(DOWNLOAD) "Doing Things with Poems: Performativity and Cultural Form." by Victorian Poetry * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Doing Things with Poems: Performativity and Cultural Form.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 186 KB
Description
As one who works on women's poetry (in my case, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon), my critical approach entails reflection on the period's constitution as a field of study. Hence a critical skepticism of the terms Romantic and Victorian. Whither Victorian poetry? Well, first, into the long nineteenth century. Second, out of the critical orphanage. While Romanticism has had a long-standing association with theoretical reflection, Victorian poetry has often appeared in search of a theory to call its own. Now that romanticists have dismissed deconstruction for a historicism which no longer looks new (while declining the invitation to help repair the idealist/materialist rift), perhaps we will see "Victorian" poetry emerge as a stage for critical innovation. The construction of this stage is indebted to the theoretical heavyweights of the nineties, cultural studies and queer theory. In the space of fifteen years queer theorists brought feminism to her knees, rendered gender conceptually redundant, and produced one of the major paradigm shifts of the last part of the century. Given that queer theory found its footing in late nineteenth-century literary representation, it should come as no surprise to find its influence in so much innovative work on poetry in the field. (1) Crucially, queer theory taught us that attentiveness to the historically constructed nature of things is not enough, that there is a point at which our categories of thought produce what they claim to categorize. The dual allegiance to cultural constructivism and the cultural work of epistemology has perhaps allowed queer theory to come closest to mediating the idealist/materialist divide.