The Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History
- ISBN-10
- 022635427X
- ISBN-13
- 9780226354279
- Category
- Art
- Pages
- 170
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-05-31
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Author
- John Hollander
Description
In this book, based on unpublished lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, the late John Hollander explores the poetic lives and afterlives of shadow, focusing on British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Hollander uncovers the myriad literary identities assumed by shadow its force as a metaphoric mirror, as material for parable, a form of knowledge, and a mode of vision. He shows us what kind of thinking can be done with and in shadow, and what love of shadow amounts to. In particular, he traces the history of how shadows acquire in poetry a mysterious substance the paradoxical means through which a thing, by nature secondary and passing, grabs at authority and becomes itself a source of life. In Hollander s poetic examples, shadow shows itself as a kind of light, clarifying things as much as it darkens them, even as it becomes a name for doubt and the unnamable. Hollander and the poets he discusses give us shadow as companion, comforter, and questioner; creator, stalker, and ghost; witness, destroyer, and double. If the book s argument suggests at moments an anatomy of melancholy, the shadow here is also an occasion of continuous wonder, an opening to the gifts of time."
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- 2016-05-31
- 192 pages
- Ebook
- University of Chicago Press
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