The Substance of Shadow : A Darkening Trope in Poetic History / John Hollander; Kenneth Gross.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hollander, John, Author.

Contributor:

Gross, Kenneth, Editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shades and shadows in literature.

English poetry--History and criticism.

English poetry.

American poetry--History and criticism.

American poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts-from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens-Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self. An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander's account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

1. A Lecture upon the Shadow

2. Shadows and Shades

3. Shadowes Light

4. A Shadow Different from Either

5. Fragments of Shadow: Manuscript Extracts

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226354309

022635430X

OCLC:

954734937