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How does modern poetry from Donne to Ashbery provide occasions for rethinking the scope and limits of the literary canon? This question is not simply concerned with literature in English but addresses the problem of how texts transform the reader s experience of literature in the wake of modernity. This study shows how an experience of absence is the starting point for a reversal that occurs whenever reading transforms an engagement with the world. The eight chapters that comprise this study offer revisionary readings of key poetic works and a new way of understanding the modern canon.
List of contents
Chapter 01: Introduction: Literature s Double Burden.- Chapter 02: Donne and Modern Criticism: An Archaeological Quest.- Chapter 03: Coleridge and Hermeneutics: Paradoxical Redemption.- Chapter 04: Shelley s Self-Doubt: Beyond the Dark Tower.- Chapter 05: Browning and Lost Work: After Historicism.- Chapter 06: Yeatsian Performances: Poetry, Nature, Time.- Chapter 07: Eliot and Cultural Memory: Trauma, Specter, Text.- Chapter 08: H. D. and Psychoanalysis: A Heterodox Sensibility.- Chapter 09: Ashbery and Proust: Revisiting the Postmodern.- Chapter 10: Conclusion: Poetic Reversal in Context.
About the author
William D. Melaney is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo, Egypt. His current teaching fields include Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century European Literature, the history of literary criticism, hermeneutics, and recent work in criticism. William has published three books on modernism as a literary and philosophical concept: After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics (2001); Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse (2012); and Alterity and Criticism: Tracing Time in Modern Literature (2017), as well as the book Figural Space: Semiotics and the Aesthetic Imaginary (2021), which explores a new approach to literature in adopting Julia Kristeva’s semiotics as the starting point for reinterpreting Freud and Hegel.
Summary
How does modern poetry from Donne to Ashbery provide occasions for rethinking the scope and limits of the literary canon? This question is not simply concerned with literature in English but addresses the problem of how texts transform the reader’s experience of literature in the wake of modernity. This study shows how an experience of absence is the starting point for a reversal that occurs whenever reading transforms an engagement with the world. The eight chapters that comprise this study offer revisionary readings of key poetic works and a new way of understanding the modern canon.
