Poetry, Media, and the Material Body

Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Ashley Miller author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:9th Aug '18

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Poetry, Media, and the Material Body cover

A study of the tradition in nineteenth-century thought that imagines the body as one of the reproductive media of poetry.

This book investigates the often surprising intersections and overlaps between three infrequently related fields: studies of poetry, studies of media, and studies of the body. At these intersections a neglected nineteenth-century theory of poetry becomes visible, one that imagines the body as a reproductive medium for poetry.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.

'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 Studies

ISBN: 9781108418966

Dimensions: 235mm x 157mm x 15mm

Weight: 490g

210 pages