Books by Sean Pryor
Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, und... more Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.
Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study ta... more Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.
Edited Books by Sean Pryor
What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter indiv... more What is a poem? What ideas about the poem as such shape how readers and audiences encounter individual poems? To explore these questions, the first section of this Companion addresses key conceptual issues, from singularity and genre to the poem's historical exchanges with the song and the novel. The second section turns to issues of form, focusing on voice, rhythm, image, sound, diction, and style. The third section considers the poem's social and cultural lives. It examines the poem in the archive and in the digital sphere, as well as in relation to decolonization and global capitalism. The chapters in this volume range across both canonical and non-canonical poems, poems from the past and the present, and poems by a diverse set of poets. This book will be a key resource for students and scholars studying the poem.
What is a literary text? What does it mean to read a text? Who are "we" who read? How does the me... more What is a literary text? What does it mean to read a text? Who are "we" who read? How does the meaning of a text change in relation to the context in which it is read? What authority does an author have over the reception of a text? How does our gender, class, or ethnicity shape our understanding of texts? The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory delves into these and the many other questions that arise when we read and write, exploring with an innovative approach and an unprecedented variety of perspectives what literary theory means. Led by Editor in Chief John Frow and Associate Editors Mark Byron, Pelagia Goulimari, Sean Pryor, and Julie Rak, the Encyclopedia illustrates the problems, the concepts, and the methodologies that arise when we discuss literary criticism.
Around 180 full-length essays written by international experts discuss the theoretical categories and formal structures; the institutions that support the production, dissemination, interpretation, and valuation of literary texts; the identities of the real and textual persons who interact in the study of texts; and the systematic methodologies of literary interpretation and understanding. Ranging from ancient criticism—Greek and Latin, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Biblical—to contemporary issues, including digital humanities, ecocriticism, queer studies, and Indigenous traditions, the Encyclopedia offers the most comprehensive analysis currently available of literary theory in all its many dimensions.
Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies is a collection of thirteen essays by leading sch... more Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies is a collection of thirteen essays by leading scholars which explores the mutual determination of forms of writing and forms of technology in modern literature. The essays unfold from a variety of historical and theoretical perspectives the proposition that literature is not less but more mechanical than other forms of writing: a transfigurative ideal machine. The collection breaks new ground archaeologically, unearthing representations in literature and film of a whole range of decisive technologies from the stereopticon through census-and slot-machines to the stock ticker, and from the Telex to the manipulation of genetic code and the screens which increasingly mediate our access to the world and to each other. It also contributes significantly to critical and cultural theory by investigating key concepts which articulate the relation between writing and technology: number, measure, encoding, encryption, the archive, the interface. Technography is not just a modern matter, a feature of texts that happen to arise in a world full of machinery and pay attention to that machinery in various ways. But the mediation of other machines has beyond doubt assisted literature to imagine and start to become the ideal machine it is always aspiring to be.
Papers by Sean Pryor
English Studies, 2025
This article investigates how literary works create worlds by asking about medium. Whereas Eric H... more This article investigates how literary works create worlds by asking about medium. Whereas Eric Hayot, Jonathan Culler, Paul K. Saint-Amour, and others emphasize diegesis and form, this article argues that literary worldmaking is also shaped by the mediation of works through publication cultures. To show this, the article examines one of modernism's most peculiar anthologies, The Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers (1925). Unusually, this anthology offers no explanatory apparatus, sequences its selections in the arbitrary order of the alphabet, and features many unfinished works and extracts from longer works. The article argues that the Contact Collection thus frames its selections and the worlds they make, not as complete and fixed totalities, but as partial and provisional. The article concludes that, in assembling disparate worlds in so flat and decentered a fashion, the Contact Collection offers its own concept of world: for this anthology, no act of worldmaking is final.
The Cambridge Companion to the Poem, 2024
This chapter examines the concept of style in terms of language and of representation. The style ... more This chapter examines the concept of style in terms of language and of representation. The style of a poem may first be understood as a problem of language at the level of the sentence. The analysis of style is then concerned with diction, syntax, meter, and other such linguistic features, and analysis can approach style as either a conscious choice or an unconscious reflex. But style is therefore also a problem of representation. For example, style may index the poet's character, gender, class, or any other aspect of their identity, and in this way, style is entangled in the specificities of social and historical life. Through detailed readings of poems by Margaret Cavendish and Harryette Mullen, the chapter then argues that the concept of style, both as language and representation, mediates between the one poem and the many. On the one hand, style customarily links one poem to other poems and indeed to other discourses and artforms. On the other, precisely because styles are shared and repeated a given poem may allude to or incorporate styles as part of its material and may, through this very process, affirm its own difference or even singularity.
