Naomi Levine – författare

A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies. The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme’s association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a forgotten style of literary-historical thought, The Burden of Rhyme reveals the unacknowledged influence of Victorian poetics—and its repudiation—on the development of modern literary criticism.

A major new account of Victorian poetry and its place in the field of literary studies. The Burden of Rhyme shows how the nineteenth-century search for the origin of rhyme shaped the theory and practice of poetry. For Victorians, rhyme was not (as it was for the New Critics, and as it still is for us) a mere technique or ahistorical form. Instead, it carried vivid historical fantasies derived from early studies of world literature. Naomi Levine argues that rhyme’s association with the advent of literary modernity and with a repertoire of medievalist, Italophilic, and orientalist myths about love, loss, and poetic longing made it a sensitive historiographic instrument. Victorian poets used rhyme to theorize both literary history and the most elusive effects of aesthetic form. This Victorian formalism, which insisted on the significance of origins, was a precursor to and a challenge for twentieth-century methods. In uncovering the rich relationship between Victorian poetic forms and a forgotten style of literary-historical thought, The Burden of Rhyme reveals the unacknowledged influence of Victorian poetics—and its repudiation—on the development of modern literary criticism.

The popular image of the Jewish community is that it consists primarily of members of the middle and upper middle classes. But this image is far from true. Poor Jews: An American Awakening shatters, once and for all, the stereotype of Jewish affluence.Citing national data and descriptions of the life-styles of the Jewish poor, the authors reveal unique social characteristics of the Jewish poor—including the surprising statistic that over two-thirds of the members of this group are past the age of sixty, thus experiencing the compounded disadvantage of being poor, elderly, and deserted by the young, mobile Jewish community.Reasons for the "invisibility" of Jewish poverty are examined, as well as how the Jewish community has responded to poverty within its own ethnic group and Jewish attitudes toward the welfare state and charity. The lack of Jewish participation in antipoverty programs is cited, along with measures which will bring them fully into this and other federal and state programs.