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Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mark Jeffreys
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Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, lyric has been stigmatized by its association with the New Criticism. This circumstance raises the question whether an ideology can be assigned to a text on the basis of the text's identification with a particular genre or school of critical thought. Observing several recent critical constructions of the ideology of lyric, both hostile and sympathetic, I argue that the act of identifying lyric as either an oppositional genre or a reactionary one encourages oversimplification of the term's history and criticism and desensitizes readers to the ideological diversity of texts identified as lyrical.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 2: Special Millennium issue , March 1995 , pp. 196 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

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