Download or read book The Underworld in Twentieth Century Poetry written by M. Thurston and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-12-21 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hero s descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets - British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from the margins - stage Underworld descents in their works? Through a series of contextualized close readings, this study traces the cultural work performed by modern deployments of the classical narrative. While some poets engage their literary forebears to exorcise anxiety and others use Hell to sharpen their cultural critique, most recent poets, including James Merrill, Derek Walcott, Tony Harrison, and Seamus Heaney, have found the Underworld descent to be a useful framework for addressing the claims of history and politics.

Download or read book Urban Underworlds written by Thomas Heise and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Underworlds is an exploration of city spaces, pathologized identities, lurid fears, and American literature. Surveying one hundred years of history, and fusing sociology, urban planning, and criminology with literary and cultural studies, it chronicles how and why marginalized populations-immigrant Americans in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village and downtown Los Angeles, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities-have been selectively targeted as "urban underworlds" and their neighborhoods.

Download or read book American Poetry The Twentieth Century Vol 2 LOA 116 written by Edward Estlin Cummings and published by Library of America: The Americ. This book was released on 2000-03-20 with total page 1064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthology of poems by 20th century American poets.

Download or read book Twentieth Century Metapoetry and the Lyric Tradition written by Daniella Jancsó and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-Century Metapoetry and the Lyric Tradition reveals the unique value of metapoems for exploring twentieth-century poetry. By placing these texts into a hitherto barely investigated literary-historical perspective, it demonstrates that modern metapoetry is steeped in the lyric tradition to a much greater extent than previously acknowledged. Since these literary continuities that cut across epochal boundaries can be traced across all major poetic movements, they challenge established accounts of the history of twentieth-century poetry that postulate a radical break with the (immediate) past. Moreover, the finding that metapoems perpetuate traditional forms and topoi distinguishes metapoetry historically and systematically from metafiction and metadrama. After highlighting the most important differences as regards to the function of metareference in poetry on the one side, and in fiction and drama on the other, the book concludes with a discussion of how to account for these generic differences theoretically. With its "extraordinarily subtle and perceptive" (Ronald Bush, St. John's College, Oxford) interpretive readings of over one hundred metapoems by canonical anglophone authors, it offers the first representative selection of twentieth-century poems about poetry in English.

Download or read book Humor Empathy and Community in Twentieth Century American Poetry written by Rachel Trousdale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies--whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.

Download or read book A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry written by Neil Roberts and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.

Download or read book Memories of the Classical Underworld in Irish and Caribbean Literature written by Madeleine Scherer and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

Download or read book The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth Century Poetry written by Jon Silkin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a wide-ranging and compelling account of the life of metrical and free verse in the twentieth century, poet and critic Jon Silkin deepens our understanding of the way poetry works on us. He begins from the premiss that two modes of verse, free and metrical, engage the creative energies of poetry now, creating a rich, fertile environment capable of yielding work valuable to poetry itself and to the society which has given it life. With a practitioner's empathy Silkin reads the poetry of Whitman, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Bunting and eight British poets from the post-second World War period to illustrate how free and metrical verse create, separately or together, a poetic harmony. Additionally, he includes crucial statements on modern poetry from poets themselves, concluding with a fine memoir of Basil Bunting by Connie Pickard, published in book-form for the first time.

Download or read book Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture written by Judith Fletcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze examines a series of twentieth and twenty-first century fictional works that adapt Greco-Roman myths of the catabasis, the heroic journey to the underworld. Covering a range of genres - including novels, comics, and children's culture, by authors such as Elena Ferrante, Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, A. S. Byatt, Toni Morrison, and Anne Patchett - it reveals how an enduring fascination with life after death, and fantasies of accessing the world of the dead while we are still alive, manifest themselves in myriad and varied re-imaginings of the ancient descent myth. The volume begins with a detailed overview of the use of the myth by ancient authors such as Homer, Aristophanes, Vergil, and Ovid, before exploring the ways in which the narrative of a return trip to Hades by Odysseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, and Persephone can be manipulated by contemporary storytellers to fit themes of social marginality and alterity, postmodern rebellion, the position of female authors in the literary canon, and the dislocation endured by refugees, exiles, and diasporic populations. It also argues that citations of classical underworld stories can disrupt and challenge the literary canon by using media - such as comic books, children's culture, or rock music - not conventionally associated with high culture.

Download or read book Global Failure and World Literature written by Karen Borg Cardona and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-10-23 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the contemporary era has witnessed a series of spectacular failures with severe and widespread global consequences, failure is still broadly understood on an individual level, while its broader causes and consequences receive little attention. This book reconceptualises failure as a method for characterising and critiquing systems and institutions on both a global and a local level. It defines global failure as comprising global inequality, economic crisis, and ecological disaster, and as a condition which informs and is informed by localised failure. It examines the negotiation between global and local failure in narratives of failed quests by four contemporary authors: Cormac McCarthy, Julia Kristeva, Michael Ondaatje, and Basma Abdel Aziz. As a genre, the quest narrative is associated with the idea of hard-won success. The failed quest narrative, or the narrative of the failed quest, is therefore the ideal vehicle through which to examine the socio-political and institutional conditions of failure. Primarily a contribution to the field of world literature, this book is also relevant to those with an interest in the contemporary novel, failure studies, and the quest narrative.

