Poetry, politics, and the body in Rimbaud : lyrical material / Robert St. Clair.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• St. Clair, Robert (French literary scholar), author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854-1891--Criticism and interpretation.
• Rimbaud, Arthur, 1854-1891.
• Human body in literature.
• Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

• Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

viii, 271 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Bodies abound in Rimbaud's poetry in a way that is nearly unprecedented in the nineteenth-century poetic canon: lazy, creative, rule-breaking bodies, queer bodies, marginalized and impoverished bodies, revolting and revolutionary, historical bodies. The question that this book seeks to answer is: What does this corporeal density mean for reading Rimbaud? What kind of sense are we to make of this omnipresence of the body in the Rimbaldian corpus, from first to last-from the earliest poems in verse celebrating the sheer, simple delight of running away from wherever one is and stretching one's legs out under a table, to the ultimate flight away from poetry itself? In response, this book argues that the body appears-often literally-as a kind of gap, breach, or aperture through which Rimbaud's poems enter into contact with history and a larger body of other texts. Simply put, the body is privileged 'lyrical material' for Rimbaud: a figure for human beings in their exposed, finite creatureliness and in their unpredictable agency and interconnectedness. Its presence in the early work allows us not only to contemplate what a strange, sensuous thing it is to be embodied, to be both singular and part of a collective, it also allows the poet to diagnose, and the reader to perceive, a set of seemingly intractable, 'real' socio-economic, political, and symbolic problems.

Contents:

• 1 (Departures). Natural Bodies: (Eco)Poetics and the Politics of the Aesthetic: "Sensation" p. 26
• 2 (Diagnostic). Impoverished Bodies: "Les Effarés" and the Misery of the Nineteenth-Century Lyric p. 72
• 3 (Prognosis). Happy Bodies, Happy Hours: "Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir'" p. 123
• 4 (Anamnesis). Revolting Bodies: "Le Forgeron" and the Poetry of the Past p. 165.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [249]-264) and indexes.

ISBN:

• 9780198826583
• 0198826583

OCLC:

1022080701