Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, Volume 10

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University of Chicago Press, Jul 29, 1988 - Literary Criticism - 300 pages
At the heart of poetic tradition is a figure of abandonment, a woman forsaken and out of control. She appears in writings ancient and modern, in the East and the West, in high art and popular culture produced by women and by men. What accounts for her perennial fascination? What is her function—in poems and for writers? Lawrence Lipking suggests many possibilities. In this figure he finds a partial record of women's experience, an instrument for the expression of religious love and yearning, a voice for psychological fears, and, finally, a model for the poet. Abandoned women inspire new ways of reading poems and poetic tradition.

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Contents

Ariadne at the Wedding Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition
xxvii
Lord Byrons Secret The School of Abandonment
30
Sappho Descending Abandonment through the Ages
55
Sappho Descending Abandonment to the Present
95
The Rape of the Sibyl Male Poets and Abandoned Women
125
Could I be like her? The Example of Women Alone
168
Aristotles Sister A Poetics of Abandonment
207
Notes and Glosses
227
Index
287
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About the author (1988)

Lawrence Lipking, the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, is an editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and The Life of the Poet, which is published by the University of Chicago Press.

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