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Author: Louis A. Renza Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807127551 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Throughout the history of the United States, a commitment to both democratic political ideals and to capitalist realities has made privacy a persistently controversial issue. Only rarely, however, has privacy attracted the attention of American literary criticism. In his ingeniously argued new study, Louis A. Renza extends the idea of privacy beyond the received wisdom of its popular legal and psychological conceptions and, iconoclastically, beyond its conception in postmodern literary theory to show that the public-private paradigm has import for American literary texts past and present. It is a truism of cultural studies that the interior space of imagination is socially constructed and thus that the private is ineluctably political. But Renza shows, through a brilliantly original analysis of works by Edgar Allan Poe and Wallace Stevens, that as an effect of reading and writing, a real or “radical” privacy continually resists appropriation. In admirably close readings of Poe’s tales, his long essay Eureka, and Stevens’s Harmonium poems, Renza demonstrates that both writers ground the concept of privacy in the possibility of multiple interpretations of their texts. Neither Poe nor Stevens resists meaning or sense, but by thematically engaging in their work the inescapable public/private dichotomy of artistic creation, they create a highly personal idiom that, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” allows them to “hide in plain sight” and in that way to finesse public constructions of meaning. Thus, surprisingly, privacy can always be conceived as something more than what current social-cultural codes urge us to believe. The poetics Renza compellingly elucidates does not deny the insights of current theory but offers a refreshing alternative that allows for the “radical” autonomy of authorship without resorting to vague elitist claims of individual genius. His thoughtful readings are a major contribution to traditional Poe and Stevens scholarship, and his challenging thesis will provoke new investigations into the privacy issue in American literature as a whole.
Author: Louis A. Renza Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807127551 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Throughout the history of the United States, a commitment to both democratic political ideals and to capitalist realities has made privacy a persistently controversial issue. Only rarely, however, has privacy attracted the attention of American literary criticism. In his ingeniously argued new study, Louis A. Renza extends the idea of privacy beyond the received wisdom of its popular legal and psychological conceptions and, iconoclastically, beyond its conception in postmodern literary theory to show that the public-private paradigm has import for American literary texts past and present. It is a truism of cultural studies that the interior space of imagination is socially constructed and thus that the private is ineluctably political. But Renza shows, through a brilliantly original analysis of works by Edgar Allan Poe and Wallace Stevens, that as an effect of reading and writing, a real or “radical” privacy continually resists appropriation. In admirably close readings of Poe’s tales, his long essay Eureka, and Stevens’s Harmonium poems, Renza demonstrates that both writers ground the concept of privacy in the possibility of multiple interpretations of their texts. Neither Poe nor Stevens resists meaning or sense, but by thematically engaging in their work the inescapable public/private dichotomy of artistic creation, they create a highly personal idiom that, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” allows them to “hide in plain sight” and in that way to finesse public constructions of meaning. Thus, surprisingly, privacy can always be conceived as something more than what current social-cultural codes urge us to believe. The poetics Renza compellingly elucidates does not deny the insights of current theory but offers a refreshing alternative that allows for the “radical” autonomy of authorship without resorting to vague elitist claims of individual genius. His thoughtful readings are a major contribution to traditional Poe and Stevens scholarship, and his challenging thesis will provoke new investigations into the privacy issue in American literature as a whole.
Author: Stefan Holander Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135914001 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
This study examines Wallace Stevens' ideas and practice of poetic language with a focus on the 1930s, an era in which Stevens persistently thematized a keenly felt pressure for the possible social involvement and political utility of poetic language. The argument suggests how mutually implicated elements of his poetry such as diction, prosody and metaphor are relied on to signify or enact aesthetic closure; both in the negative terms of expressive impotence and unethical isolation and the positive ones of imaginative and linguistic change. In this respect, the study deals closely with the epistemologically and ethically fraught issue of the ambiguous and volatile role of non-semantic elements and linguistic difficulty in Stevens' language. Assuming that these facets are not exclusive to this period but receive a very clear, and therefore instructive, formulation in it, the discussion outlines some of Stevens' most central tropes for poetic creativity at this stage of his career, suggesting ways in which they came to form part of his later discourse on poetic functionality, when polemical concepts for the imagination, such as "evasion" and "escapism," became central. Stevens' prosody is discussed from within an eclectic analytical framework in which cumulative rhythmics is complemented by traditional metrics as a way of doing justice to his rich, varied and cognitively volatile use of verse language. The expressive potency of prosodic patterning is understood both as an effect of its resistance to semantic interpretation and by assuming a formal drive to interpret them in relation to the semantic and metaphoric staging of individual poems. A poem, in turn, is understood both as a strategic, stylistically deviant response to the challenges of a particular historical moment, and as an attempt to communicate through creating a sense of linguistic resistance and otherness.
