Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric

by Virginia Jackson
Sold out
Current price ₹5,670.00
Original price ₹8,100.00
Original price ₹8,100.00
Original price ₹8,100.00
(-30%)
₹5,670.00
Current price ₹5,670.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Hardcover
  • ISBN13: 9780691232799
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Princeton University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 312
  • Original Price: INR 8100.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 622 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): American / African American & Black, Modern / 19th Century, and Comparative Literature

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

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--as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--Virginia 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--Black, White, male, female, Indigenous--almost 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 "the deep design" of American lyric.

Virginia Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton) and the editor (with Yopie Prins) of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us