Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet

Critiquing the politics and dynamics of the transcultural poetics of reading literature, this book demonstrates an ambitious understanding of the concept of the poet across a wide range of traditions - Anglo-American, German, French, Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit, Bengali, Urdu - and philosophies of creativity that are rarely studied side by side. Ghosh carves out unexplored spaces of negotiation and intersections between literature, aesthetics and philosophy. The book demonstrates an original method of 'global comparison' that displaces the relatively staid and historicist categories that have underpinned comparative literature approaches so far, since they rarely dare stray beyond issues of influence and schools, or new 'world literature' approaches that affirm cosmopolitanism and transnationalism as overarching themes. Going beyond comparatism and reformulating the chronological patterns of reading, this bold book introduces new methodologies of reading literature to configure the concept of the poet from Philip Sidney to T. S Eliot, reading the notion of the poet through completely new theoretical and epistemic triggers. Commonly known texts and sometimes well-circulated ideas are subjected to refreshing reading in what the author calls the 'transcultural now' and (in)fusionised transpoetical matrices. By moving between theories of poetry and literature that come from widely separated times, contexts, and cultures, this book shows the relevance of canonical texts to a theory of the future as marked by post-global concerns.

Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the department of English, University of North Bengal, India. To know more about him please visit his website: http://www.ranjanghosh.com/

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: The Poet: the 'More-Ever' and the Transcultural 'Now' 1. Poet as Maker? Abuse, Apology and After 2. 'To you I submit my selfe, and worke. Farewell': The Poet and the Reader 3. 'Illumine what in me is dark': The Poet and the Aesthetics of Blindness and Insight 4. 'Launch not beyond your depth but be discreet': Poet and the Neoclassical Philosophy of Art 5. 'Fearful Symmetry?' Rethinking the Poet in Romantic philosophy of Creativity 6. 'Hero as Poet': Thomas Carlyle and 'Future Poetry' 7. 'O life unlike to ours!': Matthew Arnold as an Indian Sage? 8. The 'Platinum' Poet: Modernist Aesthetics and the Making of a Poem Epilogue: 'I arise and unbuild it again': The Poet and Postmodern Critical Philosophy Bibliography Index