Book Description
"Parts I and II are substantial and useful surveys of cultural and literary theory and its development, and are pretty well packed with suggestive general ideas. But for many readers the twenty-one essays of Part III, dealing with specific and more of less familiar works, may be the most provocative. These studies exemplify mythic criticism in action, in interpretations of a wide variety of authors and works, mainly of prose fiction. . . . This volume helps to consolidate the value and the diverse uses of myth for both artist and critic. . . . [Professor Vickery's] book should appeal both to the large body of the sophisticated and to what one may imagine as an also large number of people who have known that 'myth' has been very much in the air but have not been initiated into either philosophic theory or critical practice."--Douglas Bush, Harvard Educational Review."A collection without parallel. . . . Whether for historical interest in the fads and fashions of literary study or as the best single source for an overview of the best that has been said about the subject in the past 20 years, this collection is without peer."--Choice.This collection of thirty-four major essays devoted to the theories, methods, and problems of myth criticism offers a convenient and substantial introduction to one of the most distinctive trends in contemporary literary study. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, published by Thomson Gale on September 22, 2005. The length of the article is 6838 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Bridges and Housman as Elegists: the modern threshold.(Robert Bridges and A. E. Housman's works)(Critical Essay)
Author: John B. Vickery
Publication: English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 48Issue: 4Page: 404(16)

Article Type: Critical Essay

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Book Description
Lamentation of death is the traditional elegiac focus, but in the twentieth century the elegy has become characterized as well by the mourning of other kinds of loss—those personal, familial, romantic, cultural, and philosophical privations and dispossessions that have so greatly shaped the modern sensibility. According to John B. Vickery, a profound elegiac temper is itself the major trait of twentieth-century culture, registered in attitudes ranging from regret, sorrow, confusion, anger, anxiety, doubt, and alienation to outright despair. He transforms our understanding of the elegy and its relation to modernism in The Modern Elegiac Temper.

Vickery offers in-depth readings of a broad sampling of British and American poems written from World War I to the present. He considers works of overlooked poets such as Vernon Watkins, George Barker, and Edith Sitwell while also attending to canonical writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens. Taking a text-oriented rather than author- or theory-oriented approach, he discusses in turn the personal, love, cultural, and philosophical elegy and shows how war, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and other major historical events influenced poets' elegiac expressions.

By suggesting ways in which the individual-centered concerns of the traditional elegy metamorphose under the depersonalizing lens of high modernism, Vickery reveals the modern elegy to be a finely calibrated instrument for reading and expressing, absorbing and reflecting, the modern temperament.

AUTHOR BIO: John B. Vickery is the author of numerous books, including The Literary Impact of "The Golden Bough."Recent articles by him on the subject of the modern elegy have appeared in English Literature in Transition and Genre. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Riverside. ... Read more