Poetry, Media, and the Material Body by Ashley Miller

Poetry, Media, and the Material Body by Ashley Miller

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Summary

This book investigates the often surprising intersections and overlaps between three infrequently related fields: studies of poetry, studies of media, and studies of the body. At these intersections a neglected nineteenth-century theory of poetry becomes visible, one that imagines the body as a reproductive medium for poetry.

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Poetry, Media, and the Material Body by Ashley Miller

From the Romantic fascination with hallucinatory poetics to the turn-of-the-century mania for automatic writing, poetry in nineteenth-century Britain appears at crucial times to be oddly involuntary, out of the control of its producers and receivers alike. This elegant study addresses the question of how people understood those forms of written creativity that seem to occur independently of the writer's will. Through the study of the century's media revolutions, evolving theories of physiology, and close readings of the works of nineteenth-century poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson, Ashley Miller articulates how poetry was imagined to promote involuntary bodily responses in both authors and readers, and how these responses enlist the body as a medium that does not produce poetry but rather reproduces it. This is a poetics that draws attention to, rather than effaces, the mediacy of the body in the processes of composition and reception.
'Miller's book is consistently insightful, imaginative, and well written, brimming with virtuosic readings that range across a wide variety of texts and disciplines.. A valuable contribution to nineteenth-century scholarship, it brilliantly recalibrates the connections not only among literary texts, somatic experience, and emerging technology, but also among writers, readers, and critics.' Veronica Alfano, Victorian Studies
Ashley Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Albion College, Michigan. Her work on a wide variety of topics in Romantic and Victorian literary studies has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Literature Compass, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9781108408585
ISBN 10 1108408583
Title Poetry, Media, and the Material Body
Author Ashley Miller
Series Cambridge Studies In Nineteenth-Century Literature And Culture
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Year published 2020-11-26
Number of pages 211
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.