Research Catalog

Title

Elegy & paradox : testing the conventions / W. David Shaw.

Author

Shaw, W. David (William David)

Publication

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, ©1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 279 pages; 23 cm

Summary

• To what extent can the consolations of a poetry of loss be made to seem reasonable - even compelling - to readers living today? In the first book to ask whether a historical and critical knowledge of the genre elegy is still really possible, W. David Shaw shows how the elegist's testing of conventions poses new crises for understanding and new shocks to values and beliefs from one generation to the next.
• Shaw argues that the idea of an elusive truth, of an apparent contradiction that invites resolution, explains the power of many elegies we read. After exploring paradoxes of performative language and circular form in classical and confessional elegies, respectively, he examines the paradoxes of a silent-speaking word in Romantic elegy and paradoxes of breakdown and breakthrough in modern elegy. A contrast between strong and weak mourners in Ben Jonson's and Henry King's elegies, between impact and tremor in Tennyson's elegies, and between tough- and tender-minded mourners in Frost's "Home Burial," suggests that reading elegies, like writing them, is more than an academic exercise; it is also a life-and-death issue.
• Though a polemical book - written out of an urgent and timely sense of the importance of a humane, experience-based testing of elegy's rhetoric and conventions - Elegy & Paradox also retraces a path great elegists have always followed when modifying tradition and relating what is new in their poems to conventional elements.

Alternative Title

Elegy and paradox.

Subject

• Elegiac poetry, English > History and criticism
• Death in literature
• Paradox
• Death in literature
• Elegiac poetry, English
• Paradox
• Elegie
• Englisch
• Geschichte
• Paradoxon
• Engels
• Elegieën

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

1. The Paradox of Power: Doing-by-Saying in Classical Elegy. Doing-by-Saying: The Performative Paradox. Austin on Felicity: Milton's Rhymes and Shelley's Breathing. The Poetics of Caution: Arnold's Run-Ons. A Genre under Siege: Romantic Seer and Victorian Skeptic. Models of Creation in Classical Elegy -- 2. The Paradox of Ends: The Circuitous Return in Confessional Elegy. "In my end is my beginning": The Making of an Elegist. The Theology of Ends: Anatomy and Confession. From Augustine to Tennyson: Progress by Reversion. Leading Life Backwards: Retrospective Form. The Paradox of Proof: Logical Coercion and Free Assent. Confessional Elegy and the Theory of Genre -- 3. Epistemology and Paradox: Berkeley, Kant, Foucault. The Fault Lines of Elegy: Seismic Shocks. Berkeley and Gray: Is Death Conceivable? Kant and Wordsworth: Can a Real Reality be Known? Foucault and Stevens: Can the Subject Disappear? -- 4. The Paradox of the Unspeakable: Speaking by Being Silent in Romantic Elegy.

ISBN

• 0801848369
• 9780801848360

LCCN

93050617

OCLC

• ocm29634156
• 29634156
• SCSB-14170288

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library