Overview

This study analyzes post-Romantic prose whose authors--in terms of race, gender, class, nationality, and more--occupy a range of subject-positions. Unlike poetry, modern literary prose has no rhetorical repertoire or structure (beyond those of grammar) that one could tabulate. As a result, it becomes a zone of experimentation and spontaneous creativity, as well as a means to investigate the concept of spontaneity, understood as post-secular. Heeding separate histories and peculiar particularities, this volume reveals writers discovering their ideas as they go, in prose whose sound, rhythm, syntax, and imagery escapes the preordained. There are chapters on William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (and Hindu philosophy), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence and Saul Bellow, Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adil Jussawalla, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. These writers are intelligently vexed by two transitions: first, the movement from impulse into form; and second, the overlap between literary forms and social forms. They explore the yearning for renovated societies which, expressive of our deepest selves, would also enable those selves--in times of panicked fragmentation, moral relativism, and communication imperiled--to interact as citizens.

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9780198852155

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To read prose for spontaneity is to imaginatively experience prose being spontaneously rewritten. Ravinthiran models this experience delightfully, in a range of texts whose delights have been kept from literary criticism far too long. * Brian Gingrich, ALH Online Review *

Author Information

Vidyan Ravinthiran is Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard and he is author of two award-winning books of verse. His first monograph, Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015) won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. He has compiled editions of Indian poets and has published a range of both scholarly and journalistic articles on the cognitions of form in both poetry and prose, encompassing works from multiple time-periods and nations. He helps organize Ledbury Emerging Critics, a UK/US scheme for increasing racial diversity in review-culture.

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