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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Poetry & poets > General
"Poetry has leapt out of its world and into the world" Poetry is
everywhere. From Amanda Gorman performing "The Hill We Climb"
before the nation at Joe Biden's Presidential inauguration, to
poems regularly going viral on Instagram and Twitter, more
Americans are reading and interacting with poetry than ever before.
Avidly Reads Poetry is an ode to poetry and the worlds that come
into play around the different ways it is written and shared.
Mixing literary and cultural criticism with the author's personal
and often intimate relationship with poetry, Avidly Reads Poetry
breathes life into poems of every genre-from alphabet poems and
Shakespeare's sonnets to Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Rupi Kaur's
Instapoetry-and asks: How do poems come to us? How do they make us
feel and think and act when they do? Who and what is poetry for?
Who does poetry include and exclude, and what can we learn from it?
Each section links a reason why we might read poetry with a type of
poem to help us think about how poems are embedded in our lives, in
our loves, our educations, our politics, and our social media,
sometimes in spite of, and sometimes very much because of, the
nation we live in. Part of the Avidly Reads series, this slim book
gives us a new way of looking at American culture. With the
singular blend of personal reflection and cultural criticism
featured in the series, Avidly Reads Poetry shatters the wall
between poetry and "the rest of us."
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Divine Love
(Hardcover)
Jeanne De La Mothe Guyon; Edited by Nancy Carol James; Foreword by William Bradley Roberts
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R952
R811
Discovery Miles 8 110
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Is poetry still relevant today, or is it merely a dwindling
historical art? How have poets of the recent past dealt with
challenges to poetics? Seeking to chart the poetic act in a period
not so much hostile as indifferent to poetry, Language at the
Boundaries outlines spaces where poetry and poetics emerge in
migration, translation, world literature, canon formation, and the
history of science and technology. One can only come so close to
fully possessing or explaining everything about the poetic act, and
this book grapples with these limits by perusing, analyzing,
deconstructing, and reconstructing creativity, implementing
different approaches in doing so. Peter Carravetta consolidates
historical epistemological positions that have accrued over the
last several decades, some spurred by the modernism/postmodernism
debate, and unpacks their differences--juxtaposing Vico with
Heidegger and applying the approaches of translation studies,
decolonization, indigeneity, committed literature, and critical
race theory, among others. What emerges is a defense and theory of
poetics in the contemporary world, engaging the topic in a
dialectic mode and seeking grounds of agreement.
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Heretic Blood
(Hardcover)
Michael W. Higgins
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R1,492
R1,235
Discovery Miles 12 350
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The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local
Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local
speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the
second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key
observation about four major poets from both sides of the Atlantic:
Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton
all respond to societal crises by arranging, reproducing, and
reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic
form. The book's overarching claim is that "local tongues" in
poetry have the capacity to bridge aesthetic and sociopolitical
realms because nonstandard local speech declares its distinction
from the status quo and binds people who have been subordinated by
hierarchical social conditions, while harnessing those versions of
speech into poetic structures can actively counter the very
hierarchies that would degrade those languages. The diverse local
tongues of these four poets marshaled into the forms of poetry
situate them at once in literary tradition, in local contexts, and
in prevailing social constructs.
New perspectives on Anglo-Jewish history via the poetry and song of
Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London from 1884 to 1914. Archive
material from the London Yiddish press, songbooks, and satirical
writing offers a window into an untold cultural life of the Yiddish
East End. Whitechapel Noise: Jewish Immigrant Life in Yiddish Song
and Verse, London 1884-1914 by Vivi Lachs positions London's
Yiddish popular culture in historical perspective within
Anglo-Jewish history, English socialist aesthetics, and music-hall
culture, and shows its relationship to the transnational
Yiddish-speaking world. Layers of cultural references in the
Yiddish texts are closely analysed and quoted to draw out the
complex yet intimate histories they contain, offering new
perspectives on Anglo-Jewish historiography in three main areas:
politics, sex, and religion. The acculturation of Jewish immigrants
to English life is an important part of the development of their
social culture, as well as to the history of London. In the first
part of the book, Lachs presents an overview of daily immigrant
life in London, its relationship to the Anglo-Jewish establishment,
and the development of a popular Yiddish theatre and press,
establishing a context from which these popular texts came. The
author then analyzes the poems and songs, revealing the hidden
social histories of the people writing and performing them. Lachs
also explores how themes of marriage, relationships, and sexual
exploitation appear regularly in music-hall songs, alluding to the
changing nature of sexual roles in the immigrant London community
influenced by the cultural mores of their new location. In the
theme of religion, Lachs examines how ideas from Jewish texts and
practice were used and manipulated by the socialist poets to
advance ideas about class, equality, and revolution; and satirical
writings offer glimpses into how the practice of religion and
growing secularization was changing immigrants' daily lives in the
encounter with modernity. The detailed and nuanced analysis found
in Whitechapel Noise offers a new reading of Anglo-Jewish, London,
and immigrant history. It is a must-read for Jewish and
Anglo-Jewish historians and those interested in Yiddish, London,
and migration studies.
