In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover ......
In the nineteenth century, inexpensive editions of Jane Austen's novels targeted to Britain's working classes were sold at railway stations, traded for soap wrappers, and awarded as school prizes. At just pennies a copy, these reprints were some of the earliest mass-market paperbacks, with Austen's beloved stories squeezed into tight columns ......
Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canadaoften disparaged as derivative ......
For many critics, Romanticism is synonymous with nature writing, for representations of the natural world appear during this period with a freshness, concreteness, depth, and intensity that have rarely been equaled. Why did nature matter so much to writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And how did it play such an ......
Cathy Caruth juxtaposes the writings of psychoanalysts, literary and political theorists, and literary authors who write in a century faced by a new kind of history, one that is made up of events that seem to undo, rather than produce, their own remembrance. At the heart of each chapter is the enigma of a history that, in its very unfolding, seems ......
Writing and teaching across cultures and disciplines makes the act of comparison inevitable. Comparative theory and methods of comparative literature and cultural anthropology have permeated the humanities as they engage more centrally with the cultural flows and circulation of past and present globalization. How do scholars make ethically and ......
Between the emergence of the realist novel in the early eighteenth century and the novel's subsequent alignment with self-improvement a century later lies a significant moment when novelistic characters were unlikely to mature in any meaningful way. That adolescent protagonists poised on the cusp of adulthood resisted a headlong tumble into ......
The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary artistic circles of Russian futurism. By the end of his life, he was the publisher of deluxe limited edition books in Paris. The recent subject of major exhibitions in Moscow, his native Tbilisi, New York, and other venues, the work of ......