Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry

Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry PDF Author: Peter Riley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry, Peter Riley confronts our enduring and problematic investment in poetic vocation—a myth, he argues, that continues to inform how all our multifarious labors are understood, valued, and exploited. The book seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent, non-vocational labor as a necessary sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings: Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical US Romantic poets—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane—this volume offers new archival insights that call for a re-examination of celebrated literary careers and disputes their status as renowned or tragic icons of creative vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, Riley contends, does not constitute the formal inscription of an antagonistic or discreet poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of exceptional individual callings. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from its default sanctuary of privileged exemption or transcendent repose, the volume refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labor's various divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a figure who actually unfastens the 'right of passage' vocational logic that does so much to secure and reproduce the current neoliberal paradigm.

Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry

Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry PDF Author: Peter Riley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192573292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry, Peter Riley confronts our enduring and problematic investment in poetic vocation—a myth, he argues, that continues to inform how all our multifarious labors are understood, valued, and exploited. The book seeks to challenge a dominant cultural logic that frames contingent, non-vocational labor as a necessary sacrifice that frustrates the righteous progress towards realizing that seemingly purest of callings: Poet. Incorporating the often overlooked or excluded workaday ephemera of three canonical US Romantic poets—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Hart Crane—this volume offers new archival insights that call for a re-examination of celebrated literary careers and disputes their status as renowned or tragic icons of creative vocation. The poetry of Whitman the real estate dealer, Melville the customs inspector, and Crane the copywriter, Riley contends, does not constitute the formal inscription of an antagonistic or discreet poetic labor struggling against quotidian work towards the fulfilment of exceptional individual callings. Instead, the distracted forms of their poetry are always already intermingled with a variety of apparently lesser labors. Ousting poetic production from its default sanctuary of privileged exemption or transcendent repose, the volume refigures the work of the poet as a living sensuous activity that transgresses labor's various divisions and hierarchies. It consequently recasts the poet as a figure who actually unfastens the 'right of passage' vocational logic that does so much to secure and reproduce the current neoliberal paradigm.

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination PDF Author: Jo Gill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192638815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive—if hitherto overlooked—engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both. The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as 'modern' (and often 'international style') architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture—and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.

Visionary Company

Visionary Company PDF Author: Francesca Bratton
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147448154X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This book examines the poetry of Hart Crane and his circle within transnational modernist periodical culture. It reappraises Crane's poetry and reception and introduces several lost works by the poet, including critical prose, reviews and 'Nopal', a poem written in Mexico. Through its exploration of Crane's close engagement with periodical culture, it provides a rich and detailed panorama of twentieth-century literary and artistic communities. In particular, this monograph offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, examines the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation and explores Crane's important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry.

A New Companion to Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville PDF Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119668530
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 596

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Book Description
Discover a fascinating new set of perspectives on the life and work of Herman Melville A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the contributing authors highlight the ways in which Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hemispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville In-depth examinations of Melville's treatment of the natural world Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

The New Walt Whitman Studies

The New Walt Whitman Studies PDF Author: Matt Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108419062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Highlights the latest currents in Whitman scholarship and demonstrates how Whitman's work transforms discussions in literary studies.

