Poetic Presence and Illusion Essays in Critical History and Theory / Murray Krieger.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Krieger, Murray, 1923-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Criticism.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xviii, 326 p. :) ill. ;

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Johns Hopkins University Press 2019

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Originally published in 1979. Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience, only within an illusionary context. But the illusion should not be taken lightly as a false substitute for reality. It is itself a real and positive force: it is what we see and, as such, is constitutive of our reality, even if our critical faculty de-constitutes that reality by viewing it as no more than an illusion. The coupling of poetic presence and poetic illusion serves to describe the relationship between poetry as metaphor and the reader's sense of personal and poetic reality. Krieger examines the workings of selected Renaissance and contemporary poems with regard to this dual nature and evaluates the work of literary critics (himself included) who have been concerned with this doubleness. Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position.

Contents:

Cover

Copyright

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

I: Critical History

1. Poetic Presence and Illusion I: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor

2. Jacopo Mazzoni, Repository of Diverse Critical Traditions or Source of a New One?

3. Shakespeare and the Critic's Idolatry of the Word

4. Fiction, Nature, and Literary Kinds in Johnson's Criticism of Shakespeare

5. "Trying Experiments upon Our Sensibility": The Art of Dogma and Doubt in Eighteenth-Century Literature

6. The Critical Legacy of Matthew Arnold

or, The Strange Brotherhood of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and Northrop Frye

7. Reconsideration-The New Critics

8. The Theoretical Contributions of Eliseo Vivas

9. The Tragic Vision Twenty Years After

II: Critical Theory

10. Poetic Presence and Illusion II: Formalist Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor

11. Literature vs. Ecriture: Constructions and Deconstructions in Recent Critical Theory

12. Literature as Illusion, as Metaphor, as Vision

13. Theories about Theories about Theory of Criticism

14. A Scorecard for the Critics

15. Literature, Criticism, and Decision Theory

16. Mediation, Language, and Vision in the Reading of Literature

17. Literary Analysis and Evaluation-and the Ambidextrous Critic

Index of Names.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8018-2199-1

1-4214-3128-9

OCLC:

1117489296