Elizabeth Bishops Prosaic
Cód:
491_9781611486810
Elizabeth Bishop is now recognized as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century-a uniquely cosmopolitan writer with connections to the US, Canada, Brazil, and also the UK, given her neglected borrowings from many English authors, and her strong influence on modern British verse. Yet the dominant biographical/psychoanalytical approach leaves her style relatively untouched-and it is vital that an increasing focus on archival material does not replace our attention to the writing itself. Bishops verse is often compared with prose (sometimes insultingly); writing fiction, she worried she was really writing poems. But what truly is the difference between poetry and prose-structurally, conceptually, historically speaking? Is prose simply formalized speech, or does it have rhythms of its own? Ravinthiran seeks an answer to this question through close analysis of Bishops prose-like verse, her literary prose, her prose poems, and her letter prose. This title is a provocation. It demands that we reconsider the pejorative quality of the word prosaic; playing on mosaic, Ravinthiran uses Bishops thinking about prose to approach-for the first time-her work in multiple genres as a stylistic whole.Elizabeth Bishops Prosaic is concerned not only with her inimitable style, but also larger questions to do with the Anglo-American shift from closed to open forms in the twentieth century. This study identifies not just borrowings from, but rich intertextual relationships with, writers as diverse as-among others-Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Flannery OConnor, and Dorothy Richardson. (Though Bishop criticized Woolf, she in particular is treated as a central and thus far neglected precursor, crucial to our understanding of Bishop as a feminist poet.) Finally, the sustained discussion of how the history of prose frames effects of rhythm, syntax, and acoustic texture-in both Bishops prose proper and her prosaic verse-extends a body of research which seeks
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