Real Toads In Imaginary Gardens

Maureen Whitebrook argues that literature, through both its form and its content, can expose and criticize liberal theory and point beyond it to a new political theory. She describes how 'literary political criticism' might be done, and demonstrates such criticism in four essays that expose the connections between specific political and literary texts. Fiction, Whitebrook concludes, does a better job than liberal political theory of examining the relationship between the individual and the State.

Gregory reads the efflorescence of poetic quotation as part of an attempt to redefine the sources of authority in the modernist world, in which traditional hierarchies of all kinds seemed to be disintegrating. For Americans and for women this breakdown offered an opportunity, since they had long occupied a secondary position in the reigning cultural and gender orders. But it was an opportunity with a cost, and not all poets welcomed it.

This collection of work is an analysis and investigation into Maxine Greene, the most important philosopher of education in the United States today. The book opens and concludes with Greene's own autobiographical statements.

Suggestions and starting points for young creative writers.

In What Are the Animals to Us? scholars from a wide variety of academic disciplines explore the diverse meanings of animals in science, religion, folklore, literature, and art.

An illuminating exploration of how to read and understand poetry, and how reading critically can teach us to write. What makes reading a poem unlike reading anything else? While there are as many ways to read a poem as there are types of poetry, every poem demands a conscious attention to language. Reading poems forensically helps us bring that attention to our own writing. In Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens, acclaimed poet and teacher Paisley Rekdal demonstrates how to observe the building blocks of a poem—including its diction, form, imagery, and rhythm—and construct an interpretation of its meaning. Through close analyses of contemporary and classic poems as well as creative exercises and specific, skill-based questions, this book shows how a poem takes shape and accrues meaning through the intersection of all its lyric elements. Lucid and generous, Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens reveals how to read and write critically, and how to appreciate—and achieve—the exhilarating craft of poetry.

In this volume Elizabeth Gregory addresses a number of key issues surrounding the formation of the American poetic canon. Taking as her primary examples T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, William Carlos Williams' Paterson, and selected poems by Marianne Moore, she examines the ways in which modern American writers struggled with questions of literary authority and cultural identity in relation to pre-existing European models. Gregory focuses on these issues through analysis of the use of quotation in modern and postmodern literature, a practice that was strikingly divergent from the accepted use of literary allusion. Her introduction traces a history of quotation as it has been practiced in literature from classical to modern times. She then focuses on the texts of Eliot, Williams, and Moore--three central figures of American modernism whose work the author believes represents a spectrum of responses to the established European model of poetical discourse. Gregory's selection of Moore also allows her to deal with feminist concerns as they emerge in the more general modernist dialogue. How was a female writer to make use of a literary canon that traditionally excluded female participation? "The implications of Gregory's argument . . . will surely be of especial interest to feminist scholars of American poetry."--Lois Parkinson Zamora, University of Houston.

Argues that even though gender is not the central theme in the work of American writer Moore (1887-1972), a consideration of how gender structures her poetry allows a better appreciation of its aesthetic achievement. Draws from her entire poetic career and from unpublished letters, notebooks, and prose. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR