Sign-In
Cart
Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading
Hardcover
Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry
ISBN13: 9780813926100
Publisher: Univ Of Virginia Pr
Published: Mar 22 2007
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.27
Height: 0.97 Width: 9.39 Depth: 6.53
Language: English
Sincerity--the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of the author--has dominated both the reading and the writing of Anglo-American poetry since the romantic era. Most critical studies have upheld an opposition between sincerity and the literary marketplace, contributing to the widespread understanding of the lyric poem as a moral refuge from the taint of commercial culture. Guided by the question of why we expect poetry to be sincere, Susan Rosenbaum reveals in Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading that, in fact, sincerity in the modern lyric was in many ways a product of commercial culture. As she demonstrates, poets who made a living from their writing both sold the moral promise that their lyrics were sincere and commented on this conflict in their work.
Juxtaposing the poetry of Wordsworth and Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Plath, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Bishop, Rosenbaum shows how on the one hand, through textual claims to sincerity poets addressed moral anxieties about the authenticity, autonomy, and transparency of literature written in and for a market. On the other hand, by performing their private lives and feelings in public, she argues, poets marketed the self, cultivated celebrity, and advanced professional careers. Not only a moral practice, professing sincerity was also good business. The author focuses on the history of this conflict in both British romantic and American post-1945 poetry.
Professing Sincerity will appeal to students and scholars of Anglo-American lyric poetry, of the history of authorship, and of gender studies and commercial culture.
Also in
Poetry Criticism
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
Addonizio, Kim
Laux, Dorianne
Paperback
Letters to a Young Poet: With the Letters to Rilke from the ''Young Poet''
Kappus, Franz Xaver
Searls, Damion
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Hardcover
Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (Nobel Prize Winner)
Carson, Anne
Paperback
Faeries, Sprites & Malevolent Spirits: An Anthology of Classic Poetry & Stories
Thorne, Aurora
Hardcover
Poem a Day: 366 Poems, Old and New - One for Each Day of the Year
McCosker, Karen
Albery, Nicolas
Paperback
A Literary Dog for Every Day of the Year: Mischievous Mutts and Faithful Friends - Literature's Waggiest Tales
Richardson, Tara
Hardcover
Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag: And Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era
Field, Edward
Rosebrough, Amy L.
Paperback
Leaves of Grass: The Complete 1855 and 1891-92 Editions: A Library of America Paperback Classic
Whitman, Walt
Paperback
Three Simple Lines: A Writer's Pilgrimage Into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku
Goldberg, Natalie
Hardcover
Poetry from Spaceship Earth: Empire and Ecology in Post-1945 American Poetry
Rahimtoola, Samia
Paperback
Haiku: How the Modern World Came to Fall in Love with Small Poems from Japan
Crawford, Robert
Hardcover