black intellectuals and the black community aired by Wideman, and Wolfe's satirization of white privilege. Drawing on the fields of literary criticism, public policy, sociology, and journalism, Lee deftly assesses the success with which these multicultural fictions engaged in the debates over these issues and the extent to which they may actually have alienated the very communities that their creators purported to represent.Challenging both the uncritical celebration of abstract multiculturalism and its simpleminded vilification, Lee roots Urban Triage in specific instances of multiracial contact and deeply informed readings of works that have been canonized within ethnic studies and of those that either remain misunderstood or were misguided from the start.James Kyung-Jin Lee is assistant professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry PDF Author: Matthew Bevis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191653039
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1101

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Book Description
'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements--'Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'. The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, offering focused, nuanced engagements with the pleasures and challenges offered by particular styles of thinking and writing. The final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions: the places in which poems were encountered; the poetic representation and embodiment of various sites and spaces; the location of the 'Victorian' alongside other territories and nationalities; and debates about the place - and displacement - of poetry in Victorian society. This Handbook is designed to be not only an essential resource for those interested in Victorian poetry and poetics, but also a landmark publication--provocative, seminal volume that will offer a lasting contribution to future studies in the area.

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre

Blueprints for a Black Federal Theatre PDF Author: Rena Fraden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521565608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In the 1930s, the Work Progress Administration funded a massive Federal Theatre Project in America's major urban centres, presenting hundreds of productions, some of the most popular and memorable of which were produced in the highly controversial and avant garde 'Negro Units'. This experiment in government-supported culture brought to the forefront one of the central problems in American democratic culture - the representation of racial difference. Those in the profession quickly discovered inescapable ideological responsibilities attending any sort of show, whether apparently entertaining or political in nature. Exploring the liberal idealism of the thirties and the critical debates in black journals over the role of an African American theatre, Fraden also looks at the obstacles facing black playwrights, audiences, and actors in a changing milieu.