Albert Gelpi – författare

C. Day-Lewis was a major figure in British poetry and culture from the 1930s until his death in 1972. The Golden Bridle: Selected Prose takes its title from the myth of Bellerophon and the golden bridle of Pegasus, which Day-Lewis invoked on several occasions as a metaphor for the creative process. Day-Lewis as poet is, then, the organizing idea of this anthology, and the selections indicate the scope and range of his vital engagement with English life andletters.Organised into four parts, the volume illustrates Day-Lewis''s reflections on the role and function of poetry in society and culture; the creative process and the workings of the imagination as well as the nature of poetic truth and its relation to science; poets who were of particular importance to Day-Lewis; and the poetic process in relation to the composition of several of his own poems. The notes indicate the particular source, circumstances, and central issues of each piece, to provide abrief intellectual biography and critical account of this eminent poet''s development and standing.

C. Day-Lewis was a major figure in British poetry and culture from the 1930s until his death in 1972. The Golden Bridle: Selected Prose takes its title from the myth of Bellerophon and the golden bridle of Pegasus, which Day-Lewis invoked on several occasions as a metaphor for the creative process. Day-Lewis as poet is, then, the organizing idea of this anthology, and the selections indicate the scope and range of his vital engagement with English life andletters.Organised into four parts, the volume illustrates Day-Lewis''s reflections on the role and function of poetry in society and culture; the creative process and the workings of the imagination as well as the nature of poetic truth and its relation to science; poets who were of particular importance to Day-Lewis; and the poetic process in relation to the composition of several of his own poems. The notes indicate the particular source, circumstances, and central issues of each piece, to provide abrief intellectual biography and critical account of this eminent poet''s development and standing.

In this book, Albert Gelpi, a distinguished scholar of poetry, offers the first critical study of C. Day Lewis's oeuvre. Gelpi argues that, striking as the work of the 1930s remains, much of C. Day Lewis's best work came during and after the war in the 1940s and in his last years. This book is an eloquent introduction to C. Day Lewis's work and a compelling argument for his status as one of the important British poets of this century.

The Oxford poets of the 1930s--W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice--represented the first concerted British challenge to the domination of twentieth-century poetry by the innovations of American modernists such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Known for their radical politics and aesthetic conservatism, the "Auden Generation" has come to loom large in our map of twentieth century literary history. Yet Auden''s voluble domination of the group in its brief period of association, and Auden''s sway with critics ever since, has made it difficult to hear the others on their own terms and in their own distinct voices. Here, rendered in eloquent prose by one of our most distinguished critics of modern poetry, is the first full-length study of the poetry of C. Day Lewis, a book that introduces the reader to a profoundly revealing and beautifully wrought record of his poetry against the cultural and literary ferment of this century. Albert Gelpi explores in three expansive sections the major periods of the poet''s development, beginning with the emergence of Day Lewis in the thirties as the most radical of the Oxford poets. An artist who sought through poetry a way of "living in time" without traditional religious assurances, Day Lewis went further than his friends in seeking to forge a revolutionary poetry out of his commitment to Marxism. When Stalinism led to his resignation from the Communist Party, Day Lewis in the forties went on to shape a rich, fiercely perceptive poetry out of the convergence of the wartime crisis with the explosive events of his own inner life, intensified by the erotics of a decade-long affair. Returning to his Irish roots and meditating on the persistent tension between agnosticism and faith in the work of his third and final period, Day Lewis wrote some of the most moving poems in the language about mortality and dying, the limits and possibilities of human striving. Through the traumatic changes of his life C. Day Lewis came increasingly to depend on the intricacies of poetry itself as a way of living in time. His abiding belief in the psychological and moral functions of poetry impelled him in his critical writings and in his own poetic practice to delineate a modern poetics that presents an effective alternative to the elitist experimentation associated with Modernism. This vital revisionist reading of Day Lewis demonstrates that much of his best work was written after the thirties and establishes him as one of the most significant and accomplished British poets of the modern period.

C. Day-Lewis was a major figure in British poetry and culture from the 1930s until his death in 1972. The Golden Bridle: Selected Prose takes its title from the myth of Bellerophon and the golden bridle of Pegasus, which Day-Lewis invoked on several occasions as a metaphor for the creative process. Day-Lewis as poet is, then, the organizing idea of this anthology, and the selections indicate the scope and range of his vital engagement with English life and letters. Organised into four parts, the volume illustrates Day-Lewis's reflections on the role and function of poetry in society and culture; the creative process and the workings of the imagination as well as the nature of poetic truth and its relation to science; poets who were of particular importance to Day-Lewis; and the poetic process in relation to the composition of several of his own poems. The notes indicate the particular source, circumstances, and central issues of each piece, to provide a brief intellectual biography and critical account of this eminent poet's development and standing.

