Poetry of attention in the eighteenth century /

"Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century" identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in eighteenth-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve ("Let me be all, but my attention, dead") embodies a wider aspiration in the period's...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Koehler, Margaret, 1972-
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
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Description
Summary:"Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century" identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in eighteenth-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve ("Let me be all, but my attention, dead") embodies a wider aspiration in the period's poetry to explore overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention. It historicizes eighteenth-century accounts of attention and pioneers a link between the period's poetry and recent discussions of attention in cognitive psychology. It contributes to the largely neglected history of a psychological trait that has assumed a recent cultural urgency, and it repositions eighteenth-century poems as a collective model for assiduous reading and supple, wide-ranging attention.
Physical Description:xii, 263 pages ; 23 cm.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:9781137031129 (hardback)
1137031123 (hardback)