The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism Forms of Modernity.

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Lyric poetry.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

viii, 270 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] : Edinburgh Univ Pr, 2016.

Summary:

Drawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth century's literature and culture. 'This is a brilliantly conceived book, showing how Aestheticist lyrics, despite their frequent use of antiquated forms, actively engage with the concerns of modernity. In arguing that the rhetorical strategies adopted by these poems are not proto-Modernist but rather "post-Victorian" - self-consciously playing on earlier works, in the manner of postmodernism - Thain offers truly fresh insight, not only into this particular corpus of fin de siècle literature, but into the possibilities of the lyric genre itself'. Erik Gray, Columbia University, The remaking of lyric poetry in Victorian modernity, As cultural and philosophical shifts were challenging the fundamental generic identity of 'lyric', aestheticist poets seemed to turn insistently to forms from the past. Yet might those antique forms be understood in relation to the pressures of modernity? How might they have been used to reimagine lyric's presence in the modern world? This book argues that aestheticist poetry (c. 1860 to 1914) responds profoundly to the crisis of lyric's relevance to a rapidly modernising age, not in spite of these forms but through them. Setting its focal poetry within broader conceptual frames, and featuring innovative analysis of both recently rediscovered and canonical works, this study asks us to reimagine the relationship between poetry and modernity. Key Features, Challenges and transforms existing narratives of the modern formation of the 'lyric' genre through engagement with a body of work that larger-scale genre histories elide, Provides three fresh theoretical frames to examine the relationship between poetry and modernity, Includes case studies featuring a range of literary figures such as Thomas Hardy, D. G. Rossetti, Alice Meynell, Arthur Symons, A.C. Swinburne and Ezra Pound Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Lyric, Aestheticism and the Later Nineteenth Century 19

Part I Time

2 Metre and Temporality: Between Hegel and Benjamin 55

3 Painting, Music, Touch: D. G. Rossetti's Ekphrasis and Competing Temporalities 68

4 Parnassus and Commodity Time 90

Part II Space

5 Form and Transaction: Lyric Touch 115

6 Arthur Symons and Decadent Lyric Phenomenology 130

7 'Space, the Bound of a Solid': Alice Meynell and Thomas Hardy 153

Part III Subjectivity

8 Desire Lines: Subjectivity and Collectivity 177

9 A. C. Swinburne in the Round: Drama, Personae and Lyric Subjectivity 189

10 Ezra Pound's Troubadour Subject: Community, Form and 'Lyric' in Early Modernism 210.

ISBN:

9781474415668

1474415660

OCLC:

945950339