Professing Sincerity

Professing Sincerity

Sincerity--the claim that the voice, figure, and experience of a first-person speaker is that of the author--has dominated both the reading and the writing of Anglo-American poetry since the romantic era. Most critical studies have upheld an opposition between sincerity and the literary marketplace, contributing to the widespread understanding of the lyric poem as a moral refuge from the taint of commercial culture. Guided by the question of why we expect poetry to be sincere, Susan Rosenbaum reveals in Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading that, in fact, sincerity in the modern lyric was in many ways a product of commercial culture. As she demonstrates, poets who made a living from their writing both sold the moral promise that their lyrics were sincere and commented on this conflict in their work. Juxtaposing the poetry of Wordsworth and Frank O'Hara, Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Plath, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Elizabeth Bishop, Rosenbaum shows how on the one hand, through textual claims to sincerity poets addressed moral anxieties about the authenticity, autonomy, and transparency of literature written in and for a market. On the other hand, by performing their "private" lives and feelings in public, she argues, poets marketed the self, cultivated celebrity, and advanced professional careers. Not only a moral practice, professing sincerity was also good business. The author focuses on the history of this conflict in both British romantic and American post-1945 poetry. Professing Sincerity will appeal to students and scholars of Anglo-American lyric poetry, of the history of authorship, and of gender studies and commercial culture.

The domestic commentary on the Old (New) Testament, by a clergyman of the Church of England [R. Shittler].

Incredible Modernism

With the twentieth century came a new awareness of just how much an individual was obliged to accept on trust, and this heightened awareness of social trust in turn prompted new kinds of anxiety about fraudulence and deception. Beginning with the premise that the traditional liberal concept of trust as a ‘bond of society’ entered a period of crisis around the turn of the twentieth century, this collection examines the profound influence of this shift on a wide range of modernist writers, including James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, H.D., Ford Madox Ford, Samuel Beckett, Ralph Ellison and Wallace Stevens. In examining the importance of trust and fraudulence during the period, the contributors take up a diverse set of topics related to reception, the institutions of modernism, the history of authorship, the nature of representation, authenticity, genre, social order and politics. Taken as a whole, Incredible Modernism provides concrete historical coordinates for the study of twentieth-century trust, while also arguing that a problem of trust is central to the institutions and formal innovations of modernism itself.