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    The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

    Proposal review

    Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form

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    Author(s)
    Ruderman, D.B.
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    This book radically refigures the conceptual and formal significance of childhood in nineteenth-century English poetry. By theorizing infancy as a poetics as well as a space of continual beginning, Ruderman shows how it allowed poets access to inchoate, uncanny, and mutable forms of subjectivity and art. While recent historicist studies have documented the "freshness of experience" childhood confers on 19th-century poetry and culture, this book draws on new formalist and psychoanalytic perspectives to rethink familiar concepts such as immortality, the sublime, and the death drive as well as forms and genres such as the pastoral, the ode, and the ballad. Ruderman establishes that infancy emerges as a unique structure of feeling simultaneously with new theories of lyric poetry at the end of the eighteenth century. He then explores the intertwining of poetic experimentation and infancy in Wordsworth, Anna Barbauld, Blake, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Sara Coleridge, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, and Augusta Webster. Each chapter addresses andanalyzes a specific moment in a writers’ work, moments of tenderness or mourning, birth or death, physical or mental illness, when infancy is analogized, eulogized, or theorized. Moving between canonical and archival materials, and combining textual and inter-textual reading, metrical and prosodic analysis, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the book shows how poetic engagements with infancy anticipate psychoanalytic and phenomenological (i.e. modern) ways of being in the world. Ultimately, Rudermansuggests that it is not so much that we return to infancy as that infancy returns (obsessively, compulsively) in us. This book shows how by tracking changing attitudes towards the idea of infancy, one might also map the emotional, political, and aesthetic terrain of nineteenth-century culture. It will be of interest to scholars in the areas of British romanticism and Victorianism, as well as 19th-century American literature and culture, histories of childhood, and representations of the child from art historical, cultural studies, and literary perspectives. "D. B. Ruderman’s The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry: Romanticism, Subjectivity, Form is an interesting contribution to this field, and it manages to bring a new perspective to our understanding of Romantic-era and Victorian representations of infancy and childhood. …a supremely exciting book that will be a key work for generations of readers of nineteenth-century poetry." Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Victorian Studies (59.4)
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/53307
    Keywords
    Anna Barbauld; Augusta Webster; Ballad; British Literature; British Poetry; British Romanticism; Childhood; Coleridge; Erasmus Darwin; Infancy; Literature; Lyric Poetry; Matthew Arnold; Nineteenth Century Poetry; Pastoral; Poetics; Psychoanalytic Theory; Research; Romanticism; Romantic Poetry; Sara Coleridge; Shelley; Sublime; Tennyson; William Blake; Wordsworth
    DOI
    10.4324/9781315640266
    ISBN
    9781317276494, 9780367876678, 9781138191853, 9781315640266, 9781317276494
    Publisher
    Taylor & Francis
    Publisher website
    https://taylorandfrancis.com/
    Publication date and place
    2016
    Imprint
    Routledge
    Series
    Routledge Studies in Romanticism,
    Classification
    Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900
    Literary studies: poetry and poets
    Literature: history and criticism
    Pages
    288
    Rights
    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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