Epic Negation

"Epic Negation examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review's totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war's onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.'s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud's Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such"--

This book demonstrates the epic genre’s enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic, the ‘postcolonial epic’, ushered in by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a foundational text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott’s Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh’s South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy. The work focuses on the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of ‘political epic’, where an avowed national politics promoting a culture’s ‘pure’ origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from ‘other’ cultures. An important intervention in literary studies, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, especially South Asian and Caribbean literature, Global South studies, transnational studies and cultural studies.

Explores how modernist national narrative successively reimagined the evolutionary epic from the 1910s to the 1930s.

In Homeric Megathemes D.N. Maronitis puts forward war, homilia, and homecoming as three themes central to Homer's two epic poems, the Illiad and the Odyssey. Branching out from each of these themes are certain semiotic and structural characteristics that determine, specific to each of the poems, myth and plot, narrative syntax, and more generally, their poetic and humanistic character. The aim of Maronitis' study is to determine and document similarities and differences in the two Homeric epics through these themes and to identify examples of them in ancient lyric poetry and Attic tragedy. Maronitis' theoretical framework gives classics scholars and literary theorists interested in poetry, history, and tragedy a social and cultural research model for thinking about the genesis and maturity of great lyric works. His comparative approach, revealing the creative debt of the Odyssey to the Iliadic model, lays bare the progression of an art form through the development of literary technique, the shifts in classical ideologies (including anthropoligical ideas about "man"), and in politics. Anyone interested in the thought of the Archaic period should read this book.

"Epic Negation examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review's totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war's onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.'s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud's Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such"--.

The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.

Andrew Bennett's original study of Keats focuses on questions of narrative and audience as a means to offer new readings of the major poems. It discusses ways in which reading is 'figured' in Keats's poetry, and suggests that such 'figures of reading' have themselves determined certain modes of response to Keats's texts. Together with important new readings of Keats's poetry, the study presents a significant rethinking of the relationship between Romantic poetry and its audience. Developing recent discussions in literary theory concerning narrative, readers and reading, the nature of the audience for poetry, and the Romantic 'invention' of posterity, Bennett elaborates a sophisticated and historically specific reconceptualization of Romantic writing.

This book explores the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and the ways in which experimental poets formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology, which proposes using negative statements as a means of attesting to the superior, unrepresentable being of God. With individual chapters on works by such poets as Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Charles Bernstein, and Alice Notley, this book illustrates how a strategy of negation similarly proves optimal for depicting the subject of utopia in literary works. Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations contends that negative statements in experimental poetry illustrate the potential for utopian social change, not by portraying an ideal world itself but by revealing the very challenge of representing utopia directly.