The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion, 2023
Modernism and the Hymn What could be further from modernism than the hymn? A congregation's song ... more Modernism and the Hymn What could be further from modernism than the hymn? A congregation's song of praise, the sincere expression of shared values and beliefs, the hymn has little of modernism's irony or shock. The collectivity of the hymn and its broad popularity seem to oppose, say, the individualism of the Egoist and limited or deluxe editions published by small presses. The ongoing life of old hymns in public memory and public practice, their authors and their original contexts often forgotten, appears to differ radically from modernist investments in making it new and in the distinctive style of each individual talent. To be popular, the hymn must be accessible, deploying a common language and familiar concepts, but modernism famously spurns simplicity for difficulty, for rebarbative forms and the critique of modernity. Most of all, the hymn seems an instrumental genre, framed by institutions, tethered to particular occasions and didactic purposes, while modernism promises the autonomy of art. But that is a caricature, both of the hymn and of modernism. Some modernist works also offered sincere expressions of shared values and beliefs, some were very popular and some were occasional or didactic. Modernism's novelties and experiments emerged out of and in relation to traditions and conventions. Modernism's autonomy was always partial or compromised. And modernism engaged actively with the hymn, variously adopting and adapting its history and its forms. The hymn itself was, in the early part of the twentieth century, a diverse genre, or set of related genres. In this chapter, I first sketch the situation of the hymn at this time, and then explore what the hymn meant to modernist poetry. 1 My focus is not on
Readings in the Cantos: Volume 2, 2022
What makes a Canto by Ezra Pound? What governs the decision to end one Canto and begin another? A... more What makes a Canto by Ezra Pound? What governs the decision to end one Canto and begin another? And what, if anything, distinguishes each Canto, giving it identity or unity or shape? A Canto by Ezra Pound is not much like a canto by Dante. Most cantos in the Commedia narrate a discrete encounter-with Francesca and Paolo in the fifth canto of the Inferno, with Brunetto Latini in the tenth, with Ulysses in the twenty-sixth-and Dante's cantos are mostly of a consistent length. But the Cantos of Pound's "plotless epic" 1 are of varying lengths, and only a few centre on some single narrative episode or scene: the nekuia in Canto 1, for example, or the conversation between Confucius and his disciples in Canto 13. In The Cantos, episode and scene are less important as structuring devices than theme and material: Canto 2 deals with "metamorphosis and vision"; 2 Canto 36 presents a translation of Cavalcanti's "Donna mi prega"; Canto 45 rails against usury. At the same time, the contours of Cantos are determined by difference, by the contrasts they establish with surrounding Cantos. Rounding off its translation of Cavalcanti with references to Eriugena, Sordello, and others, Canto 36 stands out between Canto 35, with its anecdotes about "Mitteleuropa," and Canto 37, with its account of Martin Van Buren and banking. The archaisms of Canto 45-"Usura rusteth the chisel / It rusteth the craft and the craftsman"-could hardly be less like the colloquialisms of Canto 46: "An' the fuzzy bloke sez." 3 So a Canto by Ezra Pound may be determined both internally and externally, by theme or material, as well as by diction, rhythm, register, trope, and other such features. It is worth asking what makes a Canto here, because The Pisan Cantos puts Pound's making under new pressure. For Hugh Kenner, The Pisan Cantos marks a "new phase in the poem":
British Literature in Transition, 1900-1920: A New Age?, 2021
The progress of British poetry in the first two decades of the twentieth century might be charted... more The progress of British poetry in the first two decades of the twentieth century might be charted by comparing, as exemplary beginning and end, two poems by W. B. Yeats: "The Valley of the Black Pig" (1896) and "The Second Coming" (1920). The first poem was first published in the Savoy, that quintessential little magazine of literary decadence. It casts an apocalyptic vision in the rhythms, rhymes, and images of the fin de siècle: "The dews drop slowly and dreams gather". 1 The second poem responds to violence in Ireland, revolution in Russia, and the bloodshed of the Great War with its own apocalyptic vision, but this vision's early halfrhymes give way, as if under the pressure of that history, to blank verse. The opening octave of "The Second Coming" then gives birth, not to a sestet, but to another fourteen lines, generating a "monstrous" sonnet out of the traditional form. 2 In order to give "a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history", the poem's inversion of orthodox Christian belief epitomizes the "mythical method" which, T. S. Eliot suggested, Yeats had been the first of his contemporaries to appreciate. 3 Here, then, poetry's progress from decadence to modernism seems direct and unambiguous.
ELH, 2021
This essay explores the early circulation history of Hope Mirrlees's Paris. Published by the Hoga... more This essay explores the early circulation history of Hope Mirrlees's Paris. Published by the Hogarth Press in 1920, Paris was neglected for nearly ninety years, though it has recently been republished and reevaluated. By examining the surviving Hogarth Press order book, the essay shows that Paris, unlike more famous works by T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, rarely reached readers who might have appreciated and advertised its poetic experiments. The essay uses this history to reflect on what sort of poem Paris was in 1920, and what circulation history means more broadly for criticism's recovery of forgotten modernist poems.
Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, 2020
If poetics customarily deals with generalities, history seems to insist on particulars. In the 21... more If poetics customarily deals with generalities, history seems to insist on particulars. In the 21st century, various literary critics have sought to manage these competing imperatives by developing an “historical poetics.” These critics pursue sometimes very different projects, working with diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks, but they share a desire to think again about the relation between poetics and history.
Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry.
For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.
Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital, 2019
The relation between poetry and poems is an old problem. It involves more than a relation between... more The relation between poetry and poems is an old problem. It involves more than a relation between concept and instance, but even in the most abstract or metaphorical contexts, when poetry seems to shake off the shackles of mere poems, a need for instances persists. In this essay I consider how this relation is involved specifically, for some theorists and critics, in the historical situation of late capitalism. I then reflect on why that relation should be an urgent concern, not only in writing about poetry and poems, but in poems themselves, and particularly in poems which, in the face of that situation, think about its end.
Critical Quarterly, 2019
It has become customary to show that, though Hope Mirrlees's _Paris: A Poem_ (1920) was neglected... more It has become customary to show that, though Hope Mirrlees's _Paris: A Poem_ (1920) was neglected for nearly a century, the poem typifies modernist poetics just as well as the canonical works of Mirrlees's male contemporaries. This essay argues that, nevertheless, _Paris_ also resists such generalisation. The poem is set in Paris in the spring of 1919, the season of the Paris Peace Conference and a singular moment of acute uncertainty about the future. In its experimental typography, and especially in its transitions between verse and prose, _Paris_ responds to this moment, not by replicating the prominent narratives of political commentary, but with its own open, agile, and responsive temporality. In this poem, therefore, poetics meets history – and gives meaning to history – in precisely what is most peculiar to the work.
Essays in Criticism, Jul 1, 2018
Readings in the Cantos, 2018
Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies, 2016
Modernism/modernity, Sep 2016
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Books by Sean Pryor
Edited Books by Sean Pryor
Around 180 full-length essays written by international experts discuss the theoretical categories and formal structures; the institutions that support the production, dissemination, interpretation, and valuation of literary texts; the identities of the real and textual persons who interact in the study of texts; and the systematic methodologies of literary interpretation and understanding. Ranging from ancient criticism—Greek and Latin, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Biblical—to contemporary issues, including digital humanities, ecocriticism, queer studies, and Indigenous traditions, the Encyclopedia offers the most comprehensive analysis currently available of literary theory in all its many dimensions.
Papers by Sean Pryor
Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry.
For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.
Around 180 full-length essays written by international experts discuss the theoretical categories and formal structures; the institutions that support the production, dissemination, interpretation, and valuation of literary texts; the identities of the real and textual persons who interact in the study of texts; and the systematic methodologies of literary interpretation and understanding. Ranging from ancient criticism—Greek and Latin, Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Biblical—to contemporary issues, including digital humanities, ecocriticism, queer studies, and Indigenous traditions, the Encyclopedia offers the most comprehensive analysis currently available of literary theory in all its many dimensions.
Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry.
For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.