Poetry of attention in the eighteenth century
By: Margaret Koehler
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 263
ISBN-13: 9781137031129
Subjects: Psychology and literature; Cognition in literature; LITERARY CRITICISM / General; PSYCHOLOGY / Cognitive Psychology; History and criticism; Literary Discourse analysis; English poetry; Interest (Psychology); LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; History
Description: ""Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century" identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in eighteenth-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve-"Let me be all, but my attention, dead"-embodies a wider aspiration in the period's poetry to explore overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention. It historicizes eighteenth-century accounts of attention and pioneers a link between the period's poetry and recent discussions of attention in cognitive psychology. It contributes to the largely neglected history of a psychological trait that has assumed a recent cultural urgency, and it repositions eighteenth-century poems as a collective model for assiduous reading and supple, wide-ranging attention"--