Literary History

The Attack on Yeats

by Jonathan Allison

An Approach for the Study of Poetic Imagination

by Arezou Zalipour

Abstract of my PhD thesis that was completed in 2008. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested to know more about my PhD thesis. I am trying to publish it as a book. Your kind suggestions are most welcomed.

An Approach for the Study of Poetic Imagination

Arezou Zalipour, PhD
more An Approach for the Study of Poetic Imagination

Arezou Zalipour, PhD
arezouzalipour@gmail.com


This study examines notions of poetic imagination towards exploring its contemporary representations. It takes its initial point of departure with a historical and conceptual survey that traces the concepts and theories of both imagination and poetic imagination. The literature survey demonstrates that poetic imagination has not been featured in the theories of modern and contemporary poetry, barring the Romantics who celebrated the creative nature of imagination. Therefore, the existing concepts, ideas and theories of poetic imagination are largely unstructured and incoherent concepts inherited by contemporary poets. However, there are some researches on the concept of imagination in poetry in modern and contemporary philosophy and psychology. In the twentieth century, the use of poetic image in philosophical studies as well as the relations between imagination and reality have provided some insights into modern conceptions of poetic imagination. This thesis examines, discusses and collates the principles and concepts relevant to imagination to discover whether these notions can explain and define the nature of poetic imagination in contemporary poetry. Fundamentally, the thesis develops an approach for the exploration of contemporary notions of poetic imagination. The approach is drawn from the existing concepts and theories of imagination and poetic imagination. The approach is constructed featuring the elements of types of images, features of poetic imagination and modes of imagination.

These three categories shape the components of the theoretical framework and also form the three levels of the analytical procedure of the approach. In level one, we look at types of images in a poem which leads us to draw conclusions about features of poetic imagination in level two. In level three, the findings in levels one and two will then help us to determine the apparent and dominant mode of imagination in the poem/text. What should emerge by the end of the analysis is a special opportunity to look at how (creative) imagination is manifested in a poem/text. The approach was applied to a corpus of contemporary poetry in order to show the application of the approach and the way analysis is carried put. The assessment of the approach on a corpus of contemporary poetry was also in an attempt to elucidate the dimensions of relationships between the imagined, the imaged, and the real.

The research identifies that imagination in contemporary poetry moves more towards imaging rather than poetic imagination. In other words, imagination shows greater affinity to imaging in contemporary poetry. The significant contribution of the thesis is that it offers a continuum called Imaginiuum with one end as imaging, and poetic imagination as the other. Imaginiuum is a paradigm that describes contemporary notions of imagination in poetry.

‘Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory’: The Cinematic Adaptation of American Poetry

by Michael Devine

Adaptation 5.1 (March 2012): 1-17

This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular... more This essay reconstructs a forgotten crisis in American letters and film: President Theodore Roosevelt's unpopular campaign to make ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ the nation's poem in 1908 and the poem's popular film adaptation in 1911. As the cinematic response to poetry's failure as a national art, the Vitagraph film became a collectivist hymnal for the nation's dream of assimilation. Featured prominently in American poet Vachel Lindsay's pioneering work of film theory, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), the adaptation effectively reasserted the popular roots of the otherwise genteel ‘Battle Hymn’ poem and by doing so helped to modernize poetry's communal function and the nation's literary tradition.

Future Tense

by Samuel Cohen

"I’ve been thinking some lately about why I‘m in the job I’m in. I don’t mean why I got my job (as a professor of... more "I’ve been thinking some lately about why I‘m in the job I’m in. I don’t mean why I got my job (as a professor of contemporary American literature) — that’s an endless mystery — but why I wanted to do this sort of thing in the first place."

Beyond the Brink: Indigenous Women's Agency and the Colonization of Knowledge in the Maid of the Mist Myth

by Robinder Sehdev

Forthcoming 2012. Cultural Studies Review.

The myth of the Maid of the Mist of Niagara Falls is a settler story of an Indigenous woman who kills herself by... more The myth of the Maid of the Mist of Niagara Falls is a settler story of an Indigenous woman who kills herself by piloting her canoe over the cataract. This is presented not as a tragedy, but as a cultural necessity. So compelling was this settler myth that until recently it was the focus of settler cultural production at Niagara. I argue that the creation and subsequent fixation upon the myth attempted to displace Indigenous stories, and the centrality of Indigenous women to Indigenous epistemologies and in decolonial action. The recent move to banish the myth from tourist audiences does further violence by moving colonial cultural production to the fringes of visibility and away from critical interrogation. The myth and the ways it is called upon and subsequently banished indicates the normalizing practices of settler colonialism and must be pulled from the brink of unnameability and unknowability into critical discourse.

Le rêve américain de Jean-Paul Sartre

by Yan Hamel

Les Temps Modernes, no 658-659, avril-juillet 2010, p. 49-80

Imaginario e historia literaria. El caso de la Península Ibérica como geografía literaria orientalizada en el marco europeo

by Cesar Dominguez

In La literatura en la literatura. Actas del XIV Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada. Ed. Magdalena León Gómez. Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos. 2004. pp. 525-532.

