Distant Reading
Regular price
€28.50
A01=Peter Middleton
anthology
Author_Peter Middleton
Category=DSA
Category=DSC
close reading
collection of essays
creative
creative writing
cultural practice
culture
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
essays
literary criticism
literature
poetic conventions
poetic style
poetics
poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9780817351519
- Weight: 412g
- Dimensions: 163 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 13 Mar 2005
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance. Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter 'I' in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition. The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls 'distant reading,' interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates. Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance - recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen - rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.
Peter Middleton is Professor of English at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, and author of Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (coauthored with Tim Woods), The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Aftermath (poems).
