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One Foot in Eden: Modes of Pastoral in Romantic Poetry
by Lore MetzgerA UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Poems in Their Place: Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections
by Neil FraistatWith essays by 13 leading scholars, this collection establishes the grounds for a new kind of poetics that considers the poetry book itself -- the concept and the material fact -- as an object of interpretation. The authors argue that the decisions poets make about the presentation of their works play a meaningful role in the poetic process and therefore should figure as part of the reading experience.The common practice of approaching poems chronologically, as they are presented in anthologies or in posthumous editions, has been fostered by the long prevailing tendency of the New Criticism to treat each poem as self-contained. This volume urges the reader to reconsider the most fundamental ways that one reads, teaches, and inteprets poetry.Moving from classical to contemporary poetry, these essays develop a literary history and theory for such a poetics, at the same time providing a generous set of models for a related practical criticism. At the heart of this collection are such issues as order, arrangement, and intertextuality. Reading poems in their place helps to return them to their historical contexts because the book itself has had a particular place in its own culture and society.Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Raising Cane and Backwater Graffiti
by Tammy BrownHow can a stolen body steal cane?Blazing sun--no sign of rain . . ."This article appears in the Fall 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook.Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.
Revising Life
by Susan R. Van Dyne'Provides a compelling argument for Plath's revision of the painful parts of her life--the failed marriage, her anxiety for success, and her ambivalence towards her mother. . . . The reader will feel the tension in the poetry and the life.'Choice '[Examines] Plath's twin goals of becoming a famous poet and a perfect mother. . . . This book's main points are clearly and forcefully argued: that both poems and babies require 'struggle, pain, endless labor, and . . . fears of monstrous offspring' and that, in the end, Plath ran out of the resources necessary to produce both. Often maligned as a self-indulgent confessional poet, Plath is here retrieved as a passionate theorist.'--Library Journal Susan Van Dyne's reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems considers three contexts: Plath's journal entries from 1957 to 1959 (especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and Plath's multiple revisions of the poems.
Robert Lowell's Language of the Self
by Katharine WallingfordKatharine Wallingford's incisive study treats Robert Lowell's work as a poetry of self-examination and explores the ways in which he used methods common to psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy in his poetry. Although he was never psychoanalyzed in a strictly Freudian sense, Lowell spent many years in psychotherapy. Wallingford stresses not the pathological aspects of Lowell's work, however, but rather his lifelong process of self-examination, a process with ethical as well as psychological dimensions. She links this process to the tradition of self-scrutiny that Lowell inherited from his New England Puritan ancestors.Through close readings of the poetry and of unpublished drafts of several poems as well as letters from Lowell to George Santayana, Allen Tate, and his cousin Harriet Winslow, Wallingford treats Lowell's use of specific psychoanalytic techniques: free association, repetition, concentration on the relation between the poet and the "other" to whom he addresses himself, and the use of memory to probe the past. The book considers as well the role the narrative plays in these psychoanalytic and poetic techniques.Lowell believed firmly in the identity of self and language -- "one life, one writing" -- and this study brings us closer to an understanding both of the poet and of his dense and moving poetry. It enriches our reading of Lowell's poetry by calling attention to the ways in which his poetic techniques are analogous to and to some extent derived from psychoanalytic techniques -- techniques that have in our time become integrated into our culture as a whole.Originally published in 1988.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Skeleton of Light (Contemporary Poetry Series)
by Thomas VanceThe essential mind-mysteries are the subject of Vance's poems. Themes of mutability, maturation, discovery, and delight are projected through brilliant archetypal imagery controlled and perfected by a striking technical assurance. The poems are concentrated and sometimes demanding, but they are never obscure and they go deep.Originally published in 1961.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Song in the Wilderness
by Paul GreenThis work is a cantata for chorus and orchestra, with baritone solo, celebrating the pioneers who settled the American wilderness. In his poem, Green has given us the finer spirit of the ancestors of many native Americans throughout the republic. Charles Vardell has brought his imagination and distinguished skill to the translation of emotions, ideas, and aspirations into music.Originally published in 1947.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation
by Jon RosenblattThe author shows how Plath's remarkable lyric dramas define a private ritual process. The book deals with the emotional material from which Plath's poetry arises and the specific ritual transformations she dramatizes. It covers all phases of Plath's poetry, closely following the development of image and idea from the apprentice work through the last lyrics of Ariel. The critical method stays close to the language of the poems and defines Plath's struggle toward maturity.Originally published in 1979.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
The Autobiographical Myth of Robert Lowell
by Philip CooperLowell's continuing productivity and his ever-increasing stature as a poet demand a new evaluation of his work, and Cooper has provided it in this penetrating study. Though Cooper's primary purpose is to demonstrate the principle of the interrelation of the poems, a secondary and equally important purpose is to analyze the significance of Lowell's most recent work.Originally published in 1970.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
The Black Bard of North Carolina
by Joan R. ShermanFor his humanistic religious verse, his poignant and deeply personal antislavery poems, and, above all, his lifelong enthusiasm for liberty, nature, and the art of poetry, George Moses Horton merits a place of distinction among nineteenth-century African American poets. Enslaved from birth until the close of the Civil War, the self-taught Horton was the first American slave to protest his bondage in published verse and the first black man to publish a book in the South. As a man and as a poet, his achievements were extraordinary. In this volume, Joan Sherman collects sixty-two of Horton's poems. Her comprehensive introduction--combining biography, history, cultural commentary, and critical insight--presents a compelling and detailed picture of this remarkable man's life and art. George Moses Horton (ca. 1797-1883) was born in Northampton County, North Carolina. A slave for sixty-eight years, Horton spent much of his life on a farm near Chapel Hill, and in time he fostered a deep connection with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The author of three books of poetry, Horton was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in May of 1996.
The Carnivore (Contemporary Poetry Series)
by David R. SlavittDirectly or obliquely, while reading Gibbon or shopping for toys at F. A. O. Schwarz, Slavitt addresses, invokes, or simply enjoys the civilization that has been the poet's true subject from the time of the wandering bards. Upon the foundation of technical mastery, he has begun to build an oeuvre, to assert himself, and, with insouciance and gaiety, to grow into his majority.Originally published in 1965.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer
by Margot Toomer Latimer Robert B. JonesThis volume is the only collected edition of poems by Jean Toomer, the enigmatic American writer, Gurdjieffian guru, and Quaker convert who is perhaps best known for his 1923 lyrical narrative Cane. The fifty-five poems here -- most of them previously unpublished -- chart a fascinating evolution of artistic consciousness.The book is divided into sections reflecting four distinct periods of creativity in Toomer's career. The Aesthetic period includes Imagist, Symbolist, and other experimental pieces, such as "Five Vignettes," while "Georgia Dusk" and the newly discovered poem "Tell Me" come from Toomer' s Ancestral Consciousness period in the early 1920s. "The Blue Meridian" and other Objective Consciousness poems reveal the influence of idealist philosopher Georges Gurdjieff. Among the works of this period the editor presents a group of local color poems picturing the landscape of the American Southwest, including "Imprint for Rio Grande." "It Is Everywhere," another newly discovered poem, celebrates America and democratic idealism. The Quaker religious philosophy of Toomer's final years is demonstrated in such Christian Existential works as "They Are Not Missed" and "To Gurdjieff Dying."Robert Jones's clear and comprehensive introduction examines the major poems in this volume and serves as a guide through the stages of Toomer's evolution as an artist and thinker. The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer will prove essential to Toomer's admirers as well as to scholars and students of modern poetry, Afro-American literature, and American studies.
The Essential Clarence Major: Prose and Poetry
by Clarence MajorClarence Major is one of America's literary masters. He has published numerous books, from novels to poetry and short story collections. Among his many accolades, he was a finalist for the National Book Award and a Fulbright scholar and received the PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award. His work has been featured in many literary journals, newspapers, and magazines, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Ploughshares.Whether you've known Major's work for decades or are new to his singular style, The Essential Clarence Major offers a thrilling overview of an exceptional career, from his early groundbreaking fiction to his most recent poems. Included here are excerpts from Major's best novels, a selection of his finest short stories and poetry, more than a dozen thought-provoking essays, a taste of his autobiography. Award-winning playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Kia Corthron introduces the collection, artfully illuminating Major's importance as one of the foremost and original voices in contemporary American literature.