Download or read book Poetry and Islands written by Rajeev S. Patke and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In all cultures and times, the poetic imagination has fed on the natural attributes of islands. An island is either a destination, or a home, or a place of exile and imprisonment, or simply a place to sojourn. It is an ideal vehicle for journeys treated as allegories, or for acts of finding that turn into acts of losing, or the reverse transformation. An island is not a continent; yet it can be an archipelago. An island is both a place in itself and a pretext for imaginings that need a local habitation and a name. It can give relief, and pleasure; or it can frustrate, isolate, and negate. Above all, it both invites and resists - or contains or constrains - the imagination. Poetry and Islands explores how islands become repositories of human longings and desires, a locus for some of our deepest fears and fantasies. It balances historical and geographical reference with a selective approach to poems and poets in English, and in translations into English. The study of particular poems in which islands figure in exemplary ways is balanced by a more detailed discussion of the poets who have played a major role in shaping human responses to islands on a global scale.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry written by Walter Kalaidjian and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-19 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century.

Download or read book A Quest for Remembrance written by Madeleine Scherer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-20 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern literature brings together a range of arguments exploring connections between the descent into the underworld, also known as katabasis, and various forms of memory. Its chapters investigate the uses of the descent topos both in antiquity and in the reception of classical literature in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In the process, the volume explores how the hero’s quest into the underworld engages with the theme of recovering memories from the past. At the same time, we aim to foreground how the narrative format itself is concerned with forms of commemoration ranging from trans-cultural memory, remembering the literary and intellectual canon, to commemorating important historical events that might otherwise be forgotten. Through highlighting this duality this collection aims to introduce the descent narrative as its own literary genre, a ‘memorious genre’ related to but distinct from the quest narrative.

Download or read book Northrop Frye on Twentieth century Literature written by Northrop Frye and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume brings together Northrop Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, a body of work produced over almost sixty years. Including Frye's incisive book on T.S. Eliot, as well as his discussions of writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and George Orwell, the volume also contains a recently discovered review of C.G. Jung's book on the synchronicity principle and a previously unpublished introduction to an anthology of twentieth-century literature. Frye's insightful commentaries demonstrate that he was as astute a critic of the literature of his own time as he was of the literature of earlier periods." "Glen Robert Gill's introduction delineates the development of Frye's criticism on twentieth-century literature, puts it in historical and cultural context, and relates it to his overarching theory of literature. This definitive volume in the Collected Works will be a welcome addition to the libraries of Frye specialists and of scholars and students of twentieth-century literature in general."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English written by Jenny Stringer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-26 with total page 774 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique new reference book to English-language writers and writing throughout the present century, in all major genres and from all around the world - from Joseph Conrad to Will Self, Virginia Woolf to David Mamet, Ezra Pound to Peter Carey, James Joyce to Amy Tan. The survivors of the Victorian age who feature in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English - writers such as Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Rabindranath Tagore, Henry James - could hardly have imagined how richly diverse `Literature in English' would become by the end of the century. Fiction, plays, poetry, and a whole range of non-fictional writing are celebrated in this informative, readable, and catholic reference book, which includes entries on literary movements, periodicals, and over 400 individual works, as well as articles on some 2,400 authors. All the great literary figures are included, whether American or Australian, British, Irish, or Indian, African or Canadian or Caribbean - among them Samuel Beckett, Edith Wharton, Patrick White, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, D. H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Wole Soyinka, Sylvia Plath - as well as a wealth of less obviously canonical writers, from Anaïs Nin to L. M. Montgomery, Bob Dylan to Terry Pratchett. The book comes right up to date with contemporary figures such as Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Salman Rushdie, Carol Shields, Tim Winton, Nadine Gordimer, Vikram Seth, Don Delillo, and many others. Title entries range from Aaron's Rod to The Zoo Story; topics from Angry Young Men, Bestsellers, and Concrete Poetry to Soap Opera, Vietnam Writing, and Westerns. A lively introduction by John Sutherland highlights the various and sometimes contradictory canons that have emerged over the century, and the increasingly international sources of writing in English which the Companion records. Catering for all literary tastes, this is the most comprehensive single-volume guide to modern (and postmodern) literature.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry written by Cary Nelson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-16 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry gives readers a cutting-edge introduction to the kaleidoscopic world of American poetry over the last century. Offering a comprehensive approach to the debates that have defined the study of American verse, the twenty-five original essays contained herein take up a wide array of topics: the influence of jazz on the Beats and beyond; European and surrealist influences on style; poetics of the disenfranchised; religion and the national epic; antiwar and dissent poetry; the AIDS epidemic; digital innovations; transnationalism; hip hop; and more. Alongside these topics, major interpretive perspectives such as Marxist, psychoanalytic, disability, queer, and ecocritcal are incorporated. Throughout, the names that have shaped American poetry in the period--Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Sterling Brown, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Posey, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Larry Eigner, and others--serve as touchstones along the tour of the poetic landscape.

Download or read book European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century written by David Jasper and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2009-06-17 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central themes of this collection of essays are the mystery of time past, present and future, and the problems of redemption. They are concerned with modern literature, the threat of meaninglessness in the postmodern condition, and the possibility of salvation. In an age of deferral and difference, this book addresses itself to eschatology and apocalypse, and redemption in, through, but particularly of, time itself. Hell and madness are never far away, yet the reconfiguration of time and the breaking in of the transcendent continue to suggest theological possibilities beyond the wastelands of the twentieth century. To those possibilities we look in hope.