Introducing the Prose Poem

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
Intense Emotion

This chapter traces prose poetry's development in nineteenth-century France and its early reception and subsequent critical views about the form. The prose poem in English is now established as an important literary form in many countries at a time when the composition and publication of poetry is thriving. However, while poetry generally continues to be recognized as a literary genre highly suited to expressing intense emotion, grappling with the ineffable and the intimate, and while lineated lyric poetry is widely admired for its rhythms and musicality, the main scholarship written about English-language prose poetry to date defines the form as problematic, paradoxical, ambiguous, unresolved, or contradictory. The common observation that the term “prose poetry” appears to contain a contradiction is not surprising given that poetry and prose are often understood to be fundamentally different kinds of writing. The chapter then defines the prose poem's main features and discusses the challenge prose poetry presents to established ideas of literary genre.

Prose Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Anglophone World

This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.

Reading Rooms for Travelling Cultures: English-Language Reading Rooms in Late Nineteenth-Century France

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206
Author(s):  
Colette Colligan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Transit Routes

This essay focuses on British and American reading rooms at the end of the nineteenth century in French travel centres such as Boulogne-sur-Mer, Cannes, and Paris. These reading rooms were sites of transit that reveal the travelling cultures of Britons and Americans. They set in motion certain travel sociabilities and practices, suggested various transit routes and itineraries, promoted different cultural and national affiliations and identities, and collected, represented, and displayed anglophone cultures. They operated as microcosms of British and American cultures, offering essentialized experiences and connections with people, behaviour, and things affiliated with home, but this essay shows how they were also social environments that not only reinforced, but also reshaped and interrogated anglophone cultures on the move in British, American, and French cultural territories.

INTERNATIONALISING THE SONNET: TORU DUTT'S “SONNET – BAUGMAREE”

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Victorian Poetry ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries

“When the history of theliterature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song” (Dutt xxvii). This sentence is Edmund Gosse's famous final flourish to his memoir of Toru Dutt, which introduced her posthumous volumeAncient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan, published in 1882, five years after her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one. But what would Dutt's page look like in the history of “our country,” by which Gosse means of course England? This question is a tricky one, because placing a late nineteenth-century Bengali who was a Europhile, a Christian convert, and an English-language woman poet within a British Victorian tradition is a simplistic, if not a problematic appropriation of a colonial subject into the centre of the British Empire. Where Dutt belongs has long preoccupied critics who try to recuperate her poetry for an Indian national poetic tradition, or for a transnational, cosmopolitan poetics. The issue of placing Dutt allows us also to press questions about the conception of Victorian poetry studies, its geographical, cultural, and national boundaries, not just in the nineteenth-century creation of a canon but in our current conception of the symbolic map of Victorian poetry. But, while recent critics have celebrated her poetry's embrace of global poetry as a challenge to the parochialism of national literary boundaries, Dutt's original English-language poetry also suggests an uneven, uncomfortable hybridity, and a wry, ironic interplay between distance and proximity that unfolds through her use of poetic form. This essay investigates what it means to “make something” of Toru Dutt, in the nineteenth century and in the twenty-first century, what is at stake for Victorian poetry studies in privileging Dutt and her multi-lingual writing, and whether her celebrated transnationalism might not also include a discomfort with hybridity that reveals itself through the relation between space and literary form in her poetry.

Echoes of the Guillotine: Berlioz and the French Fantastic

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-185
Author(s):  
Marianna Ritchey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Important Contributor ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The Many

Abstract The fantastic, theorized as an expression of the anxieties, fears, and political beliefs of the generation of young French writers born in the decades directly following the Revolution and Terror, has long been viewed primarily as a literary genre. Observed in light of this artistic movement, Berlioz's most famous work, Symphonie fantastique, emerges as a musical manifestation of fantastic techniques, and Berlioz himself as an important contributor to the Fantastic culture that swept nineteenth-century France. Using Tzvetan Todorov's narrative theory, I identify two techniques fantastic authors exploit that are most useful in understanding Symphonie Fantastique: an intentional ambiguity of form, and a privileging of ambiguous ““thresholds”” over teleological plot resolution. In pursuing a new explanation of the symphony's strange deviations from musical norms, I highlight the many different ways the symphony has been understood and analyzed by prominent musicologists over the past 180 years. By now, musicologists have effectively demonstrated that Berlioz was not the ““incompetent genius”” (in Charles Rosen's wry formulation) he was long considered to be; however, the fact that there is still disagreement and debate over Symphonie Fantastique's deviations from normative form and content, as well as what those deviations might mean, demonstrates the highly fraught signifying structure of the music. Locating the symphony's use of fantastic tropes and techniques demonstrates that many of its strangest aspects——those ““failures”” that have been the subject of musicological debate since 1835——come into focus when we take its title seriously and regard the work as a symphony in the fantastic genre.

The New Elites. Questions about Political, Social, and Cultural Reconstruction after the Terror

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Luc Chappey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Common People ◽  
Cultural Reconstruction ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The French Revolution

Was the French Revolution the victory of an all-conquering bourgeoisie that made up the foundation of the nineteenth-century France of the ‘notables’? How far did the older elites of the ancien régime succeed in taking part in the political, social and cultural reordering of the first decades of the new century? This chapter examines the significance of these questions in relation to the construction and legitimation of elite power after the fall of Robespierre. Exploring both political and intellectual developments, it reveals the dynamics which account for the major rupture between the dominance of a republican elite under the Directory, and the foundations of the power of the Empire’s so-called ‘Granite masses’. Study of the various components of elite domination involves not merely scrutiny of the role played by the state, but also of changing attitudes towards the common people, against whom the evolving position of the elite was constructed.

Women and Prose Poetry

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 199-223
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Critical View ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Comprehensive Study

This chapter highlights the tradition of English-language prose poetry by women. It explores what women's prose poetries may be — not only in terms of content and approach but in terms of technique and emphasis. The chapter begins by looking at Holly Iglesias's seminal text, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry (2004), which is the most comprehensive study of women's prose poetry to date. Iglesias advocates for the liberation of women prose poets, using the prose poem box as a metaphor for their containment. Beginning with Carolyn Forché's famous and disturbing prose poem about male power and brutality, “The Colonel,” and ending with C. D. Wright's hybrid prose poem essay, Iglesias's book celebrates women prose poets by giving them space and prominence. Ultimately, the neglect of many women prose poets did not occur because women were not writing prose poems; it is just that many women were not writing the kinds of prose poems that fit the prevalent critical view of what successful prose poems might look like.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

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