The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision Around 1900
by Carsten StrathausenExamining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stephan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world.
The Pattern of Hardy's Poetry
by Samuel HynesThe pattern in Hardy's poetry is the eternal conflict between irreconcilables that was, for him, the first principle, and indeed the only principle, of universal order. Hynes analyzes this pattern as it is manifested in the philosophical context of the poems, their structure, diction, and imagery. Originally published in 1961.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
The Poems of Edward Taylor
by Edward TaylorNow considered America's foremost colonial poet, Edward Taylor was virtually unknown until some of his poems were discovered in the Yale library and published in 1937. The intellectual brilliance and the emotional intensity of his poetical meditations have led critics to compare him to John Donne and George Herbert. These poems are now recognized as one of the great achievements in American devotional literature.
The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary
by J. O. BaileyThis handbook provides the background necessary for fully understanding the nearly one thousand poems of Hardy. As it treats the poems individually and often supplements the analysis of a poem by relating it to other poems and to passages in the fiction, every comment helps build a portrait of Hardy as a poet.Originally published in 1970.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form
by Marjorie LevinsonThe fragment poem, long regarded as a peculiarly Romantic phenomenon, has never been examined outside the context of thematic and biographical criticism. By submitting the unfinished poems of the English Romantics to both a genetic investigation and a reception study, Marjorie Levinson defines the fragment's formal character at various moments in its historical career. She suggests that the formal determinancy of these works, hence their expressive or semantic affinities, is a function of historical conditions and projections.The English Romantic fragment poems share not so much a particular mode of production as a myth of production. Levinson pries apart these two dimensions and analyzes each independently to consider their relationship. By reconstructing the contemporary reception of such works as Wordsworth's "Nutting," Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan," Shelley's "Julian and Maddalo," and Keats's Hyperion fragments, and juxtaposing this model against dominant twentieth-century critical paradigms, Levinson discriminates layers, phases, and kinds of intentionality in the poems and considers the ideological implications of this diversity.This study is the first to investigate the English Romantic fragment poem by identifying the assumptions -- contemporary and belated -- that govern interpretative procedures. In a substantial summary chapter, Levinson reflects upon the meaning and effects of these assumptions with respect to the facts and fictions of literary production in the period and to the processes of canon formation.Originally published in 1986.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
The Work of Self-Representation
by Ivy SchweitzerIn The Work of Self-Representation Ivy Schweitzer examines early American poetry through the critical lens of gender. Her concern is not the inclusion of female writers into the canon; rather, she analyzes how the metaphors of "woman" and "feminine" function in Puritan religious and literary discourse to represent both the "otherness" of spiritual experience and the ways in which race and class function to keep the "other" in marginalized positions.Schwetizer argues that gender was for seventeenth-century new England -- and still is today -- a basic and most politically charged metaphor for the differences that shape identity and determine cultural position. To glimpse the struggle between gender ideology and experience, Schweitzer provides close readings of the poetry of four New Englanders writing between the Great Migration and the first wave of the Great Awakening: John Fiske, Edward Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, and Roger Williams.Schweitzer focuses exclusively on lyric poetry, she says, because a first-person speaker wrestling with the intricacies of individual consciousness provides fruitful ground for exploring the politics of voice and identity and especially problems of authority, intertextuality, and positionality. Fiske and Taylor define the orthodox tradition, and Bradstreet and Williams in different ways challenge it. Her treatment of the familiar poetry of Bradstreet and Taylor is solidly grounded in historical and literary scholarship yet suggestive of the new insights gained from a gender analysis, while discussions of Fiske and Williams bring their little-known lyric work to light.Taken together, these poets' texts illustrate the cultural construction of a troubled masculinity and an idealized, effaced femininity implicit in the Puritan notion of redeemed subjectivity, and constitute a profoundly disturbing and resilient part of our Puritan legacy.
