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The American Love Lyric After Auschwitz and Hiroshima
About This Book
Citing the massive horrors of the Nazi death camps and the domestic violence behind a woman's suicide, Adrienne Rich challenges a fellow poet: 'would it relieve you to decide/Poetry doesn't make this happen?' In this provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens in the late forties and fifties, Robert Lowell in the Seventies, and Adrienne Rich in the nineties) to the mid-century catastrophes that gave rise to such thorny questions. Through close readings of individual poems (and drawing upon the gender and genre theories of Jean François Lyotard, Judith Butler, Melanie Klien, and Jacques Lacan), Estrin counters the usual presuppositions that the lyric remains sequestered in a-political isolation, and offers a new, revisionist critique of American poetry.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Permissions
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Theorizing the Lyric
- Chapter 2. âForm Gulping After Formlessnessâ: Petrarchâs Resistant Lauras in Stevensâs âAuroras of Autumnâ
- Chapter 3. âThe Intricate Evasions of Asâ: Historyâs Duplicities in Stevensâs âAn Ordinary Evening in New Havenâ
- Chapter 4. âInfinite Mischief â: Robert Lowellâs Fiction of Desire in The Dolphin
- Chapter 5. âSolid with Yearningâ: Lowelling and Laureling in Day by Day
- Chapter 6. Re-Versing the Past: Adrienne Richâs Outrage against Order
- Chapter 7. âAt Long Last Firstâ: Adrienne Richâs Dark Fields and Samuel Beckettâs Colorless Cliff
- Chapter 8. After-Words
- Notes
- Index