Leaves of Grass

Leaves of Grass PDF Author: Walt Whitman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192647164
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
'I spring from the pages into your arms' Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass stands as one of the most influential and innovative literary works of the last two hundred years. Widely credited as the originator of free verse in English, Whitman abandoned the rules of traditional poetry--breaking the standard metred line, discarding the obligatory rhyming scheme, and using the emerging American vernacular with the formal precedents of the past while adopting the vernacular rhythms of his emergent American democracy. Most currently available texts reproduce the poetry from the "Deathbed" edition of Leaves, first published in 1892. Often obscured by the near-ubiquitous reprinting of this final edition, however, is the elaborate fluidity and daring of the various previous editions of Leaves. After the book's initial publication in June 1855, Whitman revised and expanded the project a further seven times, with subsequent editions appearing in 1856, 1860, 1867, 1870-71, 1876, 1881-82, and at intervals until 1891-92. His revisions to particular poems were often substantial, and the addition of new poems to each successive edition so extensive, that the book's dimensions altered dramatically. This edition introduces Whitman's ongoing labour of revision and renewal--his successive responses to the shattering years that encompassed the American Civil War and its aftermath. Beginning with the first edition of 1855, it moves chronologically, selecting and including the most substantial poems and "clusters" as Whitman first included them. In most cases, the present edition reprints the often more politically and sexually daring beginning, rather than the revised "end" of a particular poem's journey. It thereby provides a portrait of a poet who feverishly attempted to reshape his project in tandem with some of the most tumultuous decades in American history, and who in the process radically revised the parameters and possibilities of poetry itself. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877

American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877 PDF Author: Cody Marrs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108682014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
Between 1851 and 1877, the U.S. underwent a whirlwind of change. This volume offers a fresh account of this important era, assessing the many developments - both major and minor - that transformed American literature. In a wide range of chapters, scholars re-examine literary history before, during, and after the Civil War, revealing significant changes not only in how literature is written but also in how it is conceived, distributed, and consumed. Cutting across literary periods that are typically considered separate and distinct, and incorporating an array of methods and approaches, this volume discloses the Long Civil War to be an era of ongoing struggle and cultural contestation. It thus captures the dynamism of this period in American literary history as well as its ever-evolving field of study.

Libraries in Literature

Libraries in Literature PDF Author: Alice Crawford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192855735
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Unashamedly a book for the bookish, yet accessible and frequently entertaining, this is the first book devoted to how libraries are depicted in imaginative writing. Covering fiction, poetry, and drama from the late Middle Ages to the present, it runs the gamut of British and American literature, as well as examining a range of fiction in other languages--from Rabelais and Cervantes to modern and contemporary French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian writing. While the tropes of the complex catalogue and the bibliomaniacal reader persist throughout the centuries, libraries also emerge as societal battle-sites where issues of personality, gender, cultural power, and national identity are contested repeatedly and often in surprising ways. As well as examining how libraries were deployed in their work by canonical authors from Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Swift to Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges, the volume also examines in detail the haunted libraries of Margaret Oliphant and M. R. James, and a range of much less familiar historic and contemporary authors. Alert to the depiction of librarians as well as of book-rooms and institutional readers, this book will inform, entertain, and delight. At a time when traditional libraries are under pressure, Libraries in Literature shows the power of their lasting fascination.

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism PDF Author: Mark Steven
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501351133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A concentrated study of the relationships between modernism and transformative left utopianism, this volume provides an introduction to Marx and Marxism for modernists, and an introduction to modernism for Marxists. Its guiding hypothesis is that Marx's writing absorbed the lessons of artistic and cultural modernity as much as his legacy concretely shaped modernism across multiple media.

Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger

Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger PDF Author: Ian Tan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030992497
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book is a unique contribution to scholarship of the poetics of Wallace Stevens, offering an analysis of the entire oeuvre of Stevens’s poetry using the philosophical framework of Martin Heidegger. Marking the first book-length engagement with a philosophical reading of Stevens, it uses Heidegger’s theories as a framework through which Stevens’s poetry can be read and shows how philosophy and literature can enter into a productive dialogue. It also makes a case for a Heideggerian reading of poetry, exploring his later philosophy with respect to his writing on art, language, and poetry. Taking Stevens’s repeated emphasis on the terms “being”, “consciousness”, “reality” and “truth” as its starting point, the book provides a new reading of Stevens with a philosopher who aligns poetic insight with a reconceptualization of the metaphysical significance of these concepts. It pursues the link between philosophy, American poetry as reflected through Stevens, and modernist poetics, looking from Stevens’s modernist techniques to broader European philosophical movements of the twentieth century.