“Per una rifondazione della civiltà europea: De la littérature”, in N. Bellucci (a c. di), Corinne e l’Italia di Madame de Staël, Roma, Bulzoni, 2010, pp.53-65.

by Franca Sinopoli

“ Il Quadrio tra storia nazionale e storia comparata della letteratura”, in La figura e l'opera di Francesco Saverio Quadrio (1695-1756), a cura di Claudia Berra, Ponte in Valtellina, Ediz. Biblioteca Comunale "Libero della Briotta" 2010, pp.123-132.

by Franca Sinopoli

Montaigne's Paradox: The Multiplicity and Unity of Virtue

by Andrei Pop

Appeared in the Booth Prize Winners, 2001.

Montaigne's view of virtue as culturally variable but historically comprehensible human responses is textually... more Montaigne's view of virtue as culturally variable but historically comprehensible human responses is textually sketched. Of particular importance is his subtle comparison of Europeans and Brazilians. The latter are idealized, but not held up for emulation, for historical accident has made this impractical: they "don't wear pants." Caveat lector...it's a freshman paper.

Visitando la construcción del canon medieval: El caso de la mutación genológica de la Gran conquista de Ultramar en la historiografía literaria del siglo XIX

by Cesar Dominguez

In Visitando la Edad Media: Representaciones del medievo en la España del siglo XIX. Eds. Julián Ortega y Rebeca Sanmartín. Teruel: Fundación Amantes de Teruel, 2009. 136-162.

Casting Out Demons: Homage to Shirley Jackson

by Gustavo Vargas Cohen

Intense and lively activity regarding North American writer Shirley Jackson has been noted in the last decades of the... more Intense and lively activity regarding North American writer Shirley Jackson has been noted in the last decades of the twentieth century and in the beginning of the twenty-first. The period that
immediately followed her death in 1965 foreshadowed a response that led several critics to postulate Jackson as a forgotten writer. Often referred to as an author of horror and weird fiction, Jackson has, for strange reasons, accepted the label, though really a minority of her literary production actually features supernatural elements or delves in gothic themes. The present text wishes to pay homage to this supposedly underappreciated and forsaken woman who influences many achieved authors and canonical
works to this day and who changed and continues to change American and world literary history indelibly.

The Birth of Tragedy in the Cinquecento: Humanism and Literary History

by Kristine Haugen

Journal of the History of Ideas 72,3 (2011): 351-70

As literary history stages a comeback as a method in contemporary literary study, it makes sense to ask about its... more As literary history stages a comeback as a method in contemporary literary study, it makes sense to ask about its antecedents. In the Renaissance, as it turns out, literary history was widely pursued alongside interpretive commentary and textual criticism. Perhaps the thorniest question Renaissance scholars faced in this field, as well as the most resonant for 21st-century readers, centered on the birth of tragedy in ancient Greece. What had been the tragedy's original form, and in particular, had it included music in any way? To attempt to answer was to engage with Aristotle's 'Poetics' in a very unfamiliar way, and moreover to compare Greek with Roman sources imaginatively and boldly. Angelo Poliziano, Francesco Robortello, Pier Vettori, and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso are discussed.

Por uma Historiografia do Modernismo: O Caso da Competitividade nas Literaturas Anglófonas

by Gustavo Vargas Cohen

The present text brings and comments on a series of dichotomies and conflicts that ravaged the English language... more The present text brings and comments on a series of dichotomies and conflicts that ravaged the English language modernists. The context of creation of their works is introduced
and external conflicts are highlighted, such as the world wars and their social, cultural and artistic implications, so as to reach the internal conflicts, those motivated by the anxiety and the disorientation that stemmed from that turbulent era and that generated a number of injurious observations among writers, i.e., the invectives which are the focus of this investigation. Based on oral and printed documents, this sagacious, oftentimes unhealthy, competition explored by Anglophone Modernists the likes of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, among others, is presented through the search of a balance between historical-scientific rigor and good humor.

Polish Literary Criticism Circa 1772: A Genre Perspective

by Sylwia Chrostowska

working excerpt from PhD thesis, published in TSQ

Twentieth-Century Burns Scholar: J. DeLancey Ferguson.

by Corey E. Andrews

The Burns Chronicle (Winter 2011): 9-12.

This essay presents a critical appreciation of the work of J. DeLancey Ferguson, a noted Burns critic of the twentieth... more This essay presents a critical appreciation of the work of J. DeLancey Ferguson, a noted Burns critic of the twentieth century.

Richard Yates: O Cronista da Idade da Ansiedade Revisitado

by Gustavo Vargas Cohen

The objective of the present text is to historicize the literary trajectory, and its implications, of that who is... more The objective of the present text is to historicize the literary trajectory, and its implications, of that who is considered the great writer of the Age of Anxiety, the American Richard Yates (1926-1992). This study intends a review of the critical reception of Yates’s oeuvre, through time as well as ion the present, emphasizing his main opus, the 1961 novel Revolutionary Road. An informed literary historiography that accounts for the greatness of the power of observation and social commentary of
the author’s fiction is sought as well.

Review: Greil Marcus / Werner Sollors (eds.): A New Literary History of America, Cambridge, MA / London: Harvard University Press 2009, XXVII + 1095 S., ISBN 978-0-674-03594-2

by John Andreas Fuchs

In: sehepunkte 10 (2010), Nr. 6

Modello, imitazione e trasformazione: i Zefiro torna di Francesco Petrarca, Ottavio Rinuccini e Claudio Monteverdi

by Linda Maria Koldau

Narratives About Collaborating Playwrights: The New Bibliography, "Disintegration," and the Problem of Multiple Authorship in Shakespeare

by Edmund King

Originally published in Laurie Johnson and Darryl Chalk, eds., Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 249–67.