scholarly journals Concrete Horizons: Romantic Irony in the Poetry of David Malouf and Samuel Wagan Watson

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Barratt-Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Romanticism ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-189
Author(s):  
Rolf Lessenich

Though treated marginally in histories of philosophy and criticism, Byron was deeply involved in Romantic-Period controversies. In that post-Enlightenment, science-orientated age, the Platonic-Romantic concept of inspiration as divine afflatus linking the prophet-priest-poet with the ideal world beyond was no longer tenable without an admixture of doubt that turned religion into myth. As a seriously-minded Romantic sceptic in the Pyrrhonian tradition and commuter between the genres of sensibility and satire, Byron often refers to the prophet-poet concept, acting it out in pre-Decadent poses of inspiration, yet undercutting it with his typical Romantic Irony. In contrast to Goethe, who insisted on an inspired poet's sanity, he saw inspiration both as a social distinction and as a pathological norm deviation. The more imaginative and poetical the creation, the more insane is the poet's mind; the more realistic and prosaic, the more compos it is, though an active poet is never quite sane in the sense of Coleridge's ‘depression’, meaning his non-visitation by his ‘shaping spirit of imagination’.


1981 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 192-196
Author(s):  
Susan Wolfson
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 115-126
Author(s):  
Jesús Bolaño Quintero

By analysing Dave Eggers’s autofictional work A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this article attempts to reveal the role of this author in the post-postmodern narrative of the turn of the millennium. Following in the wake of David Foster Wallace, Eggers’s solution to overcome the problems created by postmodernism is a kind of writing based on honesty. Through a rebirth of the author, the objective of Eggers’s New Sincerity is the democratization of narrative in order to create a sensibility network aimed at ending the solipsism brought about by postmodern linguistic relativism. However, this new sensibility is reminiscent of pre-postmodern fundamentalism. The use of meta-metafiction based on the use of neo-Romantic irony enables Eggers to create an escape valve that allows for the creation of a metamodern oscillation—as described by Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-95
Author(s):  
Suzie Gibson

By the time poet David Malouf wrote Johnno (1976), his first work of prose fiction, he was in his late thirties and living in the Renaissance city of Florence. Both European Florence and antipodean Brisbane mirror and enfold the novel's eponymous hero, Johnno, and his narrator-creator, Dante. The Florentine poet, and by extension his medieval trappings, resonate throughout a tale about growing up in a frontier town far removed from the cosmopolitan centres of the Northern Hemisphere. This Italian connection can be explored further by considering Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1997) alongside Johnno. The depiction of Venice in Calvino's novel can operate as a point of contrast and comparison to the river city of Brisbane, conjured by Malouf's Dante.


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