No description available.

No description available.

I have termed Birthing Attila a creative-critical project since it is not only a collection of poems, or a critical compendium of methodologies and theories, but an alignment of the two in a mutually illuminating process. My creative work informs my critical, and, reflexively, my critical informs my creative. The Birthing Attila project engages with orthodox narratives of history and ideology, critiquing them, working against linear expectation, and identifying and dramatizing margins of society that are often subordinated or neglected in such discourses. By engaging with New Historicist theory as a creative impetus (see Chapter Three) and exploring other theoretical debates chiefly within feminism and post-colonialism, my poetry is drawn into line with a critical praxis. This critical-creative contact locates Birthing Attila at the confluence of recent work on the 'interfrictions' between theorized inquiry and creative practice. The poems themselves seek to encourage today's readers to look internally and at the world around them, all viewed through a 'time-slipped universe' that adopts three 'worlds' inextricably intertwined - the fall of Rome, the 1980s, and contemporary society. Through the use of a time-slipped space in the creative pieces, fault lines, fractures, and permutations of perception across and embedded within history are explored within poems as well as between them. Birthing Attila fuses time together where clean distinctions between periods and events, and the ability to identify a clear chronology beyond the characters' narrative arcs, are, as with the separation of critical and creative practice in the construction of the project, rendered impossible. Chapter One (Reflections and Influences) explores the range of literary influences on the project and the genesis of the idea of a time-slipped space as a means of critique, focusing principally on the four most central literary figures to the poems' generation: Bret Easton Ellis, Tiffany Atkinson, Charles Bukowski, and Wallace Stevens. Chapter Two (Negotiating Borders and Boundaries) introduces cultural cartography and the ways in which the delineation of borders, boundaries, and 'the other' shape notions of identity, and how, consequently, these often artificial distinctions may be misappropriated for use in nationalist and imperialist dogma in the dominant discourse, particularly as it pertains to the West. Chapter Three (New Historicism and Creative-Critical Practice) seeks to firmly situate the Birthing Attila project along a creative-critical axis and expounds on the reflexive exercise of creative-critical writing. This chapter also explains the decision to employ Marjorie Levinson's New Historicism as a creative springboard, as opposed to viewing New Historicism through a purely critical lens. Chapter Four (Gender and Space) expands on the mapping of the body politic, engages with post-colonial and feminist theory, and investigates notions of time, space, and linearity. Perhaps most crucially, this chapter also explains the role of women in the collection and the choice to consciously exclude them from the poems as a means of critique.

A poetic experiment in reading without guidance, instruction, or mastery.

This thesis studies the poetry of Ernest Charles Jones (1819-69) from 1840 to 1860. One of its aims is to cast further light on the critically neglected area of Chartist poetry, and to investigate the social, political, and aesthetic implications of poetry whose explicit function is that of propaganda or polemic. Aside from offering close analysis of many poems which have not been studied before, this thesis presents previously unlisted Jones poems and, most importantly, a complete pseudonymous poetry collection. Study of original manuscripts has given significant insight into Jones’s process of poetic revision and some of his German-language poetry has been translated for the first time. My research covers Jones’s first publications in conservative newspapers shortly after his arrival in Great Britain from the German Duchy of Holstein, his early Chartist period, his imprisonment, and his years as the effective leader of Chartism. Although the six chapters are in broadly chronological order, each addresses a conceptual or contextual theme. These are, consecutively: poetic influence; mythopoeia; poet/reader relationships; prison writing; epic poetry; and poetic revision. Themes recurring throughout the study include the political and literary implications of republication and revision; the relationship between poetry and politics in the early Victorian period; the figure of the ‘gentleman radical’ and his relationship with his readership; the influence of Romantic legacies on mid-nineteenth-century radical poetics; links between Chartist and Irish Nationalist poetry; and intersections between radical and conservative imaginative conceptions of the past. Close analysis of the poetry is consistently related to its historical, political and cultural circumstances – the declarative and socially-engaged nature of Chartist poetry demands it be studied alongside its extra-literary contexts. What emerges from this study is a new version of Ernest Jones, a political poet whose exceptional complexity is here mapped for the first time in its fullness.

No description available.

