Elizabeth Bishop's World War II - Cold War View


Book Description

Elizabeth Bishop's World War II-Cold War View offers the first comprehensive portrayal of the poet in mid-century America. The elusive story of Bishop's national, cultural, and literary politics during the World War II-Cold War period is finally brought into sharp focus as the book traces her life and writing from the war years spent in Key West through her tenure as the 1949-1950 national poet laureate. Our understanding of Bishop is completely reshaped by this study's unique ability to easily move back and forth between a wide-ranging cultural critique of mid-twentieth-century America and a careful, close, and chronological reading of the poet. Roman's study is ideal for students of American poetry, contemporary poetry, and American literature.




Elizabeth Bishop's World War II-Cold War View


Book Description

This book offers the first comprehensive portrayal of the poet in mid-20th century America.




The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop


Book Description

Elizabeth Bishop is increasingly recognized as one of the twentieth century's most important and original poets. Initially celebrated for the minute detail of her descriptions, what John Ashbery memorably called her 'thinginess', Bishop's reputation has risen dramatically since her death, in part due to the publication of new work, including letters, stories, and visual art, as well as a controversial volume of uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments. This Companion engages with key debates surrounding the interpretation and reception of Bishop's writing in relation to questions of biography, the natural world and politics. Individual chapters focus on texts such as North and South, Questions of Travel, and Geography III, while offering fresh readings of the significance of Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, and Brazil to Bishop's life and work. This volume explores the full range of Bishop's artistic achievements and the extent to which the posthumous publications have contributed to her enduring popularity.




Midcentury Suspension


Book Description

How did literary artists confront the middle of a century already defined by two global wars and newly faced with a nuclear future? Midcentury Suspension argues that a sense of suspension—a feeling of being between beginnings and endings, recent horrors and opaque horizons—shaped transatlantic literary forms and cultural expression in this singular moment. Rooted in extensive archival research in literary, print, and public cultures of the Anglophone North Atlantic, Claire Seiler’s account of midcentury suspension ranges across key works of the late 1940s and early 1950s by authors such as W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Bowen, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O’Hara. Seiler reveals how these writers cultivated modes of suspension that spoke to the felt texture of life at midcentury. Running counter to the tendency to frame midcentury literature in the terms of modernism or of our contemporary, Midcentury Suspension reorients twentieth-century literary study around the epoch’s fraught middle.




Literary Theory


Book Description

The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics. Covers all the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Expanded to include work from Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant. Pedagogically enhanced with detailed editorial introductions and a comprehensive glossary of terms




Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description


Book Description

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Description argues that attention to the material realm informs everything Bishop does. Seen through this lens, many familiar topics look remarkably different. Bishop's relationship to travel, epiphany, surrealism, and imagery are all transformed, and a timely new Bishop emerges - one quite different from the postmodern poet that has dominated recent scholarship.




Elizabeth Bishop in Context


Book Description

Elizabeth Bishop is increasingly recognised as one of the twentieth century's most original writers. Consisting of thirty-five ground-breaking essays by an international team of authors, including biographers, literary critics, poets and translators, this volume addresses the biographical and literary inception of Bishop's originality, from her formative upbringing in New England and Nova Scotia to long residences in New York, France, Florida and Brazil. Her poetry, prose, letters, translations and visual art are analysed in turn, followed by detailed studies of literary movements such as surrealism and modernism that influenced her artistic development. Bishop's encounters with nature, music, psychoanalysis and religion receive extended treatment, likewise her interest in dreams and humour. Essays also investigate the impact of twentieth-century history and politics on Bishop's life writing, and what it means to read Bishop via eco-criticism, postcolonial theory and queer studies.




Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire


Book Description

What is the difference between the 'I' of a poem--the lyric subject-- and the liberal subject of rights? Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire uses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry. Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period--underpinned by the discourse of individual rights--forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period. By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of 'lyric'>. This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.




Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic


Book Description

Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century—a uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouched—and it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishop’s verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prose—structurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishop’s prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishop’s thinking about prose to approach—for the first time—her work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole. Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as—among others—Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texture—in both Bishop’s prose proper and her prosaic verse—extends a body of research which seeks now to treat literature as a form of cognition. Technique and thought are finely wedded in Bishop’s work—her literary forms evince a historical intelligence attuned to questions of power, nationality, tradition (both literary and otherwise), race, and gender.




Elizabeth Bishop


Book Description

A biography of the brilliant, award-winning poet by one of her former students, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller. Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America’s most revered poets. And yet she has never been fully understood as a woman and artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop’s letters to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares. By alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Megan Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader an original and compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined. “A shapely experiment, mixing memoir with biography…[Elizabeth Bishop] fuses sympathy with intelligence, sending us back to Bishop’s marvelous poems.”—The Wall Street Journal “Marshall is a skilled reader who points out the telling echoes between Bishop’s published and private writing. Her account is enriched by a cache of revelatory, recently discovered documents…Marshall’s narrative is smooth and brisk: an impressive feat.”—The New York Times Book Review




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