The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880 to the Present

The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880-1940

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

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Beskrivning

From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination-and how that imagination, in turn, responded.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-03-05
Mått:157 x 235 x 19 mm
Vikt:462 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:240
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781009710213

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Mer om författaren

Christian R. Gelder is a Research Fellow in Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Literature and Medicine, Psychoanalysis and History, The Cambridge Quarterly, Australian Humanities Review and elsewhere. With Robert Boncardo, he is the co-author of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Recensioner i media

'Christian R. Gelder's erudite and limpid study of aspirations toward a science of verse provides an intellectual history and a critique of ideology that should be of great interest to scholars of modernist poetics-but it also gives us much more. By showing how poets not only went beyond but worked through this positivist program, Gelder makes a dialectically compelling case for the specific forms of knowledge only poetry can construct.' Nathan Brown, Centre for Expanded Poetics, Concordia University

Innehållsförteckning

Preface: the normal scientific study of poetry; 1. William Carlos Williams, measurement and the origins of distant reading; 2. Laura Riding's exactitude; 3. The method wars; 4. The birth of close reading: instruments in I. A. Richards and Veronica Forrest-Thomson; Coda: machine learning and the history of style.