Post-structuralist Readings of English Poetry

by Richard Machin , Christopher Norris

• ISBN13: 9780521315838
• ISBN10: 0521315832
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1987-01-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

There has been a plethora of monographs and textbooks dealing with the many aspects of deconstruction and post-structuralist theory in recent years. What is needed now is a book which demonstrates in very concrete terms the possible application of post-structuralist theory to literary texts. This volume answers that need. A group of distinguished practitioners in the field have been invited to offer close readings of well-known poems from the established canon of English poetry. The texts chosen range from Renaissance sonneteers through Shakespeare, the Metaphysicals, the Augustan and Romantic periods, to Eliot and developments in the wake of modernism. An extensive reference and bibliographical section will provide useful points, of entry for those who wish to pursue critical issues which the book will inevitably raise. The book is unique in bringing together theory and practical application across such a range of texts from a single, canonical tradition.

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors

Introduction

Presentation and representation in the Renaissance lyric: the net of words and the escape of the gods

Speculations: Macbeth and source

Trust and transgression: the discursive practices of Much Ado about Nothing

Donne's praise of folly

Love and death in 'To His Coy Mistress'

Towards the autonomous subject in poetry: Milton's 'On His Blindness'

Pope among the formalists: textual politics and 'The Rape of the Lock'

Gray's 'Elegy': inscribing the twilight

From topos to trope, from sensibility to Romanticism: Collins's 'Ode To Fear'

Sex and history in The Prelude (1805): Books IX to XIII

Bounding lines: The Prelude and critical revision

Coleridge and the deluded reader: 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

Evening star and evening land

Ozone: an essay on Keats

Strategies of containment: Tennyson's In Memoriam

Topography and tropography in Thomas Hardy's 'In Front of the Landscape'

Yeats in theory

The spider and the weevil: self and writing in Eliot's early poetry

Frost's thanatography

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