did-you-know? rent-now

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

9780192895714

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

  • ISBN 13:

    9780192895714

  • ISBN 10:

    0192895710

  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 03/16/2022
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press

List Price $101.33 Save

Rent $57.18
TERM PRICE DUE
Added Benefits of Renting

Free Shipping Both Ways Free Shipping Both Ways
Highlight/Take Notes Like You Own It Highlight/Take Notes Like You Own It
Purchase/Extend Before Due Date Purchase/Extend Before Due Date

List Price $101.33 Save $1.01

New $100.32

Usually Ships in 3-5 Business Days

We Buy This Book Back We Buy This Book Back!

Included with your book

Free Shipping On Every Order Free Shipping On Every Order

Note: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.

Extend or Purchase Your Rental at Any Time

Need to keep your rental past your due date? At any time before your due date you can extend or purchase your rental through your account.

Summary

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies--whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top.

While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects.

This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.

Author Biography

Read more