Humor in recent American poetry has been largely dismissed or
ignored by scholars, due in part to a staid reverence for the
lyric. Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late
Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that humor is not a
superficial feature of a small subset, but instead an integral
feature in a great deal of American poetry written since the 1950s.
Rather than viewing poetry as a lofty, serious genre, Carrie
Conners asks readers to consider poetry alongside another art form
that has burgeoned in America since the 1950s: stand-up comedy.
Both art forms use wit and laughter to rethink the world and the
words used to describe it. Humor's disruptive nature makes it
especially whetted for critique. Many comedians and humorous poets
prove to be astute cultural critics. To that end, Laugh Lines
focuses on poetry that wields humor to espouse sociopolitical
critique. To show the range of recent American poetry that uses
humor to articulate sociopolitical critique, Conners highlights the
work of poets working in four distinct poetic genres: traditional,
received forms, such as the sonnet; the epic; procedural poetry;
and prose poetry. Marilyn Hacker, Harryette Mullen, Ed Dorn, and
Russell Edson provide the main focus of the chapters, but each
chapter compares those poets to others writing humorous political
verse in the same genre, including Terrance Hayes and Anne Carson.
This comparison highlights the pervasiveness of this trend in
recent American poetry and reveals the particular ways the poets
use conventions of genre to generate and even amplify their humor.
Conners argues that the interplay between humor and genre creates
special opportunities for political critique, as poetic forms and
styles can invoke the very social constructs that the poets deride.
Focusing on the influence of the Oxford Movement on key British
poets of the nineteenth-century, this book charts their ruminations
on the nature of hunger, poverty and economic injustice. Exploring
the works of Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley
Hopkins, Adelaide Anne Procter, Alice Meynell and Alfred, Lord
Tennyson, Lesa Scholl examines the extent to which these poets -
not all of whom were Anglo-Catholics themselves - engaged with the
Tractarian social vision when grappling with issues of poverty and
economic injustice in and beyond their poetic works. By engaging
with economic and cultural history, as well as the sensorial
materiality of poetry, Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement
challenges the assumption that High-Church politics were
essentially conservative and removed from the social crises of the
Victorian period.
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Go On
(Paperback)
Ethel Rackin
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R411
Discovery Miles 4 110
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The poetry of Horace was central to Victorian male elite education
and the ancient poet himself, suitably refashioned, became a model
for the English gentleman. Horace and the Victorians examines the
English reception of Horace in Victorian culture, a period which
saw the foundations of the discipline of modern classical
scholarship in England and of many associated and lasting social
values. It shows that the scholarly study, translation and literary
imitation of Horace in this period were crucial elements in
reinforcing the social prestige of Classics as a discipline and its
function as an indicator of 'gentlemanly' status through its
domination of the elite educational system and its prominence in
literary production. The book ends with an epilogue suggesting that
the framework of study and reception of a classical author such as
Horace, so firmly established in the Victorian era, has been
modernised and 'democratised' in recent years, matching the
movement of Classics from a discipline which reinforces traditional
and conservative social values to one which can be seen as both
marginal and liberal.
This book offers new insights into the twelfth-century Persian poet
Nezami Ganjavi. Challenging the dominant interpretation of Nezami's
poetry as the product of mysticism or Islam, this book explores
Nezami's literary techniques such as his pictorial allegory and his
profound conceptualization of poetry, rhetoric, and eloquence. It
employs several theoretical and methodological approaches to
clarify the nature of his artistic approach to poetry. Chapters
explore Nezami's understanding of rhetoric and literature as
Sakhon, his interest in literary genres, the diversity of themes
explored in his Five Treasures, the sources of Nezami's creativity,
and his literary devices. Exploring themes such as love, religion,
science, wine, gender, and philosophy, this study compares Nezami's
works to other giants of Persian poetry such as Ferdowsi, Jami,
Rudaki, and others. The book argues that Nezami's main concern was
to weave poetry rather than to promote any specific ideology.
This book is a new history of early modern gender, told through the
lyric poetry of Renaissance Italy. In the evolution of Western
gender roles, the Italian Renaissance was a watershed moment, when
a confluence of cultural developments disrupted centuries of
Aristotelian, binary thinking. Men and women living through this
upheaval exploited Petrarchism's capacity for subjective expression
and experimentation - as well as its status as the most accessible
of genres - in order to imagine new gendered possibilities in
realms such as marriage, war, and religion. One of the first
studies to examine writing by early modern Italian men and women
together, it is also a revolutionary testament to poetry's work in
the world. These poets' works challenge the traditional boundaries
drawn around lyric's utility. They show us how poems could be sites
of resistance against the pervading social order - how they are
texts capable not only of recording social history, but also of
shaping it.
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