Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism [Hardcover]

Epic Negationexamines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound's poem including history to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content.This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.The history of the epic-ranging from the heroic narratives of cultural origin found in Homer and Virgil to the tumultuous theological and political conflicts depicted by Dante or Milton-is nearly as old as literature itself. But the epic is also made and remade by its present, adapted to the pressures and formal necessities of its particular cultural moment. Examining modernist poetry's epic turn in the years between the two World Wars, C.D. Blanton's ambitious study charts the inversion of what Ezra Pound called a poem including history into a fractured and hollowed form, a negated epic that struggles not only to acknowledge the distant past but also to conceive its immediate present. Compelled to register the force of a larger historical totality it cannot directly rePart IThe Dialectical Poetics of Late ModernismDialectical PoeticsAn Organ of Documentation: Eliot and OrderDate Line: Including HistoryEliotic Marxism: Notes Toward a Dialectic of CulturePart IIA poem is not poetryAuden's MonadologyMacNeice's Dying FallH.D.'s IncidentsNotesIndexAttends to three key moments in which the question of the interwar modernist epic was most intensely posedBlanton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. He is coeditor of A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Blackwell, 2009). ...[An] ambitious, scholarly investigation into how certain modernist poets...handle history.... This volume...open[s] an iml“