Modernist Quartet by Frank Lentricchia

Modernist Quartet by Frank Lentricchia

Modernist Quartet is a study of the four major American modernist poets (Frost, Stevens, Pound, Eliot) in various historical environments (literary, philosophical, gender relations, the business of capitalist economics) with special attention given to their central poetic texts as they both reflect and shape our understanding of those environments. Frank Lentricchia presents the poems as stories, sometimes only implicit, of the poets seeking to sustain a life in non-commercial writing, in a culture that is hospitable only (for the most part) to commercial art. Central chapters give a synoptic vision of the lives and literary careers of the four poets in question.

"I can't think of any piece of recent literary criticism that more astutely and usefully combines text and context, close readings of selected poems (and acute, telling remarks about many, many others) with salient readings of American culture..At times, as I read passages where Lentricchia really lets himself go...pushes his subject beyond where you'd expect him to push it at these times, I thought of R.P. Blackmur....This is major criticism of high imaginative power, about as inclusive as one could hope for." C. William Pritchard, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of Lives of the Modern Poets
"Lentricchia's erudite and vigorous prose results in a thought-provoking examination of modernism." B. Quinn, Choice

Lentricchia, Frank: -

Frank Lentricchia was born to working-class parents in Utica, New York, in 1940. He earned his M.A. from Duke University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in 1966. His first two books were about modern poetry, and he then began to write more about literary theory, publishing his ground-breaking books in the early 1980s. Lentricchia served as the editor of two book series, one for The University of Chicago Press (The Wellek Library Lectures), and one for the University of Wisconsin Press (The Wisconsin Project on American Writing.) During these years, he began to drift from his previous work in theory. Lentricchia's first non-scholarly book, The Edge of Night, was published in 1994, and he soon followed with his much-noted essay in Lingua Franca, Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic, his farewell to certain types of academic criticism and theory. Though he did not completely abandon literary comment, Lentricchia from then on devoted himself to fiction. To date, he has published 12 books of fiction.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521469753
ISBN 10	0521469759
Title	Modernist Quartet
Author	Frank Lentricchia
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	1994-08-26
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.