Overview

How does modern poetry from Donne to Ashbery provide occasions for rethinking the scope and limits of the literary canon? This question is not simply concerned with literature in English but addresses the problem of how texts transform the reader’s experience of literature in the wake of modernity. This study shows how an experience of absence is the starting point for a reversal that occurs whenever reading transforms an engagement with the world. The eight chapters that comprise this study offer revisionary readings of key poetic works and a new way of understanding the modern canon. 

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9783032071231

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William D. Melaney is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at The American University in Cairo, Egypt. His current teaching fields include Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century European Literature, the history of literary criticism, hermeneutics, and recent work in criticism. William has published three books on modernism as a literary and philosophical concept: After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics (2001); Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse (2012); and Alterity and Criticism: Tracing Time in Modern Literature (2017), as well as the book Figural Space: Semiotics and the Aesthetic Imaginary (2021), which explores a new approach to literature in adopting Julia Kristeva’s semiotics as the starting point for reinterpreting Freud and Hegel. 

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