The American Love Lyric After Auschwitz and Hiroshima (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780312238650)

Citing the massive horrors of the Nazi death camps and the domestic violence behind a woman's suicide, Adrienne Rich challenges a fellow poet: 'would it relieve you to decide/Poetry doesn't make this happen?' In this provocative reassessment of the modern American love lyric, Barbara L. Estrin chronicles the return of three major American poets (Wallace Stevens in the late forties and fifties, Robert Lowell in the Seventies, and Adrienne Rich in the nineties) to the mid-century catastrophes that gave rise to such thorny questions. Through close readings of individual poems (and drawing upon the gender and genre theories of Jean Fran輟is Lyotard, Judith Butler, Melanie Klien, and Jacques Lacan), Estrin counters the usual presuppositions that the lyric remains sequestered in a-political isolation, and offers a new, revisionist critique of American poetry.

Author: B. Estrin
ISBN-10: 0312238657
ISBN-13: 9780312238650
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Language: English
Published: 02/08/2002
Pages: 253
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.94lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.78w x 0.94d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2003 pg. 1182