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Valentine Cunningham's controversial manifesto asks what will and should happen to reading in the post-theory era.
In this critical tour de force d, Valentine Cunningham offers a sequence of controversial arguments in favour of the worldly stuff of texts, a commodity that he sees to be still too commonly discredited, down-played and repressed by post-modernist theory and practice. In the course of its critique this books inspects, with startling originality, texts from the Bible to Jane Eyre, Hamlet d to Batman d (the movie), Tristram Shandy d to Finnegan's Wake, d concentrating particularly on classic nineteenth-century realist novels such as Emma, Hard Times, Bleak House, Middlemarch, The Trumpet Major d and Heart of Darkness d, as well as classic twentieth-century novels, including Beckett's Watt d and Golding's Rites of Passage d.
Lear is too much. There’s too much to stomach, an overdoing of massive wickednesses which rightly provoked perhaps the most famous reaction to King Lear ever, Dr Samuel Johnson’s horror in his Prefaces to his Shakespeare (1765) over the blinding of Gloucester –“an act too horrid to be endured in dramatick exhibition” – and the death of Cordelia: “contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of the chronicles”. There are indeed just too many awful enhancements of the Lear stories Shakespeare drew on, a superfluity of terrible things – and of course these, as Valentine Cunningham says, are uneasily central to...
Victorian Poets: A Critical Reader features a collection of critical essays focusing on various aspects of Victorian-era poetry from the 1830s to the 1890s. Presents key criticism on Victorian poetry Features contributions from a variety of scholars in the field Illustrates the full range of critical approaches to the Victorian poets, including attention to texts, words, forms, modes, and sub-genres Offers fresh reinterpretations, many driven by contemporary ideological interests, including gender questions, selfhood, and body issues
This book is the definitive guide to Victorian poetry, which its author approaches in the light of modern critical concerns and contemporary contexts. Valentine Cunningham exhibits encyclopedic knowledge of the poetry produced in this period and offers dazzling close readings of a number of well-known poems Draws on the work of major Victorian poets and their works as well as many of the less well-known poets and poems Reads poems and poets in the light of both Victorian and modern critical concerns Places poetry in its personal, aesthetic, historical, and ideological context Organized in terms of the Victorian anxieties of self, body, and melancholy Argues that rhyming/repetition is the major formal feature of Victorian poetry Highlights the Victorian obsession with small subjects in small poems Shows how Victorian poetry attempts to engage with the modern subject and how its modernity segues into modernism and postmodernism
In the days before there were handbooks, self-help guides, or advice columns for graduate students and junior faculty, there were academic novels teaching us how a proper professor should speak, behave, dress, think, write, love, and (more than occasionally) solve murders. If many of thesebooks are wildly funny, others paint pictures of failure and pain, of lives wasted or destroyed. Like the suburbs, Elaine Showalter notes, the campus can be the site of pastoral and refuge. But even ivory towers can be structurally unsound, or at least built with glass ceilings. Though we love toread about them, all is not well in the faculty towers, and the situation has been worsening.In Faculty Towers, S...
This volume distils into two hundred pages some of the most influential poetry of the Victorian period. Distils into one volume the key poems of the Victorian era. Organised chronologically, allowing readers to perceive continuities and changes through the century. Includes a general introduction, giving readers an overview of the poets and the period. Represents texts in their entirety where possible.
This magnificent anthology presents the cornucopia of Victorian poetry within a single volume.
Incorrigibly Plural celebrates the diversity and vitality of Louis MacNeice's writing. Poets and critics illuminate the work of a writer whose achievement and influence is increasingly recognised as central to modern poetry in English. Contributions include responses to MacNeice by poets such as Paul Farley, Leontia Flynn, Nick Laird, Derek Mahon, Glyn Maxwell and Paul Muldoon; discussions by critics such as Neil Corcoran, Valentine Cunningham, Hugh Haughton, Peter McDonald and Clair Wills; and more biographical accounts, including a memoir by MacNeice's son, the late Dan MacNeice. For each of them, MacNeice remains a continuing presence for his insight into the mechanisms of the modern world, his complex political awareness, his ability to bring the historical moment alive. Above all, what emerges is pleasure in MacNeice's plurality of language and forms. More than a retrospective work of criticism, Incorrigibly Plural belongs to live debates about contemporary poetry.