Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space, and the Past [Hardcover]

Through incisive readings of ten poets from William Wordsworth to Alice Oswald, this book shows how poets have engaged with the possibilities and pitfalls of memory. Linking poets' uses of personal, aesthetic, and collective memory, as well as history, the book provides a new critical template for understanding how literature engages with the past.Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: The Returns of the Past Multiplicity and Mourning: Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson Weird Wests: Victorian and Post-Victorian Displacements of Nostalgia Modernism, Tradition, and Organicism in T. S. Eliot and Heaney Other Times: Contemporary Poetry's Breaks with the Past Conclusion: Imperfect Hindsight Notes Bibliography IndexCHARLES I.?ARMSTRONG is?Professor of British Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has previously published Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife.