Download or read book Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem written by Jeffrey Walker and published by Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic 1621 1982 written by Bernard Schweizer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epic has long been regarded as the exclusive domain of the male literary genius and as an incarnation of patriarchal values. This provocative collection of essays challenges such a hegemonic stereotype by demonstrating the ways in which women writers have successfully adapted the masculine epic tradition to suit their own aesthetic needs and to express their own heroic literary, social, and historical visions. Bringing the female epic out of the shadows, the contributors rethink generic boundaries to illuminate this heretofore hidden literary practice. The essays range from Mary Tighe to Rebecca West from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Gwendolyn Brooks, and from Frances Burney to Virginia Woolf. Bernard Schweizer's introduction, titled 'Muses with Pens,' connects the trajectory of ideas and influences in the individual essays to demonstrate how each participates in reclaiming for women writers a place in the development of a female epic tradition. The volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars working on issues related to genre, canon formation, and the evolution of female literary authority.
Download or read book Epics of the Americas written by William Allegrezza and published by Universitat de València. This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whitman wanted to bolster the American democratic spirit by creating a democratic literature through his Leaves of Grass, he also wanted to create something epic, so he crafted a new form, the lyric-epic. Pablo Neruda wrote Canto general as a foundational text for communism in Latin America. In both books, these poets want to politicize the reader, Whitman for democracy and Neruda for communism, both of which have become foundational poets for their countries over time.
Download or read book The Epic Trickster in American Literature written by Gregory E. Rutledge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as Africa and the West have traditionally fit into binaries of Darkness/Enlightenment, Savage/Modern, Ugly/Beautiful, and Ritual/Art, among others, much of Western cultural production rests upon the archetypal binary of Trickster/Epic, with trickster aesthetics and commensurate cultural forms characterizing Africa. Challenging this binary and the exceptionalism that underlies anti-hegemonic efforts even today, this book begins with the scholarly foundations that mapped out African trickster continuities in the United States and excavated the aesthetics of traditional African epic performances. Rutledge locates trickster-like capacities within the epic hero archetype (the "epic trickster" paradigm) and constructs an Homeric Diaspora, which is to say that the modern Homeric performance foundation lies at an absolute time and distance away from the ancient storytelling performance needed to understand the cautionary aesthetic inseparable from epic potential. As traditional epic performances demonstrate, unchecked epic trickster dynamism anticipates not only brutal imperialism and creative diversity, but the greatest threat to everyone, an eco-apocalypse. Relying upon the preeminent scholarship on African-American trickster-heroes, traditional African heroic performances, and cultural studies approaches to Greco-Roman epics, Rutledge traces the epic trickster aesthetic through three seminal African-American novels keenly attuned to the American Homeric Diaspora: Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Download or read book Fettered Genius written by Keith D. Leonard and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fettered Genius, Keith D. Leonard identifies how African American poets' use and revision of traditional poetics constituted an antiracist political agency. Comparing this practice to the use of poetic mastery by the ancient Celtic bards to resist British imperialism, Leonard shows how traditional poetics enable African American poets to insert racial experience, racial protest, and African American culture into public discourse by making them features of validated artistic expression. As with the Celtic bards, these poets' artistry testified to their marginalized people's capacity for imagination and reason within and against the terms of the dominant culture. In an ambitious survey that moves from slavery to the cultural nationalism of the 1960s, Leonard examines numerous poets, placing each in the context of his or her time to demonstrate the antiracist meaning of their accomplishments. The book offers new insight on the conservatism of Phillis Wheatley, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the genteel members of the Harlem Renaissance, how their rage for assimilation functioned to refute racist notions of difference and, paradoxically, to affirm a distinctive racial experience as valid material for poetry. Leonard also demonstrates how the more progressive and ethnically distinctive poetics of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Melvin B. Tolson share some of the same ambivalence about cultural achievement as those of the earlier poets. They also have in common the self-conscious pursuit of an affirmation of the African American self through the substitution of African American vernacular language and cultural forms for traditional poetic themes and forms. The evolution of these poetics parallels the emergence of notions of ethnic identity over racial identity and, indeed, in some ways even motivated this shift. Leonard recognizes poetic mastery as the African American bardic poet's most powerful claim of ethnic tradition and of social belonging and clarifies the full hybrid complexity of African American identity that makes possible this political self-assertion. The development that is traced in Fettered Genius illustrates nothing less than the defining artistic coherence and political significance of the African American poetic tradition.