The Works of James M.Whitfield
by Robert S. Levine Ivy G. WilsonIn this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States. Whitfield's works, including poems from his celebratedAmerica and Other Poems(1853), were printed in influential journals and newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass'sThe North Star. A champion of the black emigration movement during the 1850s, Whitfield was embraced by African Americans as a black nationalist bard when he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in the early 1860s. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, his reputation had faded. For this volume, Levine and Wilson gathered and annotated all of Whitfield's extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication. In their thorough introduction, the editors situate Whitfield in relation to key debates on black nationalism in African American culture, underscoring the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the period.
Time in Ezra Pound's Work
by William HarmonThroughout nearly sixty-five of writing, Pound specialized on the suffocating effects of time on poetry, aesthetic form, and history. Harmon examines Pound's strategies for dealing with time and arrives at a persuasive reading of Pound's works in general and of the The Cantos in particular. By concentrating on a single theme and technique, the author demonstrates a coherence in the writing that elucidates the corpus for both the specialist and the casual reader.Originally published in 1977.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory: Conceiving the Supreme Fiction
by B J LeggettLeggett traces the effect of several important theoretical works on the poetry and prose of Stevens during a period in which he was formulating an aesthetic between 1942 and 1954. The author offers new readings of a number of poems and passages and clarifies certain controversial conceptions developed by Stevens, such as the supreme fiction, the relation of the new poet to tradition, and the psychologies of creativity.Originally published in 1987.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
A Journey in Translation: Anne Hébert's Poetry in English (Canadian Literature Collection)
by Lee Skallerup BessetteThis book traces the remarkable journey of Hébert’s shifting authorial identity as versions of her work traveled through complex and contested linguistic and national terrain from the late 1950s until today. At the center of this exploration of Hébert’s work are the people who were inspired by her poetry to translate and more widely disseminate her poems to a wider audience. Exactly how did this one woman’s work travel so much farther than the vast majority of Québécois authors? Though the haunting quality of her art partly explains her wide appeal, her work would have never traveled so far without the effort of scores of passionately committed translators, editors, and archivists. Though the work of such “middle men” is seldom recognized, much less scrutinized as a factor in shaping the meaning and reach of an artist, in Herbert’s case, the process of translating Hébert’s poetry has left in its wake a number of archival and other paratextual resources that chronicle the individual acts of translation and their reception. Though the impact of translation, editions, and archival work has been largely ignored in studies of Canadian literary history, the treasure trove of such paratextual records in Hébert’s case allows us to better understand the reach of her work. More importantly, it provides insight into and raises critical questions about the textually mediated process of nation-building and literary canon formation.
Détresse et nostalgie (Essais et fiction)
by Yolande BastaracheIn Détresse et nostalgie, Yolande Bastarache paints a village, its families, its seasons, its times. From the sixteen short stories of this posthumous collection emerge of swathes of life that take on their full meaning and color, with the passing of time, the cycles of snowstorms and daisies, simple joys and strong emotions, days and decades. Yolande sketches the contours of the author's childhood home, moments of gentleness and distress, moments of daily life against a beckoning horizon.
Home Ground and Foreign Territory: Essays on Early Canadian Literature (Reappraisals: Canadian Writers)
by Janice FiamengoHome Ground and Foreign Territory is an original collection of essays on early Canadian literature in English. Aiming to be both provocative and scholarly, it encompasses a variety of (sometimes opposing) perspectives, subjects, and methods, with the aim of reassessing the field, unearthing neglected texts, and proposing new approaches to canonical authors. Renowned experts in early Canadian literary studies, including D.M.R. Bentley, Mary Jane Edwards, and Carole Gerson, join emerging scholars in a collection distinguished by its clarity of argument and breadth of reference. Together, the essays offer bold and informative contributions to the study of this dynamic literature. Home Ground and Foreign Territory reaches out far beyond the scope of early Canadian literature. Its multi-disciplinary approach innovates literal studies and appeals to literature specialists and general readership alike.