{"product_id":"epic-negation-the-dialectical-poetics-of-late-modernism-9780199844715","title":"Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism","description":"The history of the epic-ranging from the heroic narratives of cultural origin found in Homer and Virgil to the tumultuous theological and political conflicts depicted by Dante or Milton-is nearly as old as literature itself. But the epic is also made and remade by its present, adapted to the pressures and formal necessities of its particular cultural moment. Examining modernist poetry's epic turn in the years between the two World Wars, C.D. Blanton's ambitious study charts the inversion of what Ezra Pound called \"a poem including history\" into a fractured and hollowed form, a \"negated epic\" that struggles not only to acknowledge the distant past but also to conceive its immediate present. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCompelled to register the force of a larger historical totality it cannot directly represent, the negated epic reorients the function of poetic language, trading expression or signification for concrete but often buried reference, remaking the poem as an instrument of dialectical reason in the process. \u003cem\u003eEpic Negation\u003c\/em\u003e turns first to T. S. Eliot, productively pairing \u003cem\u003eThe Waste Land\u003c\/em\u003e with \u003cem\u003eThe Criterion\u003c\/em\u003e, the literary review it announced in 1922, to argue that Eliot's journal systematically realizes the editorial and critical method through which modernism's epochal poem sought to think its moment whole, developing a totalizing account of interwar culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, \u003cem\u003eThe Criterion \u003c\/em\u003enot only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the crisis facing bourgeois society, formed in the image of a Marxism it opposes. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWorld War II's approach serves to organize the second half of Blanton's study, as he traces the dislocated formal effects of a serial epic gone underground. In the tense elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms cryptically divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness, what can be said in a poem from what cannot. And, finally, with H.D.'s Trilogy-written under bombardment in a terse exchange with Freud's famous rewriting of biblical history in \u003cem\u003eMoses and Monotheism\u003c\/em\u003e--the poetic image itself lapses, consigning epic to the silent historical force of the unconscious. Uniquely conceived and deftly executed, \u003cem\u003eEpic Negation\u003c\/em\u003e transforms our understanding of modernist poetics and the concept of epic more broadly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e C. D. Blanton\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Oxford University Press, USA\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/14\/2015\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 384\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 1.49lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.30d\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780199844715\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReview Citation(s): \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eChoice\u003c\/i\u003e 10\/01\/2015\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBlanton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. He is coeditor of A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Blackwell, 2009).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Oxford University Press, USA","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":40843713609843,"sku":"9.7802E+12","price":170.28,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0555\/9255\/0515\/products\/img_f69a8a05-5f8b-4c7f-9423-9934e0fecb29.jpg?v=1685798415","url":"https:\/\/bookstorenmore.com\/products\/epic-negation-the-dialectical-poetics-of-late-modernism-9780199844715","provider":"Bookstore N More","version":"1.0","type":"link"}