Reading with John Clare : Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism / Sara Guyer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Guyer, Sara, Author.

Series:

Lit Z.

Lit Z

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Clare, John, 1793-1864.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (176 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Reading with John Clare argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which biopolitics is said to emerge simultaneously with romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics and its relation to aesthetics across two centuries.Guyer focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British poet John Clare (1793–1864). Reading Clare in combination with contemporary theories of biopolitics, Guyer reinterprets romanticism’s political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Guyer offers an alternative account of many of romanticism’s foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism. She shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism they denounce. The book thus compels a rethinking of the biopolitical critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Life of Reading

1. The Viability of Poetry

2. The Origins and Ends of Poetic Genius

3. Can the Poet Speak?

4. Inventions of Self - Identity

5. The Poetics of Homelessness

Coda: The Reading of Life

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8232-6692-3

0-8232-6560-9

0-8232-6561-7

OCLC:

907880682