Buy This

Literature

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric

How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuries

Paperback

50% off with code BLOOM50

Sale Price:
$17.50/拢15.00
Price:
$35.00/拢30.00
ISBN:
Published:
Feb 14, 2023
Copyright:
2023
Pages:
320
Size:
6.13 x 9.25 in.
Illus:
24 b/w illus.

Before Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper鈥攁s well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow鈥擵irginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people鈥擝lack, White, male, female, Indigenous鈥攁lmost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry.

A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called 鈥渢he deep design鈥� of American lyric.