Author: Anne F. Janowitz

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 9780631167563

Anne Janovitz examines the poetry of fragments, and of ruins, in its famous progression from classic to romantic mode and provides a typology of these fragments and a painstaking discrimination of the poetic forms involved. An important contribution of "England's ruins", is its use of generic analysis to provide a "political" dimension to ruins and fragments. Her aim is to historicize the category of 18th century poetry and to find within its own achievements precisely the tensions which led to the emergence of romanticism. "England's ruins" examines the ruin poem tradition, from old English and renaissance texts to the early 19th century, and finds in it a powerful force in the shaping of British national identity and of British nationalism. The pervasive image of ubiquitous decay in 18th century writing was, Janovitz argues, both the literary topos of mortality and a sophisticated ideological bolster for imperialism and stable authority overseas. This book isolates three major lines which together form a genealogy of ruin: the tradition of topographical poetry about ruined castles in the British countryside; the tradition of antiquarianism which gathers together textual fragments and relics into anthologies and miscellanies; and the tradition of "accidental" ruins, poems that remained unfinished but found their way into an aesthetic of incompletion that characterizes the romantic fragment and its modernist heir, the pose assembled out of the ruins of other poems and documents.