Veronica Forrest-Thomson - Poet on the Periphery

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary debates in poetry and poetics. Gareth Farmer explores Forrest-Thomson's relationship to the conflicting models of literary criticism in the twentieth century such as the close-reading models of F.R Leavis and William Empson, postructuralist models, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Written by the leading scholar on Forrest-Thomson's work, this study explores Forrest-Thomson's published work as well as unpublished materials from the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive. Drawing on close readings of Forrest-Thomson's writings, this study argues that her work enables us reevaluate literary-critical history and suggests new paradigms for the literary aesthetics and poetics of the future.

List of contents

1 Introduction - Poet on the Periphery.- 2 The Reluctant Radical: Identi-kit and Uncollected Early Poems.- 3 Cambridge, Verbal Hiccups and Iambics: twelve academic questions and Language-Games.- 4 Poetic Artifice and the Defence of Form.- 5 Simplicity and Complexity in the Quest for Style.- 6 Control and Excess in the Quest for 'Writing Straight'.- 7 Coda - The Risks of 'freedom, truth and skill'.

About the author

Gareth Farmer is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and a poet. He has written essays on a range of modern and contemporary experimental writers and on literary and critical theory. He is the Senior Academic Consultant to the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive at Girton College Library, Cambridge.

Summary

This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary debates in poetry and poetics. Gareth Farmer explores Forrest-Thomson’s relationship to the conflicting models of literary criticism in the twentieth century such as the close-reading models of F.R Leavis and William Empson, postructuralist models, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Written by the leading scholar on Forrest-Thomson’s work, this study explores Forrest-Thomson’s published work as well as unpublished materials from the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive. Drawing on close readings of Forrest-Thomson’s writings, this study argues that her work enables us reevaluate literary-critical history and suggests new paradigms for the literary aesthetics and poetics of the future.

Product details

• Authors: Gareth Farmer
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.01.2018
• EAN: 9783319873787
• ISBN: 978-3-31-987378-7
• No. of pages: 219
• Dimensions: 146 mm x 210 mm x 15 mm
• Weight: 313 g
• Illustrations: XIII, 219 p. 6 illus.
• Series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Europa, Dada, B, Literatur: Geschichte und Kritik, Literaturwissenschaft: 1900 bis 2000, Literature, Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature: history & criticism, Poetry and Poetics, European Literature, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Literature, Modern—21st century, British literature, British and Irish Literature, twentieth-century female poet, Influence of nineteenth-century poetry on modernists, poetic convention, Stéphane Mallarmé’s, female modernist poet