Last Things
Emily Bronte's Poems
Published on 22. February 2007
Book
Hardback
200 pages
978-0-19-929818-1 (ISBN)
Description
At present, Emily Bronte's poetry is more frequently celebrated than read. Ironically, the very uniqueness of her poems has made them less interesting to current feminist critics than other poems written by Victorian women. Last Things seeks to reinstate Emily Bronte's poems at the heart of Romantic and Victorian concerns while at the same time underlining their enduring relevance for readers today. It presents the poems as the achievement of a powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience of the world and seeking always an abrogation of human limits compatible with a stern morality. It develops Georges Bataille's insight that it doesn't matter whether Bronte had a mystical experience because she 'reached the very essence of such an experience'. Although the book does not discuss all of Bronte's poems, it seeks to be comprehensive by undertaking an analysis of individual poems, the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, her poetical fragments and her writing practice, and her motives for writing poetry. For admirers of Wuthering Heights, Last Things will bring the concerns and methods of the novel into sharper focus by relating them to the poems.
Reviews / Votes
Janet Gezari's book has received well-deserved critical acclaim. * Debra San, Essays in Criticism * the most sensitive, sympathetic, discriminating account of the work to date... powerful, persuasive * Beth Newman, Review of English Studies * ...a powerful, persuasive, often moving reading of poems, Bronte's poetry that reveals a subtle craftsmanship in the service of an unorthodox vision...Last Things gives not only devoted readers of Bronte (the usual audience for the poems), but all who care about the poetics of lyric, ways and reasons to read the poems with attention, interest and pleasure. * Beth Newman, The Review of English Studies * Gezari, editor of Emily Jane Bronte: The Complete Poems, is an excellent guide to work, that Virginia Woolf thought would outlive Bronte's famous novel. Doubtless, the book is aimed at students and academics, but there is much here for the general reader. * The Book Depository * Absorbing...[Gezari's] thoughtful and sustained engagement with Emily Bronte's poetry has nothing of the brittle 'argument' of much contemporary critical discourse. Last Things provides an example of what reinvigorated critical humanism might look like. * Joe Phelan, TLS * A significant and important addition. * BronteBlog *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
6 b/w plates
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
385 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-929818-1 (9780199298181)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
07/2008
Oxford University Press
€45.79
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Janet Gezari received her BA degree from Cornell University and her PhD from Yale University. She has been teaching at Connecticut College, where she is the Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Professor of English, since 1970. She is the editor of Emily Bronte: The Complete Poems (Penguin, 1991) and the author of Charlotte Bronte and Defensive Conduct: The Author and the Body at Risk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Her book on Charlotte Bronte was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice in 1993 and jointly awarded the rose Mary Crawshay Prize by the British Academy in 1994. she has also published articles on the Brontes, George Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and Bob Dylan.
Content
Introduction: And First ; 1. Last Things ; 2. Fathoming 'Remembrance' ; 3. Outcomes and Endings ; 4. Fragments ; 5. The First Last Thing ; 6. Posthumous Bronte