Post Structuralist Readings Of English Poetry

A selection of close-readings of canonical English poems with a focus on ideas and debates in critical theory and literary history.

Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essays that relate history to the philosophical and institutional context, and a number of studies of particular texts, literary and non-literary, which pose the question of history and literary theory with particular force.

English Lyric Poetry is a comprehensive reassessment of lyric poetry of the early seventeenth century. The study is directed at both beginning and more advanced students of literature, and responds to more specialised scholarly inquiries pursued of late in relation to specific poets. This extremely lucid and elegantly written book avoids the limitations of much recent criticism. Donne, Jonson, the Spenserians, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Vaughan, as well as many non-canonical and women poets, all receive sustained, fresh, and detailed analysis. Jonathan Post seeks to assimilate many of the post-New Critical theoretical concerns with readings of the major and minor, male and female, authors of the period.

Reading lyric poetry over the past century. The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric. Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

In this book the author examines the relation between historical materialism and psychoanalysis for the understanding of literature. He analyzes central poems in the canonical tradition, poems of courtly love, Romantic poetry, and the modernism and post-modernism of Eliot and Pound.

Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.

This collection focuses on British poetry from the Georgians to the Second World War. The introduction provides the framework for the articles which follow by considering the question of the relation between poetry and society as it appears in the work of F.R. Leavis, T.W. Adorno and Antony Easthope. Written by experts, the essays cover poetic movements and individual authors, both mainstream and neglected, and address the difficult problem of making value judgements while situating poetry in its historical context.

Alone among artists, poets are at once blessed and burdened by the inherent semantic component and the tarnishing social employment of their linguistic medium. In an effort to define the mysterious and attractive power of poetic discourse, Emerson Marks undertakes a comparison of successive attempts to explain the phenomenon. TAMING THE CHAOS is an ambitious study of poetic language.