In both poetry and prose, the editors have chosen selections intended to give readers a clear sense of Adrienne Rich’s evolution and accomplishment. Accompanying this is the latest selection of study on her life and work.

Author of more than thirty books, Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation, bringing discussions of gender, race and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. Selected Poems offers a full and representative selection of poems from the whole of Rich’s long and distinguished career. The volume encompasses her best-known work—the clear-sighted and passionate feminist poems of the 1970s, including “Diving into the Wreck”, “Planetarium”, and “The Phenomenology of Anger”—and offers the full range of her evolution as a poet. From poems leading up to her feminist breakthrough through bold later work such as “North American Time” and “Calle Visión”, Selected Poems expresses the vital dialogue between Rich’s personal experiences and political views. As the editors explain in their introduction, Selected Poems presents the complete picture of Rich’s powerful and deeply moving poetry, as well as the evolution in poetic forms that trace her radical vision.

Illuminating reflections on the achievements of poet Denise Levertov

In this broad ranging and powerful study, Gregg Crane examines the interaction between civic identity, race and justice in American law and literature. Crane recounts the efforts of literary and legal figures to bring the nation's law into line with the moral consensus that slavery and racial oppression were evil. By documenting an actual historical interaction central both to American literature and American constitutional law, Crane reveals the influence of literature on the constitutional discourse of citizenship. Covering such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass, and a whole range of novelists, poets, philosophers, politicians, lawyers and judges, this is a remarkable book, that will revise the relationship between race and nationalism in American literature.

In Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature Cindy Weinstein radically revises our understanding of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in the United States. She argues that these novels are far more complex than critics have suggested. Rather than confirming the power of the bourgeois family, Weinstein argues, sentimental fiction used the destruction of the biological family as an opportunity to reconfigure the family in terms of love rather than consanguinity. Their texts intervened in debates about slavery, domestic reform and other social issues of the time. Weinstein shows how canonical texts, such as Melville's Pierre and works by Stowe and Twain, can take on new meaning when read in the context of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. Through intensive close readings of a wide range of novels, this groundbreaking study demonstrates the aesthetic and political complexities in this important and influential genre.

Penelope's Web should appeal to a wide spectrum of readers interested in twentieth-century modernism, women's writing, feminist criticism, post-structuralist theory, psychoanalysis, autobiography, and women's studies. Published in 1991, it was the first book to examine fully the brilliantly innovative prose writings of H. D., the pen-name for Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), who has been known primarily as a poet. Her prose, more personal, experimental, and postmodern than her poetry, raises central questions about the relation of women writers to language, desire and history. She suppressed in her lifetime many of these texts because of their daring exploration of her bisexuality and their radical critique of the social order. H. D.'s prose writings contribute importantly to the many histories and theories of modernism that are redrawing boundaries to include the achievement of women writers.

The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism overturns many of our long-held assumptions about the social and artistic values of Protestantism. Dr Ann Kibbey offers a detailed analysis of the rhetoric of the Puritan plain style, centring her argument on the influential preacher John Cotton and discloses a general theory of figuration in the Protestant tradition that has been overlooked by literary critics, historians and sociologists alike. The author explores the immense variety of ways in which early Protestants in Europe and America granted significance to material shapes. Kibbery finds that in their perception of icons, their use of acoustic design in rhetoric and their interpretations of human beings as physical objects, early Protestants - and especially Puritans - worshipped the figurations of material life as privileged sources of meaning. In this book, Ann Kibbey draws conclusions far wider than her nominal subject, proposing that still-prevalent attitudes toward gender, culture and race were central to the fundamental beliefs of American Puritans.

Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry is an inquiry into the cultural roles lyric poetry does and can play in our age. Charles Altieri first establishes a dominant mode in 'serious' American poetry by identifying current assumptions inherent in the teaching of creative writing and the awarding of prizes and contracts. The dominant mode is seen not as a prescribed style but as a set of styles that share assumptions and that tend to seek the same narrow audience. Altieri views this mode as essentially scenic, presenting in brief dramatic settings subdued, carefully wrought emotions that build to a climactic tactile image. In examining why the style appeals, the author suggests that we find in the dominant mode models of the self, of the power of language, and of the nature of emotions that are very close to the prudential narcissism of the professional classes. Two theses follow: that contemporary poetry can be approached as a paradigm for analysing literature in cultural terms (since we know the culture well on independent grounds); and that the cultural analogies help demonstrate the pressures on younger poets to explore styles that break from or attempt to overthrow the dominant mode.