Download or read book Working Women Literary Ladies written by Sylvia J. Cook and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-30 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working Women, Literary Ladies explores the simultaneous entry of working-class women in the United States into wage-earning factory labor and into opportunities for mental and literary development. It is the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As women entered the public sphere as workers, their opportunities for intellectual growth expanded, even as those same opportunities were often tightly circumscribed by the factory owners who were providing them. These developments, both institutional and personal, opened up a range of new possibilities for working-class women that profoundly affected women of all classes and the larger social fabric. Cook examines the extraordinary and diverse literary productions of these working women, ranging from their first New England magazine of belles lettres, The Lowell Offering, to Emma Goldman's periodical, Mother Earth; from Lucy Larcom's epic poem of female factory life, An Idyl of Work, to Theresa Malkiel's fictional account of sweatshop workers in New York, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker. This vital new book traces the hopes and tensions generated by the expectations of working-class women as they created a wholly new way of being alive in the world.
Download or read book Rereading Aristotle s Rhetoric written by Alan G. Gross and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2008-02-20 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer, scholars in communication, rhetoric and composition, and philosophy seek to “reread” Aristotle’s Rhetoric from a purely rhetorical perspective. So important do these contributors find the Rhetoric, in fact, that a core tenet in this book is that “all subsequent rhetorical theory is but a series of responses to issues raised by the central work.” The essays reflect on questions basic to rhetoric as a humanistic discipline. Some explore the ways in which the Rhetoric explicates the nature of the art of rhetoric, noting that on this issue, the tensions within the Rhetoric often provide a direct passageway into our own conflicts.
Download or read book Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village written by Jack Selzer and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996-12-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke’s early career in Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice conversing with “the moderns.” Burke found himself in the midst of an avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures. Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the age of 96, has been hailed as America’s most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to intellectual fashions. But Burke’s formative work of the 1920s, when he first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist conversation, has gone relatively unexamined. Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets, painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, and Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players; the leftists associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts; the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate editor saw T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” into print for the first time and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how Burke’s own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant portrait of the young Burke’s transformation from aesthete to social critic.
Download or read book Bakhtin and the Nation written by San Diego Bakhtin Circle and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The end of the twentieth century is marked by historic changes in nation-states and in the concepts of the nation and of nationalism. The ten essays in this volume give to the reader an inquiry into the problem of the nation with, and sometimes surpassing, the help of Russian philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Poets Beyond the Barricade written by Dale Smith and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the cultural conflicts over the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, poets and poetry have consistently raised questions surrounding public address, social relations, friction between global policies and democratic institutions, and the interpretation of political events and ideas. In Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960, Dale Smith makes meaningful links among rhetoric, literature, and cultural studies, illustrating how poetry and discussions of it shaped public consciousness from the socially volatile era of the 1960s to the War on Terror of today. The book begins by inspecting the correspondence and poetry of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, which embodies competing perspectives on the role of writers in the Vietnam War and in the peace movement. The work addresses the rational-critical mode of public discourse initiated by Jürgen Habermas and the relevance of rhetorical studies to literary practice. Smith also analyses letters and poetry by Charles Olson that appeared in a New England newspaper in the 1960sand drew attention to city management conflicts, land-use issues, and architectural preservation. Public identity and U.S. social practice are explored in the 1970s and ‘80s poetry of Lorenzo Thomas and Edward Dorn, whose poems articulate tensions between private and public life. The book concludes by examining more recent attempts by poets to influence public reflection on crucial events that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By using digital media, public performance, and civic encounters mediated by texts, these poetic initiatives play a critical role in the formation of cultural identity today.
