This study offers a comprehensive examination of the work of the young poet and scholar, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975) in the context of a literary-critical revolution of the late sixties and seventies and evaluates her work against contemporary debates in poetry and poetics. Gareth Farmer explores Forrest-Thomson’s relationship to the conflicting models of literary criticism in the twentieth century such as the close-reading models of F.R Leavis and William Empson, postructuralist models, and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Written by the leading scholar on Forrest-Thomson’s work, this study explores Forrest-Thomson’s published work as well as unpublished materials from the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive. Drawing on close readings of Forrest-Thomson’s writings, this study argues that her work enables us reevaluate literary-critical history and suggests new paradigms for the literary aesthetics and poetics of the future.
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1 Introduction: Poet on the Periphery |
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1 | (24) |
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2 The Reluctant Radical: Identi-Kit and Uncollected Early Poems |
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25 | (30) |
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3 Cambridge, Verbal Hiccups and Iambics: Twelve Academic Questions and Language - Games |
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55 | (40) |
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4 Poetic Artifice and the Defence of Form |
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95 | (34) |
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5 Simplicity and Complexity in the Quest for Style |
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129 | (30) |
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6 Control and Excess in the Quest for `Writing Straight' |
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159 | (42) |
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7 Coda: The Risks of `Freedom, Truth and Skill' |
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201 | (8) |
| References |
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209 | (4) |
| Index |
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213 | |
Gareth Farmer is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and a poet. He has written essays on a range of modern and contemporary experimental writers and on literary and critical theory. He is the Senior Academic Consultant to the Veronica Forrest-Thomson Archive at Girton College Library, Cambridge.
