Lyrical Strategies: The Poetics of the Twentieth-Century American Novel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780810136540)

Lyrical Strategies advances the highly original idea that not all literary fiction should be read as a novel. Instead, Katie Owens-Murphy identifies a prominent type of American novel well suited to the reading methods of lyric poetry and exhibiting lyric frameworks of structural repetition, rhythm, figurative meaning, dramatic personae, and exclusive address.

Owens-Murphy surveys a broad array of writers: poets from the lyrical transatlantic tradition, as well as American novelists including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy. Through a masterful reexamination of canonical works of twentieth-century American fiction through the lens of lyric poetry, she reveals how many elements in these novels can be better understood as poetic and rhetorical figures (metaphysical conceit, polysyndeton, dramatic monologue, apostrophe, and so on) than as narrative ones.

Making fresh contributions to literary theory and American fiction, Lyrical Strategies will fascinate readers and scholars of the American novel, fiction, poetry, and poetics alike.

Author: Katie Owens-Murphy
ISBN-10: 0810136546
ISBN-13: 9780810136540
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/15/2018
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.60d