Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • Cited by 8
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2021
Print publication year:
2021
Online ISBN:
9781108990684

Book description

Poetry and Bondage is a groundbreaking and comprehensive study of the history of poetic constraint. For millennia, poets have compared verse to bondage – chains, fetters, cells, or slavery. Tracing this metaphor from Ovid through the present, Andrea Brady reveals the contributions to poetics of people who are actually in bondage. How, the book asks, does our understanding of the lyric – and the political freedoms and forms of human being it is supposed to epitomise – change, if we listen to the voices of enslaved and imprisoned poets? Bringing canonical and contemporary poets into dialogue, from Thomas Wyatt to Rob Halpern, Emily Dickinson to M. NourbeSe Philip, and Phillis Wheatley to Lisa Robertson, the book also examines poetry that emerged from the plantation and the prison. This book is a major intervention in lyric studies and literary criticism, interrogating the whiteness of those disciplines and exploring the possibilities for committed poetry today.

Reviews

‘… monumental …’

John Hawke Source: Australian Book Review

‘capacious, ambitious, judgmental, and obviously valuable.’

Stephanie Burt Source: Critical Inquiry

‘… Brady offers a much-needed re-evaluation of the now common understanding of lyric as an expression of human freedom and transcendence.’

Sarah Dowling Source: The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

‘This is such a superb and invigorating collection, breaking ground to discover the figure of our dream of lyrics song in all its lavish beauty, primitivist rhetoric and longing for ancient home in the language of the Is eye seeing itself to abstraction.’

Adam Piette Source: Blackbox Manifold

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.