Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory

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JHU Press, 2019 M12 1 - 354 pages

Orignally published in 1979. Poetic Presence and Illusion brings together Krieger's speculation on literature and its effect on the reader. The poem, Krieger argues, is an illusionary presence and an ever-present illusion. It exists for the reader, like a drama before an audience, only within an illusionary context. But the illusion should not be taken lightly as a false substitute for reality. It is itself a real and positive force: it is what we see and, as such, is constitutive of our reality, even if our critical faculty de-constitutes that reality by viewing it as no more than an illusion. The coupling of poetic presence and poetic illusion serves to describe the relationship between poetry as metaphor and the reader's sense of personal and poetic reality. Krieger examines the workings of selected Renaissance and contemporary poems with regard to this dual nature and evaluates the work of literary critics (himself included) who have been concerned with this doubleness. Poetic Presence and Illusion allows readers who have read Krieger's earlier work to understand the development of his critical position.

 

Contents

Preface
Jacopo Mazzoni Repository of Diverse Critical Traditions
Shakespeare and the Critics Idolatry of the Word
Fiction Nature and Literary Kinds in Johnsons Criticism
The Art of Dogma
The Critical Legacy of Matthew Arnold or The Strange
ReconsiderationThe New Critics
The Tragic Vision Twenty Years After
Constructions and Deconstructions
Literature as Illusion as Metaphor as Vision
A Scorecard for the Critics
Literature Criticism and Decision Theory
Mediation Language and Vision in the Reading of Literature
Literary Analysis and Evaluationand the Ambidextrous
Index of Names
Copyright

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About the author (2019)

Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. His many books include Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign and Words about Words about Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text, which are available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

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