Jonathan Mayhew
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226512037
- eISBN:
- 9780226512051
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226512051.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
No study of Lorca's poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, this chapter turns to a set of purely domestic ...
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No study of Lorca's poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, this chapter turns to a set of purely domestic criteria that have little to do with Lorca as he might appear within his own cultural context. Lorca was particularly attractive to poets seeking to define a new variety of American cultural nationalism. He arrived on the scene as an alien figure, strongly identified with a quite different brand of national exceptionalism—that of Spain itself. Far from being an obstacle, however, Lorca's foreignness proved useful to those in search of a form of American cultural nationalism that might stand opposed to cold war politics. Lorca's poetry came to the fore with the poets associated with The New American Poetry, an anthology published in 1960. The contributions of African American and gay male poets are especially noteworthy during this period, but there is also a more generic Lorquismo, characterized by a tone of naive enthusiasm and by a proliferation of abusive citations of the duende.Less
No study of Lorca's poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, this chapter turns to a set of purely domestic criteria that have little to do with Lorca as he might appear within his own cultural context. Lorca was particularly attractive to poets seeking to define a new variety of American cultural nationalism. He arrived on the scene as an alien figure, strongly identified with a quite different brand of national exceptionalism—that of Spain itself. Far from being an obstacle, however, Lorca's foreignness proved useful to those in search of a form of American cultural nationalism that might stand opposed to cold war politics. Lorca's poetry came to the fore with the poets associated with The New American Poetry, an anthology published in 1960. The contributions of African American and gay male poets are especially noteworthy during this period, but there is also a more generic Lorquismo, characterized by a tone of naive enthusiasm and by a proliferation of abusive citations of the duende.
David Loewenstein
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- March 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198821892
- eISBN:
- 9780191861024
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198821892.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature, Milton Studies
Recent scholarship has devoted increasing critical attention to the complexities of Milton’s expressions of nationalism and England’s exceptionalism, although with less attention to his early works. ...
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Recent scholarship has devoted increasing critical attention to the complexities of Milton’s expressions of nationalism and England’s exceptionalism, although with less attention to his early works. This chapter examines Milton’s Ludlow Maske (1634) in order to address the young writer’s efforts to assert himself as an author engaged in debates about remaking English nationhood. Milton treats significant national issues uniquely at a moment when the Caroline masque, including Thomas Carew’s lavish Coelum Britannicum (1634), was giving national exceptionalism spectacular representation. In A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle the notion of refashioned English nationhood remains an ideal not yet realized in ‘this dim spot / Which men call Earth’; English nationhood requires continual and strenuous testing. A Maske looks forward to the arduous remaking of godly English nationhood that would characterize Milton’s controversial writings during the crises of the revolutionary decades and their aftermath.Less
Recent scholarship has devoted increasing critical attention to the complexities of Milton’s expressions of nationalism and England’s exceptionalism, although with less attention to his early works. This chapter examines Milton’s Ludlow Maske (1634) in order to address the young writer’s efforts to assert himself as an author engaged in debates about remaking English nationhood. Milton treats significant national issues uniquely at a moment when the Caroline masque, including Thomas Carew’s lavish Coelum Britannicum (1634), was giving national exceptionalism spectacular representation. In A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle the notion of refashioned English nationhood remains an ideal not yet realized in ‘this dim spot / Which men call Earth’; English nationhood requires continual and strenuous testing. A Maske looks forward to the arduous remaking of godly English nationhood that would characterize Milton’s controversial writings during the crises of the revolutionary decades and their aftermath.
Peter Messent
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853237365
- eISBN:
- 9781846312540
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853237365.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter explores another foundational myth of American civilization, the Western frontier, in Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy. It analyzes the novelist's use of and deviations from classic ...
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This chapter explores another foundational myth of American civilization, the Western frontier, in Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy. It analyzes the novelist's use of and deviations from classic Western motifs, and shows that ‘Standard American myths of heroic male individualism and national exceptionalism are endorsed, but also increasingly interrogated, in ambiguous texts which both rely on the formulas of Western narrative but also extend and subvert their patternings’. The ambiguities in the texts include questions about autonomous action in a deterministic or otherwise controlling universe; the complications that arise when American exceptionalism interacts with the even older and as deeply rooted national myths of Mexico; and the contrasts between those elements that earn the novels their popularity and those which give them philosophical and allusive depth.Less
This chapter explores another foundational myth of American civilization, the Western frontier, in Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy. It analyzes the novelist's use of and deviations from classic Western motifs, and shows that ‘Standard American myths of heroic male individualism and national exceptionalism are endorsed, but also increasingly interrogated, in ambiguous texts which both rely on the formulas of Western narrative but also extend and subvert their patternings’. The ambiguities in the texts include questions about autonomous action in a deterministic or otherwise controlling universe; the complications that arise when American exceptionalism interacts with the even older and as deeply rooted national myths of Mexico; and the contrasts between those elements that earn the novels their popularity and those which give them philosophical and allusive depth.