This book considers the portrayal of the American national character in the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. It examines Hawthorne's abiding concern with the development of New England from colony to province to republic, and analyses Melville's changing evocation of 'the new American', and the difficulties he faced in sustaining his heady nationalistic faith.

In the mid-seventeenth century, persons on both sides of the Atlantic wishing to join a Puritan church had to appear before all of its members and tell the story of their religious conversion - in effect, to give convincing verbal evidence that their souls were saved. New England's Puritans widely adopted this practice, and in this book Patricia Caldwell attempts to unravel the mystery of this procedure by viewing it as a literary phenomenon that met the special imaginative and expressive needs of troubled people in a time of great turmoil. In the first comparative reading of conversion stories as literary expression, Caldwell shows that these symbolic and deeply religious narratives represent 'the first faint murmurings of a truly American voice'.

The importance of Native American realism is traced through a study of the evolution of dramatic theory from the early 1890s through World War I and the uniquely American innovations in realistic drama between world wars.

In this book Warren Motley offers an original interpretation of James Fenimore Cooper's career. Whereas most studies of Cooper have centered on the figure of the Leatherstocking - that solitary model of the self-sufficient American hero untrammeled by civilization - this book examines Cooper's interest in the pioneer patriarchs who built new societies in the wilderness. Throughout his career Cooper explored an essential American problem: how to achieve the right balance between freedom and authority. He did this by retelling the story of the frontier settlement and thereby assessing its successes and failures. Like other writers in the decades before the Civil War, Cooper struggled with the legacy of the Revolutionary fathers - a legacy made more personal in Cooper's case by his father's role as a frontier land developer, judge, and Federalist politician. This book breaks new ground by relating Cooper's artistic development, and his ideas about authority in society, to his efforts to become independent of his father.

In this book Albert Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. Gelpi argues that the essential dialectic in Modernism extends and reconstitutes issues central to Romanticism. This is expressed in the interaction between two important strains in Modernism: the Symbolist exemplified in Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Allan Tate, and Hart Crane; and the Imagist, exemplified in Ezra Pound, H. D. and William Carlos Williams.

In this 1990 book John Limon examines the various ways American authors have approached the writing of fiction (and justified that writing) in an age increasingly dominated by science. He focuses in particular on Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne - three highly articulate and highly alarmed witnesses to the professionalisation of science, the great crisis in modern intellectual history. It was, he argues, especially specially difficult for American writers to face this crisis since they could make no appeal to traditional values: America, after all, had never really been a pre-scientific society.

In this 1991 book, Joel Porte examines nineteenth-century literature, focusing on the general question of the American Romantic ego and its varying modalities of self-creation, self-display, self-projection, and self-concealment. The book begins by exploring the status of the 'text' in nineteenth-century American writing, the relationship of 'rhetorical' reading to historical context, and the nature of 'Romanticism' in an American setting. Porte then concentrates on the great authors of the period through a series of thematically linked but critically discrete essays on Brown, Irving, Parkman, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Douglass, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson. Throughout his important new study, Porte offers provocative reassessments of familiar texts while at the same time casting an illuminating critical eye on less well-known territory. Readers of this book will come away with increased respect for the achievement of American Romantic writers.

David Halliburton's book is a richly textured study of the complete writings of Stephen Crane, including Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, and the less well-known fiction, newswriting, and poetry. Offering close readings of the works within a broad framework, Halliburton sets out to explore the imaginative world Crane created in his total œuvre of fiction, poetry and reportage. Comparative and interdisciplinary methods, combined with insights from historians such as Toynbee and Hofsteader, enable Halliburton to shed light on a number of issues. These include Crane's interest in musicality, the importance of his poetry and journalism to his other writings, the phenomenology of his social structures, his mastery of prosody, and the relation of his writings to the ideas of thinkers such as William James, Santayana, Weber and Sartre. This ambitious and comprehensive book sets a standard by which to measure all future interpretations of Crane.

