What's the Import ?

Kerry McSWEENEY, What's the Import ? Nineteenth-Century Poems and Contemporary Critical Practice, Montréal-Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 224 p.
ISBN 0773532021


SUMMARY

Two conspicuous features of the radical transformation of literary studies over the past three decades have been the dominance of theory-based interpretative discourse and cultural studies contextualizations. Both have greatly energized literary studies - but they have done so at a cost.

Kerry McSweeney critiques such readings of Romantic, Victorian, and 19th-century American poems. In What's the Import? he proposes and exemplifies an aesthetic or intrinsic critical model rooted in literary-historical contextualization that considers the determination of meanings to be only one of the qualities that full engagement with a poem requires. His wide-ranging study discusses poems by Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Carroll, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, Hopkins, Hardy, and the Michael Field poets. What's the Import? contributes to the current debates in North America about the state and direction of English studies and the teaching of literature in general.


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction 3

2 Performing “The Solitary Reaper” and “Tears, idle tears” 10

3 Victorian Poems on Paintings 28

4 Indefinitiveness of Meaning in Parabolic Poems 47

5 Aesthetic and Ethical Value in Bigg’s “An Irish Picture” 67

6 The Cruxes of Whitman's “The Sleepers” 73

7 Grief as a Lyric Subject in Dickinson 87

8 Hopkins’ Godless Poems 108

9 Influence and Resistance in Hardy’s Poetry 124

10 Afterword: Two Browning Poems 143

Notes 149

Works Cited 157

Index 171


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kerry McSweeney is Molson Professor of English, McGill University, and the author of numerous works, including The Language of the Senses: Sensory-Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson.