Reviews for The Poetry of John Dryden

The average rating for The Poetry of John Dryden based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-12 00:00:00 David Leyonhjelm Impressive clarity and analytical force. Truly, there is not a word out of place in Outka's analysis, and her disciplined marshalling of evidence, historical observations, and close readings makes her insights seem inevitable while not diminishing their capacity to surprise and impress. Outka is very teacherly in her orderly, concise, and clear introduction of new ideas and artifact; she organizes her arguments in a simultaneously spare, rigorous, and entertaining way (no easy feat, though she makes it look easy here). Outka argues that literary modernism maps the movement between longing for the past and aspiration for the future, nostalgia for the authentic item and desire for the proliferating commodity. Through readings of real estate, shopping spaces, and modernist texts, Outka demonstrates the productive (and sometimes distressing) entanglements of these contradictory impulses. She also suggests that modernist writers have been more subtle and complex in their accounts of "the commodified authentic" than (perhaps) have literary critics who want to assign bad faith to consumer screens. Outka argues convincingly that the ironic awareness of these contradictions is one of the distinguishing marks of modernist thought.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-19 00:00:00 Devon Day If only I had known about this book five years ago when I took a class on Austen's novels... This is a wonderful, insightful, well-researched study of female laughter and comedy in Burney's, Edgeworth's, and Austen's works. It puts into context what would have been the works of eighteenth-century "feminist" writers (were the term used then) and how they combated sexism and patriarchy in British society during that time period. It evokes the criticism of Wollstonecraft, Woolf, Cixous, Gilbert and Gubar, and other respected writers in showing how laughter and comedy was used because it was the only way in which these female writers could publish what they felt about their male-dominated society. It brings up the codes and methods used to subvert their actual messages, and also how they were actually misread by men who enjoyed them. It also compares the novels to the "conduct books" that were popular during this time period, and how Burney's, Edgeworth's, and Austen's work obviously juxtaposed those messages by making fun of and inverting them in their own novels. The criticism cited consists of not just Feminist but also Marxist and Bahktinian theories to support the "true" but concealed feminist messages within the novels mentioned (which, I believe, included all of Austen's, including her Juvenalia stories, as well as Burney's and Edgeworth's), and holds it all up against the (good and bad) criticism these writers received during their own lifetimes. Well-rounded and including footnotes, numerous resources, and a detailed index, Laughing Feminism is invaluable for both the formal scholar as well as the general reader of eighteenth-century writers and those interested in feminist interpretations of literature.