Robert Levine has examined the American romance in a historical context. His book offers a fresh reading of the genre, establishing its importance to American culture between the founding of the republic and the Civil war. With convincing historical and literary detail, Levine shows that anxieties about various subversive elements - French revolutionaries, secret societies, Catholic immigrants, African slaves - are central to the fictional worlds of Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville. Ormond, The Bravo, The Blithedale Romance, and Benito Cereno are persuasively explicated by Levine to demonstrate that the romance addressed many of the same conflicts and ideals that gave rise to the American republic. Americans conceived of America as a romance, and their romances dramatised the historical conditions of the culture, The fear that conspiracies would subvert the order and integrity of the new nation were recurrent and widespread; Levine makes us see that these fears informed the works of our major romance writers from the turn of the century until the Civil War.

The Divided Mind examines the debate between innovation and tradition in American culture of the early years of the twentieth century. Peter Conn discusses literature, painting, music, architecture and politics, using illustrations of the artwork, buildings and popular graphics of the period. The major figures studied include: Henry James, David Graham Phillips, Jack London, W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Charles Ives, John Sloan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alfred Steiglitz and Emma Goldman.

This book is a study of the development of New England literature and literary institutions from the American Revolutionary era to the late nineteenth century. Professor Buell explores the foundations, growth and literary results of the professionalization of the writing vocation. He pays particular attention to the major writers - Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe and Dickinson - but surveys them with a number of lesser-known authors, and explores the conventions, values and institutions which affected them all. Some of the main topics covered include the distinctive features of the Early National and Antebellum periods in New England writing; the importance of certain literary genres (poetry, oratory and religious narrative; etc.); the impact of Puritanism and its values; and the invention of acceptable conventions for portraying the New England landscape and institutions in literature.

A whole range of major American writers have focused on images of the household, of domestic virtue, and the feminine or feminized hero. This important 1990 book examines the persistence and flexibility of such themes in the work of a tradition of classic writers from Ann Bradstreet through Jefferson and Franklin to Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Without minimizing the differences that divide these figures, Anderson shows the extent to which, in their various circumstances, they were all committed to a common enterprise - a social and cultural reconstruction based on the domestic values of the ideal private household.

In this book Albert Gelpi traces the emergence of American Modernist poetry as a reaction to, and outgrowth of, the Romantic ideology of the nineteenth century. He focuses on the remarkable generation of poets who came to maturity in the years of the First World War and whose works constitute the principal body of poetic Modernism in English. Gelpi argues that the essential dialectic in Modernism extends and reconstitutes issues central to Romanticism. This is expressed in the interaction between two important strains in Modernism: the Symbolist exemplified in Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Allan Tate, and Hart Crane; and the Imagist, exemplified in Ezra Pound, H. D. and William Carlos Williams.

In this volume, seven renowned critics present different views of Wallace Stevens' place in the evolution of Modernist poetry. The essays offer a fresh scrutiny of the poet's work and influence, re-examining the critical consensus that has developed since Stevens first gained the attention of critics in the fifties. The collection traces both the development of Modernist poetics and Stevens' place in it, from the poet's relation to such contemporaries as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore to his influence on current writers such as John Ashbery and Robert Duncan. The contributions examine the cultural influences, or 'context', from which Stevens emerges: the Symbolist and Imagist traditions, the social and political context of the war years, and contemporary movements in the visual arts. Finally, two essays investigate the influence of Stevens on later poets.

This book traces the tradition of American historical fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. It examines the historical novel's connections with Enlightenment and Romantic theories of history; with the rise of literary regionalism; with the ambitions of Romantic writers to revive the epic and romance; with changing conceptions of gender roles; and with the authors' troubled responses to the great revolutionary and imperialistic conflicts of the modern era. However, though inevitably much concerned with the theory of genre and with the specific contents of the genre of historical romance, Professor Dekker devotes most of his book to new readings of major texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Allen Tate, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner, as well as to the Briton whose name was synonymous with the genre for most of the nineteenth century - Sir Walter Scott. 'The American Historical Romance is the richest, most fully meditated and most rewarding yet written by this author ... It is the most important book on the relations of British and American fiction to come out for many years. No devotee of the American novel will ignore it.' -- The Times Literary Supplement

Faulker's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns offers a reading of William Faulkner by viewing his masterpieces through the lens of current critical theory. The book addresses both the power of his work and the current theoretical issues that call that power into question. Drawing on poststructuralist, ideological and gender theory, Weinstein examines the harrowing process of 'becoming oneself' at the heart of Faulkner's work, and suggests that the cosmos Faulkner called his own - the textual world he produced - emerges as a cosmos no one owns, a verbal territory generated and biased by the larger culture's discourses of gender and race.