"UNDER-TIDES": CONTRAST AND AMBIGUITY IN MEREDITH'S NARRATIVE POEMS.
Item
-
Title
-
"UNDER-TIDES": CONTRAST AND AMBIGUITY IN MEREDITH'S NARRATIVE POEMS.
-
Identifier
-
AAI8023700
-
identifier
-
8023700
-
Creator
-
ELIASSON, BARBARA KEATING.
-
Date
-
1980
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
Meredith's poetry has often been studied by critics eager to use the poetry as sources of the Meredithian "philosophy." Two related effects stem from such an approach: the literary value of individual poems is frequently ignored, and the narrative poetry--with the single extraordinary exception of "Modern Love"--is often neglected.;My primary concern, then, is the critical analysis of selected narrative poems, but to avoid dissertation sprawl, I establish certain technical and temporal limits. First, I use the idea of narrative poetry merely as a principle of selection, and the words "narrative poetry" as a descriptive term for those poems that tell a story. I am not studying the nature or use of narrative in poetry, or any narrative theory divorced from study of the individual poems.;Second, the poems included for study are from the 1851, 1862, 1883 and 1887 volumes only; each of the first three chapters is a discussion of a single volume. The 1887 volume, Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, contains half a dozen substantial narrative poems; that volume forms the subject matter of Chapters IV and V.;Third, some Meredith poems--"Love in the Valley," for example--are familiar; many are not (some, fortunately). To "place" the narrative poems, Chapters I through IV open with comments on the non-narrative poems of each volume.;Finally, to narrow the critical range, in the narratives I concentrate on Meredith's use of contrasted idea and image, the clustering of images with overlapping connotations, and, in the more complex narrative poems, the opposition of entire image patterns. Such oppositions may undercut, or at least qualify, the apparent significance of a poem; as we study Meredith's narrative poems, we should become "'ware of undertides.".
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
