Re-examines the long and complex history of democracy and broadens the traditional view of this history by complementing it with examples from unexplored or under-examined quarters.
Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect
Poetry explores the production and reception of dialect poetry
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and
investigates the ...genre's rhetorical interest in where sound meets
print. Dialect poetry's popularity stems not only from its use as
an entertaining distraction from "serious" poetry, but as a
surprisingly complicated pedagogical tool collaborating with elite
literary culture. Indeed, the intersections of the oral and textual
aspects of the dialect poem, visible in both its composition and
its reception, resulted in confusing and contradictory interactions
with the genre. In this innovative study, Nadia Nurhussein
demonstrates how an art form that appears to be most closely linked
to the vernacular is in fact preoccupied with investigating its
distance from it. Although dialect poetry performance during this
period has garnered more attention than the silent reading of it,
the history of dialect poetry's reception proves that readers
invited the challenge of printed dialect into their lives in
unexpected places, such as highbrow magazines and primary school
textbooks. Attentiveness to the appearances of dialect poetry in
print-in books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, and other
media-alongside its recitation are necessary to an understanding of
its cultural impact. Recontextualizing familiar and neglected
poets, Rhetorics of Literacy proposes new literary
genealogies and throws light upon the cultural and literary
relevance of the laborious and strange reading practices associated
with dialect poetry that made it distinct from other popular
literary genres.
The last three decades have seen unprecedented flourishing of creativity across the Scottish literary landscape, so that contemporary Scottish poetry constitutes an internationally renowned, ...award-winning body of work. At the heart of this has been the work of poets. As this poetry makes space for its own innovative concerns, it renegotiates the poetic inheritance of preceding generations. At the same time, Scottish poetry continues to be animated by writing from other places.
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetryis the definitive guide to this flourishing poetic scene. Its chapters examine Scottish poetry in all three of the nation's languages. It analyses many thematic preoccupations: tradition and innovation; revolutions in gender; the importance of place; the aesthetic politics of devolution. These chapters are complemented by extended close readings of the work of key poets that have defined this era, including Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, Aonghas MacNeacail and John Burnside.
Key Features
A thorough guide to contemporary Scottish poetry and poets, making the book an ideal course textReflects the ways in which the work of Scottish poets reflects a radical cultural independence following DevolutionProvides authoritative essays by the leading experts in the fieldIncludes a valuable synoptic bibliography
The focus of this study is court literature in early sixteenth-century England and Scotland. Author Jon Robinson examines courtly poetry and drama in the context of a complex system of entertainment, ...education, self-fashioning, dissimulation, propaganda and patronage. He places selected works under close critical scrutiny to explore the symbiotic relationship that existed between court literature and important socio-political, economic and national contexts of the period 1500 to 1540. The first two chapters discuss the pervasive influence of patronage upon court literature through an analysis of the panegyric verse that surrounded the coronation of Henry VIII. The rhetorical strategies adopted by courtiers within their literary works, however, differed, depending on whether the writer was, at the time of writing the verse or drama, excluded or included from the environs of the court. The different, often elaborate rhetorical strategies are, through close readings of selected verse, delineated and discussed in chapter three on David Lyndsay and chapter four on Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Elyot.
Contents: Introduction; Poet, court and culture; Patronage and panegyric verse; The 'inclusive and exclusive' rhetorical strategy of David Lyndsay's The Dreme and The Complaynt; Counsel, service, kingship and the moral reality of the court; The 'honestye' of Thomas Wyatt's court critique and the unstable 'I' of his verse; The murky waters of court politics and poetic propaganda; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