Author: Edgar Allan Poe Publisher: Broadview Press ISBN: 1770483497 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 548
Book Description
Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are among the most haunting and indelible in American literature, but critics for decades persisted in seeing Poe as an anomaly, or even an anachronism. His works, with their bizarrely motivated characters and mysterious settings, did not seem to be a part of the literature of early nineteenth-century America. Critics realize now, though, that Poe was even more a part of the contemporary American literary scene than many of his more “nationalistic” peers, and that in much of his work Poe was making commentaries on slavery and Southern social attitudes, technology, the urban landscape, political economy, and other subjects. This Broadview Edition includes a selection of Poe’s poems, tales, and sketches in such diverse modes of writing as tales of the supernatural and psychic conflict, satires and hoaxes, science fiction and detective fiction, and nonfiction essays on literary and social topics. These are supplemented by a selection of contextual documents—newspaper and magazine articles, treatises, and other historical texts—that will help readers understand the social, literary, and intellectual milieus in which Poe wrote.
Author: Scott Peeples Publisher: Camden House ISBN: 9781571133571 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
Scott Peeples here examines the many controversies surrounding the work and life of Poe, shedding light on such issues as the relevance of literary criticism to teaching, the role of biography in literary study, and the importance of integrating various interpretations into one's own reading of literature.
Author: Paul Mariani Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1451624387 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 504
Book Description
"A perceptive, insightful biography of perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens, by an accomplished biographer and poet who traces Stevens's lifelong artistic quest"--
Author: Gero Guttzeit Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 311052015X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.
Author: William E. Engel Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317146867 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's "The Raven" serve as case studies that demonstrate the authors' debt to the past. Focusing principally on the overlapping rhetorical and iconic assumptions of the Art of Memory and its relation to chiasmus, Engel avoids engaging in a simple account of what these authors read and incorporated into their own writings. Instead, through an examination of their predisposition toward an earlier model of pattern recognition, he offers fresh insight into the writers' understandings of mourning and loss, their use of allegory, and what they gained from their use of pseudonyms.
Author: Edgar Allan Poe Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 144062724X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 676
Book Description
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe compiles Poe's greatest writings: tales of fantasy, terror, death, revenge, murder, and mystery, including "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," the world's first detective story. In addition, this volume offers letters, articles, criticism, visionary poetry, and a selection of random "opinions" on fancy and the imagination, music and poetry, intuition and sundry other topics. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Author: Alexandra Urakova Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1611461405 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 171
Book Description
Founder of the detective genre and author of works on cryptography, Edgar Allan Poe possessed what Shawn Rosenheim called a “cryptographic imagination.” Not only was Poe’s work influenced by secret writing, it inspired future critics to search his texts for secret clues and that fostered new modes of reading. Poe’s acclaimed complexity owes as much to a long and sophisticated tradition of his interpretative reading as it does to the “undercurrent of meaning” ciphered in his texts. Grounded in previous scholarly work, Deciphering Poe: Contexts, Subtexts, Subversive Meanings explores the hoaxing and subversive nature of Poe’s art and expands this contextual framework. Contributors to the volume offer a highly nuanced picture of Poe’s engagement in the major discourses of the time—religious, philosophical, social, and literary. Twelve essays of the collection discuss Poe’s debt to baroque tradition, his response to Catholicism, his tribute to philosophical idea of sublimity, his complex response to racial issues, and his controversial afterlife reception. The volume includes new readings of Poe’s texts explicitly using codes, secret writing or techniques of detection—“The Gold Bug,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and the Dupin tales. The essays in the collection were originally presented as talks at the Poe Studies Association’s Third International Edgar Allan Poe Conference: The Bicentennial in October 2009. The contributors are Poe scholars from the United States, France, Germany, and Canada: Amy C. Branam, Lauren Curtright, Daniel Fineman, William E. Engel, John C. Havard, Henri Justin, John Edward Martin, Sean Moreland, Philip E. Phillips, Stephanie Sommerfeld, and Timothy N. Towslee.
Author: Louis A. Renza
Author: Louis A. Renza
Author: Stefan Holander
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Author: 
Author: Scott Peeples
Author: Paul Mariani
Author: Gero Guttzeit
Author: William E. Engel
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Author: Alexandra Urakova