The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature

by Damian Walford Davies (Contribution by), Emma Mason (Contribution by), Harriet Devine Jump (Contribution by), Hugh Haughton (Contribution by), John Bayley (Contribution by)

Overview

The Monstrous Debt traces the diverse influences of the Romantics in twentieth-century literature, examining the ways in which twentieth-century writers have constructed their own versions of Romanticism.

The authors in this collection join an animated debate on the persistence of Romanticism. Even as dominant twentieth-century cultural movements have contested Romantic "myths" of redemptive Nature, individualism, perfectibility, the transcendence of art, and the heart’s affections, the Romantic legacy survives as a point of tension and of inspiration for modern writers. Rejecting the Bloomian notion of anxious revisionism, The Monstrous Debt argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known twentieth-century authors and canonical Romantic writers.

Among the questions asked by this volume are: How does Blake’s graphic mythology submit to "redemptive translations" in the work of Dylan Thomas? How might Ted Hughes’s strong readings of a "snaky" Coleridge illuminate the "mercurial" poetic identity of Sylvia Plath? How does Shelley "sustain" the work of W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop with supplies of "imaginative oxygen"? In what ways does Keats enable Bob Dylan to embrace influence? How does Keats prove inadequate for Tony Harrison as he confronts contemporary violence? How does "cockney" Romanticism succeed in shocking John Betjeman’s poetry out of kitsch into something new and strange?

The Monstrous Debt seeks to broaden our sense of what "influence" is by defining the complex of relations that contribute to the making of the modern literary text. Scholars and students of the Romantic era will enjoy this informative volume.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814330586
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	09/14/2006
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Damian Walford Davies and Richard Marggraf Turley are co-directors of the Centre for Romantic Studies at University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Table of Contents

Foreword   Lucy Newlyn     vii
Acknowledgments     xv
Introduction   Damian Walford Davies   Richard Marggraf Turley     1
"In the Path of Blake": Dylan Thomas's "Altarwise by Owl-Light"   Damian Walford Davies     11
"One Cry for Justice": Virginia Woolf Reads Mary Wollstonecraft   Harriet Devine Jump     41
Power and Hiding Places: Wordsworth and Seamus Heaney   Hugh Haughton     61
"Beauty, Resonance, Integrity": Creative Rereadings of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century American Poetry   Lisa M. Steinman     101
Coleridge, Ted Hughes, and Sylvia Plath: Mythology and Identity   John Beer     123
"The All-Sustaining Air": Yeats, Stevens, Rich, Bishop-Responses to Romantic Poetry   Michael O'Neill     143
John Keats and Tony Harrison: The Burden of History   John Whale     163
"Johnny's in the Basement": Keats, Bob Dylan, and the End of Influence   Richard Marggraf Turley     181
"Love's the burning boy": Hemans's Critical Legacy   Emma Mason     205
Overcoming Kitsch: Thoughts on Linguistic and Class Resource from Keats to Betjeman   John Bayley     225
Contributors     233
Index     237
Credits     245

What People are Saying About This

Professor of English, University of Leeds - Edward Larrissy

Even as 'Romanticism' itself has been radically re-defined over the past twenty years, there has also been a growing sense of the strength of the continuing influence of literature of the Romantic period. This collection of essays by leading critics who work in this complex interpretative field represents an important contribution to an expanding field of scholarly endeavor and sheds new light on some of the most significant writers of the last hundred years."

Professor of English at the University of Toronto - Alan Bewell

A rich and continually engaging study of the influence of Romanticism on twentieth-century poets, from Dylan Thomas to the Minnesota folksinger who adopted his name. Anyone interested in the subtle ways in which Romantic poetry lives and breathes in twentieth-century poetry will find much to value in this collection of essays. Here a sophisticated model of poetic influence is developed that lets poems speak to other poems, and poets to other poets, without getting so anxious that they lose their personal and historical voice."

Professor of English, University of St Andrews, Scotland - Nicholas Roe

In these brilliant new essays, leading critics alert us to the urgent, animated conversations between Romantic and modern writers. Each essay is sharply attuned to the zest in these exchanges, and to the astonishing diversity of contemporary creative encounters with Romantic language and vision. Critically smart, theoretically geared, and historically astute, every page brings fresh intelligence of how Romanticism and its inheritors are still speaking to tomorrow, ready to go anywhere."

Editorial Reviews

Even as 'Romanticism' itself has been radically re-defined over the past twenty years, there has also been a growing sense of the strength of the continuing influence of literature of the Romantic period. This collection of essays by leading critics who work in this complex interpretative field represents an important contribution to an expanding field of scholarly endeavor and sheds new light on some of the most significant writers of the last hundred years."

professor of English, University of Leeds - Edward Larrissy

A rich and continually engaging study of the influence of Romanticism on twentieth-century poets, from Dylan Thomas to the Minnesota folksinger who adopted his name. Anyone interested in the subtle ways in which Romantic poetry lives and breathes in twentieth-century poetry will find much to value in this collection of essays. Here a sophisticated model of poetic influence is developed that lets poems speak to other poems, and poets to other poets, without getting so anxious that they lose their personal and historical voice."

professor of English at the University of Toronto - Alan Bewell

In these brilliant new essays, leading critics alert us to the urgent, animated conversations between Romantic and modern writers. Each essay is sharply attuned to the zest in these exchanges, and to the astonishing diversity of contemporary creative encounters with Romantic language and vision. Critically smart, theoretically geared, and historically astute, every page brings fresh intelligence of how Romanticism and its inheritors are still speaking to tomorrow, ready to go anywhere."

professor of English, University of St Andrews, Scotland - Nicholas Roe