My Silver Planet

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

Death is no longer a mystery. The magic of eternity has been found. I often hear people wondering if life carries on after death. It always makes me smile. That’s exactly what happens. And I used to think no one would discover the truth while they were alive. I was wrong. A sixteen-year-old boy just did. His name is Jonathan Powers and this is his story. Jonathan’s from a planet called Centurian, but that’s not where his story begins. It begins on Earth with the tragic death of a boy from London, Jonathan Prior. Jonathan Prior’s soul travelled from Earth to Centurian and became part of Jonathan Powers. That much is as it should be. Humans join the consciousness of other humans on a distant planet when they die. It’s what happened next that I don’t understand. Jonathan Powers entered the world of the dead, alive. I’m still searching for answers to how he did it and I’m supposed to know about these things. My name is Rose. I’m a little robin. You might have met me outside your house or in a local park. Don’t worry if you haven’t, you’ll meet me inside this book. I’m helping Jonathan find a way home. It’s one thing to go where only the dead have been, quite another to find a way back.

In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), the American poet John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much of modern art: 'How could he explain to them his prayer / that nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?' When Ashbery asks this strange question, he joins a host of transatlantic avant-gardists—from the Dadaists to the 1960s neo-avant-gardists and beyond—who have dreamed of turning art into nature, of creating art that would be 'valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape—not its picture—is aesthetically valid' (Clement Greenberg, 1939). Invisible Terrain reads Ashbery as a bold intermediary between avant-garde anti-mimeticism and the long western nature poetic tradition. In chronicling Ashbery's articulation of 'a completely new kind of realism' and his engagement with figures ranging from Wordsworth to Warhol, the book presents a broader case study of nature's dramatic transformation into a resolutely unnatural aesthetic resource in 20th-century art and literature. The story begins in the late 1940s with the Abstract Expressionist valorization of process, surface, and immediacy—summed up by Jackson Pollock's famous quip, 'I am Nature'—that so influenced the early New York School poets. It ends with 'Breezeway,' a poem about Hurricane Sandy. Along the way, the project documents Ashbery's strategies for literalizing the 'stream of consciousness' metaphor, his negotiation of pastoral and politics during the Vietnam War, and his investment in 'bad' nature poetry.

The femme fatale appears with unceasing regularity in the texts of major poets of the nineteenth century. She symbolises an intractable mystery, a refusal to be defined and a fierce attempt to exist outside the established gender system. Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century interrogates the construction and use of the fatal woman motif in the poetry of canonical male writers of the times, both Romantic and Victorian. Subsequent chapters investigate a variety of poems by John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Algernon Swinburne in which the femme fatale surfaces as the most important character. Close-readings of poetry are enriched by an examination of the same motif in visual art, set against the vivid cultural background of the Victorian era.

The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.

Death is no longer a mystery. The magic of eternity has been found. I often hear people wondering if life carries on after death. It always makes me smile. That's exactly what happens. And I used to think no one would discover the truth while they were alive. I was wrong. A sixteen-year-old boy just did. His name is Jonathan Powers and this is his story. Jonathan's from a planet called Centurian, but that's not where his story begins. It begins on Earth with the tragic death of a boy from London, Jonathan Prior. Jonathan Prior's soul travelled from Earth to Centurian and became part of Jonathan Powers. That much is as it should be. Humans join the consciousness of other humans on a distant planet when they die. It's what happened next that I don't understand. Jonathan Powers entered the world of the dead, alive. I'm still searching for answers to how he did it and I'm supposed to know about these things. My name is Rose. I'm a little robin. You might have met me outside your house or in a local park. Don't worry if you haven't, you'll meet me inside this book. I'm helping Jonathan find a way home. It's one thing to go where only the dead have been, quite another to find a way back.