Download or read book Romanticism Rhetoric and the Search for the Sublime written by Craig R. Smith and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-07 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relying on the author’s established expertise in rhetorical theory and political communication, this book re-contextualizes Romantic rhetorical theory in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to provide a foundation for a Neo-Romantic rhetorical theory for our own time. In the process, it uses a unique methodology to correct misconceptions about many Romantic writers. The methodology of the early chapters uses a dialectical approach to trace Romanticism and its opposition, the Enlightenment, back through Humanism and its opposition, Scholasticism, to St. Augustine. These chapters include a revisionist analysis of the church’s treatment of Galileo in the course of showing how difficult it was for scientific study to be accepted in the academic world. The study also re-conceptualizes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Edmund Burke as bridge figures to the Romantic Era instead of as Enlightenment figures. This move throws new light on the major artists of the Romantic Era, who are examined in chapters seven and eight. Chapter nine focuses on Percy Bysshe Shelley and his development of the rhetorical poem, and thereby provides a new genre in the Romantic catalogue. Chapter ten uses the foregoing to analyse and reconceptualize the rhetorical theories of Hugh Blair and Thomas De Quincey. The concluding chapter then synthesizes their theories with relevant contemporary rhetorical theories thereby constructing a Neo-Romantic theory for our own time. In the process, this book links the Romantics’ love of nature to the current environmental crisis.
Download or read book Writing beyond Prophecy written by Martin Kevorkian and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing beyond Prophecy offers a new interpretation of the American Renaissance by drawing attention to a cluster of later, rarely studied works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Identifying a line of writing from Emerson's Conduct of Life to Hawthorne's posthumously published Elixir of Life manuscript to Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Martin Kevorkian demonstrates how these authors wrestled with their vocational calling. Early in their careers, these three authors positioned their literary pursuits as an alternative to the ministry. By presenting a "new revelation" and a new set of "gospels" for the nineteenth century, they sought to usurp the authority of the pulpit. Later in life, each writer came to recognize the audacity of his earlier work, creating what Kevorkian characterizes as a literary aftermath. Strikingly, each author later wrote about the character of a young divinity student torn by a crisis of faith and vocation. Writing beyond Prophecy gives a distinctive shape to the late careers of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville and offers a cohesive account of the lingering religious devotion left in the wake of American Romanticism.
Download or read book Becoming Canonical in American Poetry written by Timothy Morris and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction written by Catherine Morley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the confluences between two types of literature in contemporary America: the novel and the epic. It analyses the tradition of the epic as it has evolved from antiquity, through Joyce to its American manifestations and describes how this tradition has impacted upon contemporary American writing.
Download or read book Writing in Real Time written by Paul Jaussen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Walt Whitman to the contemporary period, the long poem has been one of the more dynamic, intricate, and yet challenging literary practices of modernity. Addressing those challenges, Writing in Real Time combines systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics to interpret a broad range of American long poems as emergent systems, capable of adaptation and transformation in response to environmental change. Due to these emergent properties, the long poem performs essential cultural work, offering a unique experience of history that remains valuable for our rapidly transforming digital age. Moving across a broad range of literary and theoretical texts, Writing in Real Time demonstrates that the study of emergence can enhance literary scholarship, just as literature provides unique insights into emergent properties, making this book a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.
Download or read book A Liberal Education in Late Emerson written by Sean Ross Meehan and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2019-01-11 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Counters the view of the late Emerson's decline by rethinking his engagement with liberal education and his intellectual relation to Whitman, William James, Charles Eliot, and Du Bois.
Download or read book The Patriot Poets written by Stephen J. Adams and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since before the Declaration of Independence, poets have shaped a collective imagination of nationhood at critical points in American history. In The Patriot Poets Stephen Adams considers major odes and "progress poems" that address America's destiny in the face of slavery, the Civil War, imperialist expansion, immigration, repeated financial boom and bust, gross social inequality, racial and gendered oppression, and the rise of the present-day corporate oligarchy. Adams elucidates how poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries addressed political crises from a position of patriotic idealism and how military interventions overseas in Cuba and in the Philippines increasingly caused poets to question the actions of those in power. He traces competing loyalties through major works of writers at both extremes of the political spectrum, from the radical Republican versus Confederate voices of the Civil War, through New Deal liberalism versus the lost-cause propaganda of the defeated South and the conservative isolationism of the 1930s, and after the Second World War, the renewed hope of Black leaders and the existential alienation of Allen Ginsberg's counter-culture. Blazing a new path of critical discourse, Adams questions why America, of all nations, has appeared to rule out politics as a subject fit for poetry. His answer draws connections between familiar touchstones of American poetry and significant yet neglected writing by Philip Freneau, Sidney Lanier, Archibald MacLeish, William Vaughn Moody, Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, Allen Tate, Henry Timrod, Melvin B. Tolson, and others. An illuminating and pioneering work, The Patriot Poets provides a rich understanding of the ambivalent relationship American poets and poems have had with nation, genre, and the public.
