Books in the Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics series

What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates natural beauty and the sublime to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city?An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire¿s evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder¿the city¿s version of a transcendent atmosphere¿as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction.Analyzing this shift, particularly as evidenced in Tableaux parisiens and Le Spleen de Paris, Ross Chambers shows how Baudelaire¿s disenchantment with the politics of his day and the coincident rise of overpopulation, poverty, and Haussmann¿s modernization of Paris influenced the poet¿s work to conceive a poetry of allegory, one with the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader whose senses have long been dulled by the din of his environment.Providing a completely new and original understanding of both Baudelaire¿s ethics and his aesthetics, Chambers reveals how the shift from themes of the supernatural in Baudelaire to ones of alienation allowed a new way for him to articulate and for his fellow Parisians to comprehend the rapidly changing conditions of the city and, in the process, to invent a ¿modern beauty¿ from the realm of suffering and the abject as they embodied forms of urban experience.

The book argues that the Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as category of discourse that inspired voluminous poetic production. By examining Petrarch, Du Bellay, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Hui explains how writers used the ruin to think about their relationship to classical antiquity.

The contributors to this volume re-assess literary practice at the edges of paper, electronic media, and film. They show how the emergence of a new medium reinvigorates the book and the page as literary media, rather than announcing their impending death.

Examines poetic responses to the transition from the late Cold War period to the post-Cold War era of globalization, focusing on the work of Bei Dao and Yang Lian from China, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Dmitrii Prigov from Russia, and Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian from the United States.

The book examines how 19th- and 20th-century French-speaking poets have used cinema for cross-medium writing experiments, especially in the aftermath of the two world wars, thereby altering modernist literary imagination.

This book argues that we should regard walking and talking in a single rhythmic vision. In doing so, it contributes to the theory of prosody, our understanding of respiration and looking, and, in sum, to the particular links, across the board, between the human characteristics of bipedal walking and meaningful talk.

Drawing inspiration from the Russian and Soviet tradition of historical poetics, the contributors to the volume seek to challenge and complement the historicism that stresses proximate socio-political contexts as well as the more recent and salutary concern with understanding literary production and reception on a global scale with the perspective of the longue durée of literary forms and institutions.

A history of the concept of orality (that is, the creation and transmission of literary works without the use of writing), this book shows awareness of this medium emerging from the encounter of many literary and scientific developments (romanticism, post-symbolism, structuralism; physiology, psychology, the study of expression, anthropology; phonography, cinema).

How can one experience the apocalypse in the present? Lyric Apocalypse argues that John Milton's and Andrew Marvell's lyrics depict revelation as an immediately perceptible event. In so doing, their lyrics explore the nature of events, the modern question of what it means for something to happen in the present.

The contributors to this volume re-assess literary practice at the edges of paper, electronic media, and film. They show how the emergence of a new medium reinvigorates the book and the page as literary media, rather than announcing their impending death.

Explores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm's role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre.

Explores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm's role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre.

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Authors include Louis Zukofsky , George Oppen, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Tina Darragh, and Harryette Mullen.