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...attention from poetry's content and contexts and back to its formal elements. As a manual for close reading poetry "after theory," it is instructive, though not without some troubling limitations.
Eagleton begins with a disclaimer reminiscent of his After Theory. Theory did not, he asserts, do literature in. On the contrary, many of the preeminent theorists were "scrupulous" close readers, and careful attention to literary texts never really went away. "Close reading is not the issue," he writes. "The question is not how tenaciously you cling to the text, but what you are in search of when you do so" (2). While Eagleton has much to say about theory in this book, he is primarily concerned with practice, and the book's strength lies in his leading by example--his admirable close readings of poetry. When Eagleton reads poetry, he searches for the ways its formal qualities convey and complicate meaning. In this respect, his procedures are reminiscent of the work of W.K. Wimsatt and...
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Books received: January 16, 2007 to April 15, 2007.(Bibliography), June 22, 2007
Shakespeare and Modernism.(Book review), June 22, 2007
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