Solstice in the Borderland is a concert of poetry in which the inherent musicalities of language and an understanding of sound relations are brought to the fore. In a similar vein to the ballads and romances that were a major part of oral traditions, these two works each tell a different, individual story, focused by the four dominant aspects of narrative (place, person, philosophical purpose, and plot), and aided by the specific musical structures in which they are composed. The poems in this sequence are: • 'Un-sained Strings': a folksong suite portraying the ongoing history of Ludlow, marcher town and former 'capital' of Wales. • 'Chase of the Beast Glatisant': a reworking of the Arthurian legends, constructed in the form of a four movement symphony. This poem follows the idea of the grail quest and is written in the voice of Malory's Nimue figure, Nenive. My endeavour with this project has been to reinvigorate the musical nature of verse through the appropriation of techniques designed for the composition of western orchestral music (such as harmony, melody, tonality, dynamic and orchestral structures) and the combination of these with a sympathy for the euphonious patterns of language. Through the consideration of current composers, such as James MacMillan and Jeffrey Lewis, alongside contemporary poets, I have demonstrated how poetry may be constructed around a true musical centre within twenty-first century verse, as it once was when poetry was primarily an oral/aural art form.

This thesis discusses homesickness and nostalgia as conditions that ‘afflict’ to productive ends the writing of Emily Brontë. Homesickness and nostalgia are situated as impelling both Brontë’s poetry and Wuthering Heights. To elucidate these states, close attention is paid to Emily Brontë’s poetry as well as Wuthering Heights, in the belief that the poetry repays detailed examination of a kind it rarely receives (even fine work by critics such as Janet Gezari tend not to scrutinise the poetry as attentively as it deserves) and that the novel benefits from being related to the poetry. Building on the work of Irene Tayler and others, this thesis views Brontë as a post-Romantic, and particularly post-Wordsworthian, poet. Much of her writing is presented as engaging in dialogue with the concerns in Wordsworth’s poetry, especially his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’; her poetry and prose eschew Wordsworth’s ‘simple creed’ and explore ‘obstinate questionings’. In so doing, they follow his own lead; Brontë brings out how complex the Romantics are. Chapter one focuses on the idea of restlessness as stirring a search for home. Chapters two and three, on Catholicism and Irishness respectively reflect on ways in which Emily Brontë used contemporary national debates in exploring imaginatively states of homesickness and nostalgia. The conceiving of another time and place to find a home in these chapters is developed in chapter four. This chapter considers Brontë’s internalisation of a home in her imaginative world of Gondal and argues for Gondal’s relevance. An imaginative home formed in childhood leads into chapter five which discusses Emily Brontë’s presentation of childhood; the chapter contends that Brontë imagines the child as lost and homesick, and rejects any ‘simple creed’ of childhood. Chapter six, which starts with the abandoned child in Wuthering Heights, focuses on the the novel as stirring a longing for home. The inability to find home, and particularly the rejection of heaven as a home, leads into a discussion of the ghostly as an expression of homesickness in the final chapter.

This thesis examines the role of quest in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. It argues that as proponents of a self-conscious quest poetry, each poet presents quest as a mode that gives shape to desire, but also one that demands scrutiny in its pursuit of potentialities. Utilising a new-formalist approach to poetry, the thesis presents these poets’ interrogations of quest as inseparable from the formal and generic qualities of their work, showing each poet locating artistic achievement in a performative approach to difficulty and struggle. Developing Harold Bloom’s argument that the Romantics create an ‘internalized’ quest-romance, I show each poet formulating their own unique sense of quest. While Byron tends towards disruption only to stop short of dismantling quest, Shelley’s quest revels in a purposeful precariousness. For Keats, quest represents a means of enacting his voyage towards capable poethood. The first chapter, on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage III, shows Byron disrupting his quest for self-transcendence through his use of the doubling trope. Chapter two compares Manfred and The Deformed Transformed, arguing that Byron’s dramas disrupt quest by foregrounding tensions between rhetoric and achievement. Chapter three views Shelley’s quests in Epipsychidion and Adonais as galvanised by the uncertain relationship between self and other. Chapter four traces the ambiguous role of movement in Shelley’s quest, focusing on the Scrope Davies Notebook and The Triumph of Life. Chapter five, on Sleep and Poetry and Endymion, presents rhyme as central to Keats’s quest to master a longer work of poetry. The final chapter examines the Hyperion poems, arguing that Keats refigures the epic to perform his progression towards poetic authority. By placing quest centre stage in their poetics, Byron, Shelley, and Keats produce poetry that is attuned to the aspiration underpinning human experience. Though tested, scrutinised, and interrogated throughout their works, quest also affords each poet an opportunity to glimpse the loftiest heights of possibility and achievement.

No description available.