On form : poetry, aestheticism, and the legacy of a word / Angela Leighton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leighton, Angela, 1954-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--19th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Aesthetics, Modern--19th century.

Aesthetics, Modern.

English poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

American poetry--19th century--History and criticism.

American poetry.

American poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

Literary form.

Knowledge, Theory of, in literature.

Poetics.

Physical Description:

viii, 288 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

In this ambitious and imaginative book Angela Leighton examines the legacy of the word 'form' from Victorian aestheticism to the present. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which, however familiar and well-worn, seems to contain the secret of art itself. She casts fresh light on familiar debates about form and content, while exploring the sense of form as music or sound-shape, as both sensual body and ghostly dynamic of the text. She argues, moreover, that form remains deeply implicated in the aestheticist principle of artistic inutility, and that this being 'for nothing' remains art's most potent and moving purpose.

Looking back to the Romantics and forward to a number of contemporary poets, she shows how ideas of form have provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. Offering new readings of Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Graham, among many others, she suggests both that form is the key to the pleasures of the literary text, and that pleasure, as a form of knowledge, is something literary criticism itself needs to embody and convey.

Contents:

1 Form's Matter: A Retrospective 1

2 Art for Art: On Pots, Crocks, Lyres, and Flutes 30

3 Touching Forms: Tennyson and Aestheticism 55

4 Aesthetic Conditions: Pater's Re-forming Style 74

5 Seeing Nothing: Vernon Lee's Ghostly Aesthetics 99

6 Just a Word: On Woolf 125

7 Yeats's Feet 144

8 Wallace Stevens' Eccentric Souvenirs 170

9 W. S. Graham: In the Mind's Ear 198

10 Forms of Elegy: Stevenson, Muldoon, Hill, Fisher 220

11 Elegies of Form: Bishop, Plath, Stevenson 242

12 Nothing, but: An Afterword 263.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [267]-283) and index.

ISBN:

9780199290604

0199290601

OCLC:

76935647