Always Learning
Reading Poetry

Reading Poetry

An Introduction
2nd Edition

Tom Furniss, Mike Bath

Jun 2007, Paperback, 648 pages
ISBN13: 9780582894204
ISBN10: 0582894204
For orders to USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Japan visit your local Pearson website
£25.99
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Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Successive chapters introduce key skills and critical or theoretical issues, enabling users to read poetry with enjoyment, insight and an awareness of the implications of what they are doing.

This new edition includes a new chapter on ‘Post-colonial Poetry’, a substantial increase in the number of end-of-chapter interactive exercises, and a comprehensive Glossary of poetic terms. Not just an add-on, the Glossary works as a key resource for the structuring of particular topics in any individual teaching or learning programme. Many of the exercises and interactive discussions develop not only the skills of competent close reading but also the necessary confidence and experience in locating historical and other contextual information through library or internet searches. The aim is to enhance readers' literary and scholarly competence – and to make it fun!

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Part One Formal Introduction

1 What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It?

2 Rhythm and Metre

3 Significant Form: Metre and Syntax

4 Creative Form and the Arbitrary Nature of Language

Part Two Textual Strategies

5 Figurative Language

6 Poetic Metaphor

7 Hearing Voices in Poetic Texts

8 Voices with Attitude: Tone and Irony

9 Ambiguity

Part Three Texts in Contexts/Contexts in Texts

10 Introducing Contexts

11 Genre

12 The Sonnet

13 Allusion, Influence and Intertextuality

14 Poetry, Discourse, History

15 The Locations of Poetry

16 Post-Colonial Poetry

Part Four An Open-ended Conclusion

17 Closure, Pluralism and Undecidability


Glossary

Key to Poems and Passages Discussed or Used for Exercises

Bibliography

Index

  • Provides a unique combination of theory and practice
  • Arguments and discussions are supported by examples and case studies
  • Contains chapter-end exercises to help develop critical analysis
  • Provides a wealth of poetry extracts to exemplify the meanings and uses of poetry
  • Well-known 'canonical' poems placed alongside the poetry of marginalised groups exemplify the different meanings and uses of poetry

Dr Tom Furniss is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the Universityof Strathclyde in Glasgow, where he has spent nearly twenty years teaching poetry, literary theory and Romanticism. He is co-author of Ways of Reading, now in its third edition, and Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology (1993).

Professor Michael Bath was also at the University of Strathclyde until his retirement, specialising in Renaissance emblem books, iconography, iconology and poetics. His publications include Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (1994) and Decorative Painting in Scotland (2002).

Expert Reviews

"ReadingPoetrystands out from other introductions to poetry in its brilliant combination of practical guidance and theoretical savvy. Students who use this book will be helped to enjoy and discuss poems, introduced to some of the major varieties of poetic criticism, and invited to reflect on what makes poetry important today. Reading Poetry is, in my view, the best introductory book on the study of poetry available. "

Professor Derek Attridge, Universityof York

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