Inscription And Modernity: From Wordsworth To Mandelstam Project Muse Upcc Books

Inscription and Modernity charts the vicissitudes of inscriptive poetry produced in the midst of the great and catastrophic political, social, and intellectual upheavals of the late 18th to mid 20th centuries. Drawing on the ideas of Geoffrey Hartman, Perry Anderson, Fredric Jameson, and Jacques Rancière among others, John MacKay shows how a wide range of Romantic and post-Romantic poets (including Wordsworth, Clare, Shelley, Hölderlin, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Blok, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann) employ the generic resources of inscription both to justify their writing and to attract a readership, during a complex historical phase when the rationale for poetry and the identity of audiences were matters of intense yet productive doubt. "Inscription and Modernity: from Wordsworth to Mandelstam charts the vicissitudes of inscriptive poetry produced in the midst of the great and catastrophic political, social, and intellectual upheavals of the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries." "Focusing on three revolutionary historical conjunctures (post-1789 in England and Germany; the years 1830, 1848, and 1871 in France; and the Russian situation from 1905 to 1917 and beyond), John MacKay discusses the improbable persistence of the inscriptive mode in light of the way the poems legitimate themselves both by imagining new configurations of audience (as part of a project of "aesthetic education") and by offering some renewed contact with the natural world."--BOOK JACKET Content: Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Inscription and Modernity -- 1. Lifeless Things: Being and Structure in Romantic Inscription -- 2. Empty and Full: Poetry, Self, and Society in Lamartine, Baudelaire, and Poncy -- 3. Kernels of the Acropolis: Poetry and Modernization in Blok, Kliuev, and Khlebnikov -- 4. Unkind Weight: Mandelstam, History, and Catastrophe -- Conclusion -- Coda: In Descending Sizes -- Notes -- Works Cited and Consulted -- Index. Cover 1 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Inscription and Modernity 14 1. Lifeless Things: Being and Structure in Romantic Inscription 52 2. Empty and Full: Poetry, Self, and Society in Lamartine, Baudelaire, and Poncy 107 3. Kernels of the Acropolis: Poetry and Modernization in Blok, Kliuev, and Khlebnikov 153 4. Unkind Weight: Mandelstam, History, and Catastrophe 183 Conclusion 214 Coda: In Descending Sizes 242 Notes 246 Works Cited and Consulted 294 Index 310 This volume carries out a speculative investigation into how, in some corners of a few of the national traditions of European lyric (namely, the English, Russian, German, and French) from roughly 1730 to 1945, a specific if highly flexible lyric form both shapes and enables responses to and reflection upon the changing historical horizon--conventionally termed''modernity''--in which the poets lived and worked. This volume carries out a speculative investigation into how, in some corners of a few of the national traditions of European lyric (namely, the English, Russian, German, and French) from roughly 1730 to 1945, a specific if highly flexible lyric form both shapes and enables responses to and reflection upon the changing historical horizon--conventionally termed ''modernity''--in which the poets lived and worked