Poetry and the Built Environment - A Theory of the Flesh of Art

This book is about how poems, as well as other kinds of art, show us how to experience them. It offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment, insistently demonstrating art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence.

List of contents

• List of Figures


• List of Principle Objects


• Acknowledgements


• Introduction: Art is the Habituation of Bodily Experience


• Part I: Station


• 1: Aspects of Virtual Space


• 2: and Orientation


• Part II: Motion


• 3: Potential Energy of the Artifact


• 4: Contagion of Attitude: Standing, Lying, Turning


• Part III: Virtual Pleasure and Pain


• 5: Roaming in the Gap Between Sensation and Meaning


• 6: Reformation of the Senses


• Part IV: Ductility and Genre: The Case of Elegy


• 7: and Emotion: Shattered Grief


• 8: and Emotion: Enriching Grief


• Part V: Virtual Injuries and Rewards


• 9: in the Historical Space of Injury


• 10: The Body in the Station


• Afterword: A Theory of the Flesh of Art in Manifesto Form


• Bibliography


• Index

About the author

Elizabeth Fowler is a literary scholar and former architect. Her writing concerns language in the context of other cultural practices, and she is working on a study of prayer. She is the author of Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Cornell), co-editor with Roland Greene of The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge), and one of five general editors of the forthcoming Oxford Collected Works of Edmund Spenser. She held a post-doc at Harvard, taught at Yale, and now teaches at the University of Virginia and lives on the Blue Ridge.

Summary

This book is about how poems, as well as other kinds of art, show us how to experience them. It offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment, insistently demonstrating art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence.

Product details

• Authors: Elizabeth Fowler, Elizabeth (Associate Professor of English Fowler, Fowler Elizabeth
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 23.05.2024
• EAN: 9780192888990
• ISBN: 978-0-19-288899-0
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, LITERARY CRITICISM / Ancient & Classical, ART / History / General, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, History of art / art & design styles, History of Art, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Social and cultural history, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Literary studies: poetry and poets