Meredith Martin
Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek
terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by
the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an
old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently
nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal
and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the
development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English
meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering
a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows
that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about
its national identity.
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Buy on Amazon.
