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Not for an Age? Robert Lowell’s Historical Moment

  • Thomas Austenfeld EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 5. November 2016
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Aus der Zeitschrift Anglia Band 134 Heft 4

Abstract

Literary periodization is still a useful practice, but in constant need of revision. As we approach the centenary of Robert Lowell’s birth in 2017, a critical reexamination of the contested concept of an ‘age of Lowell’ is required, both because of its unwarranted, apparently magisterial claim and its untapped potential. This essay recalls the historical circumstances of Irvin Ehrenpreis’s coining of that term and its fraught reception history. Three arguments remain significant: Lowell’s historical position and his own, strongly historicizing poetry changed the poetic discourse of the 1960s and beyond; Lowell participated in and helped shape the ‘identitarian’ turn of the 1960s, and Lowell’s 1973 volume History marked the conclusion of his age-crafting and personal myth-making project. The essay concludes with a brief look at Lowell’s biological age, heretofore rarely considered in Lowell studies. The ‘age of Lowell’ deserves a fresh interpretation.

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Published Online: 2016-11-5
Published in Print: 2016-11-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Grass-Bed: A Poetic Compound in the Alliterative Tradition
  4. Middle English Counter-Rivere
  5. Dialect Boundaries and Dialect Translation: The Case of Middle Scots and Middle English
  6. Between Homonymy and Polysemy: The Origins and Career of the English Form Dialect in the Sixteenth Century
  7. ‘Übersetzen’ als Kulturprozess: Thesen zur Dynamis gemachter Welten
  8. Not for an Age? Robert Lowell’s Historical Moment
  9. Reviews
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  11. Daphné Kerremans. A Web of New Words: A Corpus-Based Study of the Conventionalization Process of English Neologisms. English Corpus Linguistics 15. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2015, 278 pp., 21 tables, 50 figures, € 56.00/£ 45.00/$ 72.95.
  12. Jack Grieve. Regional Variation in Written American English. Studies in English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, xviii + 335 pp., 81 figures, 35 tables, £ 69.99.
  13. Hans-Peter Wagner. An Introduction to British and Irish Fiction: Renaissance to Romanticism. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014, 262 pp., 60 illustr., € 29.50.
  14. Birgit Neumann (ed.). Präsenz und Evidenz fremder Dinge im Europa des 18. Jahrhunderts. Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert – Supplementa 19. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015, 576 pp., 57 illustr., € 49.00.
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  21. Books Received
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