Strange Power Of Speech

This book explores the relationship between tropes of literary property and signification in the writings and literary politics of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Eilenberg argues that a complex of ideas about property, propriety, and possession sets the terms for the two writers' mutually revisionary efforts and informs the images of literary authority, textual identity, and poetic figuration evident in their major works. Eilenberg's readings of the collaboration and its principle texts bring to bear a combination of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and both new and literary historical methods. The book provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between two of the major figures of English Romanticism as well as fresh insight into what is at stake in the analogy between the verbal and the material or the literary and the economic.

Paul Youngquist reveals the cultural politics of embodiment in Britain in the late 18th & early 19th centuries. Drawing on the histories of medicine, economics, liberalism & nationalism, his work shows that bodies are not simply born, but rather built bycultural practices directed toward particular social ends.

No detailed description available for "The Incredulous Reader".

Allusion to the words and phrases of ancestral voices is one of the hiding-places of poetry's power. Poets appreciate the great debts that they owe to previous poets, and are often duly and newly grateful. Allusion to the Poets consists of twelve essays - four published here for the first time - on allusion and its relations, in particular on the use that poets in English have made of the very words of poets in English. The first half of the book, on 'The Poet as Heir', consists of six chapters devoted to individual poets, Augustan, Romantic, and Victorian: Dryden and Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson. Allusion is always a form of inheritance, not to be hoarded or squandered. The critical and creative question is its imaginative co-operation with other kinds of legacy - with whatever for a particular poet or for a particular time is judged to be an unignorable inheritance: of a throne, perhaps, or of land; of intermixed languages; of the human senses; of money; of literature itself; or of our planet, long-lived but not eternal. The second half of the book is six essays on allusion's affiliations: to plagiarism (allusion being plagiarism's responsible opposite); to metaphor (allusion being a form that metaphor may take); to loneliness in poetry (allusion constituting company); to allusion within poetry to prose (on A E. Housman); to translation as exercising allusion (on David Ferry); and to the clash between one poet's practice and his critical principles (on Yvor Winters).