In this ground-breaking study on the nature of philosophy, Jan Zwicky demonstrates how much of potential philosophical significance is lost if our notion of meaningful language is constrained by narrow concepts of analytic rigour. Her aim is not to dismiss the role of analysis in philosophy; rather she strives to augment its resources and thereby give to philosophy a voice with greater range and integrity. Two parallel texts, on facing pages, run through the book. The primary one is Zwicky’s, which begins with a critique of existing criteria for defining a work as philosophy, and then develops the notion of lyric in its relation to two other key terms: technology and domesticity. She finishes with an exploration of meaning, form, and content in lyric contexts. The parallel text consists of quotations from other authors. It serves as commentary on, illustration of, and reaction to, the main text; as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts; and as a way of providing an historical context for some of the main text’s claims. Highly original in its thought and presentation, Zwicky’s discussion makes an exciting contribution to contemporary philosophy, forging new connections and expanding old boundaries.

Carefully considering the difference in the philosophical potential of page poetry and performance poetry, Karen Simecek argues that it is only by considering them side by side that the unique cognitive value of each can be realised. Focusing on spoken word poetry reveals the importance of voice and embodied words to the differing epistemic rewards of engaging with contemporary works of poetry in both private reading and live performance. This concept of embodied voice progresses a new line of thinking in the cognitivism debate and unlocks the philosophical value of engaging with poetry. Simecek's discussion of performed poetry also advances discussions of affect and experience in contemporary analytic aesthetics which raise new insights and connections within the field. The moral significance of the differing effects of poetry finds comprehensive articulation through a rich philosophical analysis of the thoughts and affects which arise in particular contexts. Simecek concludes that when page poetry is treated as paradigmatic, this enables reflection in the singular, whereas taking poetry in live performance as paradigmatic enables reflection on what is shared and shareable with others.

Reading lyric poetry over the past century. The Lyric Theory Reader collects major essays on the modern idea of lyric, made available here for the first time in one place. Representing a wide range of perspectives in Anglo-American literary criticism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the collection as a whole documents the diversity and energy of ongoing critical conversations about lyric poetry. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins frame these conversations with a general introduction, bibliographies for further reading, and introductions to each of the anthology’s ten sections: genre theory, historical models of lyric, New Criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist reading, Frankfurt School approaches, phenomenologies of lyric reading, avant-garde anti-lyricism, lyric and sexual difference, and comparative lyric. Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.

In the foreword to Wisdom & Metaphor, Jan Zwicky observes that “those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly, because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world.” Wisdom & Metaphor explores the ways we come to understand the world through analogical structures, and the relation of this form of knowing to conventional epistemology and ontology. Zwicky uses the nature of the book itself, with its facing pages, to create resonant structures of aphorism and quotation which allow the reader to experience the kind of thinking she describes. The author’s wide-ranging influences, coupled with an understated, largely spatial, style of discourse, make this a remarkably original approach to long-standing questions about meaning and language. It offers a unique and compelling argument for the fundamental importance of metaphor to philosophy.

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities. “Theory of the Lyric brings Culler’s own earlier, more scattered interventions together with an eclectic selection from others’ work in service to what he identifies as a dominant need of the critical and pedagogical present: turning readers’ attention to lyric poems as verbal events, not fictions of impersonated speech. His fine, nuanced readings of particular poems and kinds of poems are crucial to his arguments. His observations on the workings of aspects of lyric across multiple different structures are the real strength of the book. It is a work of practical criticism that opens speculative vistas for poetics but always returns to poems.” —Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Theory

How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when she died in 1886, decisions about what it was that Dickinson wrote have been left to the editors, publishers, and critics who have brought Dickinson's work into public view. The familiar letters, notes on advertising fliers, verses on split-open envelopes, and collections of verses on personal stationery tied together with string have become the Dickinson poems celebrated since her death as exemplary lyrics. Jackson makes the larger argument that the century and a half spanning the circulation of Dickinson's work tells the story of a shift in the publication, consumption, and interpretation of lyric poetry. This shift took the form of what this book calls the "lyricization of poetry," a set of print and pedagogical practices that collapsed the variety of poetic genres into lyric as a synonym for poetry. Featuring many new illustrations from Dickinson's manuscripts, this book makes a major contribution to the study of Dickinson and of nineteenth-century American poetry. It maps out the future for new work in historical poetics and lyric theory.

In this book, Elissa Zellinger analyzes both political philosophy and poetic theory in order to chronicle the consolidation of the modern lyric and the liberal subject across the long nineteenth century. In the nineteenth-century United States, both liberalism and lyric sought self-definition by practicing techniques of exclusion. Liberalism was a political philosophy whose supposed universals were limited to white men and created by omitting women, the enslaved, and Native peoples. The conventions of poetic reception only redoubled the sense that liberal selfhood defined its boundaries by refusing raced and gendered others. Yet Zellinger argues that it is precisely the poetics of the excluded that offer insights into the dynamic processes that came to form the modern liberal and lyric subjects. She examines poets—Frances Sargent Osgood, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. Pauline Johnson—whose work uses lyric practices to contest the very assumptions about selfhood responsible for denying them the political and social freedoms enjoyed by full liberal subjects. In its consideration of politics and poetics, this project offers a new approach to genre and gender that will help shape the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies.