Overview
- Repositions thinking about nineteenth-century meter and a variety of texts and practices associated with it
- Examines how both writing in meter and about it participates in the nineteenth century’s “culture of machines”
- Takes a more inclusive view of meter’s engagement with the nineteenth century’s systems of mechanization and attendant technologies
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (PNWC)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book repositions thinking about rhythm, meter and versification during the “Mechanical Age.” Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, the book examines the rhythmical workings of poems alongside not only Victorian theories of prosody and poetics but also contemporary thinking about labor practices, pedagogical procedures, scientific experiments, and technological innovations. By offering an exploded definition of meter—one that extends beyond conventional foot-based scansion—this book explicates the conceptual and, at times, material exchanges between poetic meter and machine culture. The machines of meter include mid-century theories of abstraction and technologies of smoothness and even spacing; a deeply influential, though rarely credited, system of metrical manufacture; verse produced by a Victorian automaton; the mechanics of the human body and mind and the meters that issued from them; and the promise of scientific machines to resolve metrical dilemmas once and forall.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jason David Hall is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter, UK. His books include Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator (2007), Seamus Heaney’s Rhythmic Contract (2009), Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century (2011), and Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (2013). His edition of Wilkie Collins’s Jezebel’s Daughter was published in 2016.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Nineteenth-Century Verse and Technology
Book Subtitle: Machines of Meter
Authors: Jason David Hall
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53502-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-53501-2Published: 02 October 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-85168-6Published: 10 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-53502-9Published: 13 September 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6494
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6508
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 288
Number of Illustrations: 23 b/w illustrations