Tiresian poetics
Subtitle: modernism, sexuality, voice, 1888-2001
By: Ed Madden.
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Madison, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 402
ISBN-13: 9780838639375
Subjects: Eliot, T. S. -- 1888-1965 -- Criticism and interpretation; Barnes, Djuna -- Criticism and interpretation; Field, Michael -- Criticism and interpretation; Clarke, Austin, -- 1896-1974 -- Criticism and interpretation; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Modernism (Literature); Poetics; Gender identity in literature; Homosexuality in literature
Description: "Blind seer, articulate dead, and mythic transsexual, the figure of Tiresias has always represented a liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries. In twentieth-century literature, the boundaries crossed andembodied by Tiresias are primarily sexual, and the liminal and usually prophetic knowledge associated with Tiresias is based in sexual difference and sexual pleasure. Indeed, in literature of the twentieth century, Tiresias has come to function as a cultural shorthand for queer sexualities."

"This book argues for the emergence of a Tiresian poetics at the end of the nineteenth century. As Victorian andmodernist writers reimagined Ovid's tale of sex change and sexual judgment, they also created a poetics that grounded artistic or perfonnative power in figures of sexual difference - most often a feminized, often homosexual malebody, which this study links to the developing discourses of homosexuality and sexual identity."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 359-390) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: toward a Tiresian poetic; title: Sexing the voice; title: Between two lives : Michael Field's Tiresian poetics; title: Sexual meanings : reading T.S. Eliot's Tiresias; title: Nervous bodies and cinematic voices in T.S. Eliot's The waste land; title: Giving voice to difference : Matthew O'Connor in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood; title: Pen is lifted : history as homosexual panic in Austin Clarke's "Tiresias"; title: Queer and confused : Tiresias at century's end.