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Synopsis
To what extent can the consolations of a poetry of loss be made to seem reasonable--even compelling--to readers living today? In the first book to ask whether a historical and critical knowledge of the genre elegy is still really possible, W. David Shaw shows how the elegist's testing of conventions poses new crises for understanding and new shocks to values and beliefs from one generation to the next.
Shaw argues that the idea of an elusive truth, of an apparent contradiction that invites resolution, explains the power of many elegies we read. After exploring paradoxes of performative language and circular form in classical and confessional elegies, respectively, he examines the paradoxes of a silent-speaking word in Romantic elegy and paradoxes of breakdown and breakthrough in modern elegy. A contrast between strong and weak mourners in Ben Jonson's and Henry King's elegies, between impact and tremor in Tennyson's elegies, and between tough- and tender-minded mourners in Frost's "Home Burial," suggests that reading elegies, like writing them, is more than an academic exercise; it is also a life-and-death issue.
Though a polemical book--written out of an urgent and timely sense of the importance of a humane, experience-based testing of elegy's rhetoric and conventions--Elegy and Paradox also retraces a pathgreat elegists have always followed when modifying tradition and relating what is new in their poems to conventional elements.
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About the Author
W. David Shaw is professor of English at Victoria College, University of Toronto. His books include Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age, and Tennyson's Style.
Review
"Shaw's views are important because they uncover, in a highly competent scholarly fashion, some of the mysteries of a mysteriously complex poetic subgenre." -- Virginia Quarterly Review
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- PublisherThe Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication date1994
- ISBN 10 0801848369
- ISBN 13 9780801848360
- BindingHardcover
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages296
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Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions
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