Theory of the Lyric

Theory of the Lyric
Author: Jonathan Culler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2015-06-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674425804

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities. “Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.” —Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Theory

Formal Approaches to Poetry

Formal Approaches to Poetry
Author: B. Elan Dresher
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2006
Genre: Versification
ISBN: 9783119166096

This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. It includes papers from leading experts in the field, including Nigel Fabb, Kristin Hanson, Paul Kiparsky, Marina Tarlinskaja, Barry Scherr, among others. The book focuses on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese, Somali, Old Norse, Latin, and Greek. It contains diverse theoretical approaches that are brought together for the first time, including Optimality Theory, the Russian school of metrics, a mora-based approach, and a semantic-pragmatic approach. The book will be of interest to both linguists and students of poetry.

Structure & Surprise

Structure & Surprise
Author: Michael Theune
Publisher: Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2007
Genre: Education
ISBN:

Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns offers a road map for analyzing poetry through examination of poems' structure, rather than their forms or genres. Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work.

American and British Poetry

American and British Poetry
Author: Harriet Semmes Alexander
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 1984
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780719017063

Shakespeare's Lyricized Drama

Shakespeare's Lyricized Drama
Author: Aleksandŭr Shurbanov
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2010
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0874130867

This book explores Shakespeare's poetic drama as a blend of the dramatic and the lyrical. Through a series of minute textual analyses, it traces the gradual integration of the two modes from Love's Labour's Lost to Hamlet and the other mature tragedies. How this combination is effected in its details is a question that can help us understand better the specificity of Shakespeare's innovative work for the theater and the power of its impact.

Lyric Poem and Aestheticism

Lyric Poem and Aestheticism
Author: Marion Thain
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1474415679

This study explores lyric poetry's response to a crisis of relevance in Victorian Modernity, offering an analysis of literature usually elided by studies of the modern formation of the genre and uncovering previously unrecognized discourses within it. Setting the focal aestheticist poetry (c. 1860 to 1914) within much broader historical, theoretical and aesthetic frames, it speaks to those interested in Victorian and modernist literature and culture, but also to a burgeoning audience of the 'new lyric studies'. The six case studies introduce fresh poetic voices as well as giving innovative analyses of canonical writers (such as D. G. Rossetti, Ezra Pound, A. C. Swinburne).

Our Scene So Fair

Our Scene So Fair
Author: Gémino H. Abad
Publisher: UP Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2008
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9715425593

Our Scene So Fair consists of nine critical essays that seek to clarify the poetic tradition that Filipino poets in English have established over the first half of the last century.

Dreams of Waking

Dreams of Waking
Author: Vincent Barletta
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2013-03-22
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 022601147X

In this anthology, Vincent Barletta, Mark L. Bajus, and Cici Malik treat the Iberian lyric in the late Middle Ages and early modernity as a deeply multilingual, transnational genre that needs to break away from the old essentialist ideas about language, geography, and identity in order to be understood properly. More and more, scholars and students are recognizing the limitations of single-language, nationalist, and period-bound canons and are looking for different ways to approach the study of literature. The Iberian Peninsula is an excellent site for this approach, where the history and politics of the region, along with its creative literature, need to be read and studied together with the way the works were composed by poets and eventually consumed by readers. With a generous selection of more than one hundred poems from thirty-three poets, Dreams of Waking is unique in its coverage of the three main languages—Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish—and lyrical styles employed by peninsular poets. It contains new translations of canonical poems but also translations of many poems that have never before been edited or translated. Brief headnotes provide essential details of the poets’ lives, and a general introduction by the volume editors shows how the poems and languages fruitfully intersect. With helpful annotations to the poetry, as well as a selected bibliography containing the most important editions and translations from all three of the main Iberian languages, this volume will be an indispensable tool for both specialists and students in comparative literature.

Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English

Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English
Author: Eugene Benson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1950
Release: 2004-11-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134468482

" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.