
Poetry, Media, and the Material Body
Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Ashley Miller(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 9. August 2018
Book
Hardback
210 pages
978-1-108-41896-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'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 StudiesMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
465 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-41896-6 (9781108418966)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Book
11/2020
Cambridge University Press
€48.60
Shipment within 15-20 days

E-Book
08/2018
Cambridge University Press
€21.99
Available for download

E-Book
07/2018
Cambridge University Press
€88.99
Available for download
Person
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.
Content
Introduction: the material muse in nineteenth-century poetry; 1. Striking passages: vision, memory, and the romantic imprint; 2. Internal impressions: self-sympathy and the poetry of sensation; 3. Listening with the mouth: Tennyson's deaths of Arthur; 4. Poetic afterlives: automatic writing and the mechanics of quotation; Conclusion: the autonomous poem: new criticism and the stock response; Bibliography.