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ISBN-10: 0823265587
ISBN-13: 9780823265589
Edition: 2015
List price: $29.00
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Description:
Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Homelessness, Romanticism argues that at the heart of contemporary biopolitical thinking is an insistent repression of poetry. By returning to the moment at which, at least according to Michel Foucault, biopolitics emerges, and by taking account of the more or less simultaneous emergence of romanticism, this project renews our understanding of the operations of contemporary politics, while at the same time contesting our assumptions about the relation between aesthetics and politics from romanticism to the present. In order to manifest its argument, the project focuses on a single, exemplary case: the poetry and autobiographical writing of the British… poet John Clare (1793-1864), in particular Clare's later writings. Through readings of Clare in combination with a rigorous examination of contemporary theories of biopolitics, in particular, those focused on displacement and exile, sovereignty and nature, the book challenges our understanding of romanticism's political legacies, specifically the belief that romanticism is a direct precursor to the violent nationalisms and redemptive environmentalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book offers an alternative account of many of romanticism's foundational concepts, like home, genius, creativity, and organicism, arguing that it is not poetry, but a certain conception of romanticism that leads to misunderstanding. At the same time the book also shows that contemporary critical theories of biopolitics, despite repeatedly dismissing the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of power as a culpable ideology, emerge alongside, and more importantly within the same rhetorical tradition as the romanticism that they denounce. The book thus exposes a key, unaccounted dimension of the theory of biopolitics, one that compels a rethinking of its critique of poetry and an attendant reconsideration of romanticism and its concepts.