- Description
- 1 online resource (ix, 367 pages)
- Summary
- "Epic Negation examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review's totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war's onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.'s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud's Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such"--
- Series Statement
- Modernist literature and culture ; 24
- Uniform Title
- Epic negation (Online)
- Alternative Title
- Epic negation (Online)
- Subject
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-355) and index.
- Access (note)
- Access restricted to authorized users.
- LCCN
- 2014028153
- OCLC
- ssj0001440180
- Author
Blanton, C. D. (Charles Daniel), 1968-
- Title
Epic negation [electronic resource] : the dialectical poetics of late modernism / C.D. Blanton.
- Imprint
Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2015]
- Series
Modernist literature and culture ; 24
- Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-355) and index.
- Access
Access restricted to authorized users.
- Connect to: