Poetry, Media, and the Material Body
Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

A study of the tradition in nineteenth-century thought that imagines the body as one of the reproductive media of poetry.

Ashley Miller (Author)

9781108408585, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 November 2020

211 pages
23 x 16 x 1.2 cm, 0.32 kg

'Miller's book is consistently insightful, imaginative, and well written, brimming with virtuosic readings that range across a wide variety of texts and disciplines … A valuable contribution to nineteenth-century scholarship, it brilliantly recalibrates the connections not only among literary texts, somatic experience, and emerging technology, but also among writers, readers, and critics.' Veronica Alfano, Victorian Studies

From the Romantic fascination with hallucinatory poetics to the turn-of-the-century mania for automatic writing, poetry in nineteenth-century Britain appears at crucial times to be oddly involuntary, out of the control of its producers and receivers alike. This elegant study addresses the question of how people understood those forms of written creativity that seem to occur independently of the writer's will. Through the study of the century's media revolutions, evolving theories of physiology, and close readings of the works of nineteenth-century poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson, Ashley Miller articulates how poetry was imagined to promote involuntary bodily responses in both authors and readers, and how these responses enlist the body as a medium that does not produce poetry but rather reproduces it. This is a poetics that draws attention to, rather than effaces, the mediacy of the body in the processes of composition and reception.

Introduction: the material muse in nineteenth-century poetry
1. Striking passages: vision, memory, and the romantic imprint
2. Internal impressions: self-sympathy and the poetry of sensation
3. Listening with the mouth: Tennyson's deaths of Arthur
4. Poetic afterlives: automatic writing and the mechanics of quotation
Conclusion: the autonomous poem: new criticism and the stock response
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Poetry [DC]