Book News: Affinities of affect in Lear, Eliot, and Smith

Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

BY JASMINE JAGGER

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780198868804

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/rhythms-of-feeling-in-edward-lear-t-s-eliot-and-stevie-smith-9780198868804

Rich with unpublished material and detailed insight, Rhythms of Feeling offers a new reading of three of the most celebrated poets: Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Tracing exciting lines of interplay, affinity, and influence between these writers for the first time, the book shifts the terms of critical debate on Lear, Eliot, and Smith and subtly reorients the traditional account of the genealogies of literary modernism. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Going beyond a biographically-framed close reading or a more general analysis framed by affect theory, the volume traces these poets' "affective rhythms" (fits, tears, nerves) to consider the way that poetics, the mental and physical process of writing and reading, and the ebbs and flows of their emotional weather might be in dialogue. Attentive, acute, and often forensic, the book broadens its reach to contemporary writers and medical accounts of creativity and cognition. Alongside deep critical study, this volume seeks to bring emotional intelligence to criticism, finding ways of speaking lucidly and humanely about emotional and physical states that defy lucidity and stretch our sense of the human.

• Studies affect and emotion in the poetry of Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith
• Presents an innovative new reading of poetic form
• Uses previously neglected archival materials to cast new light on each writer
• Combines analysis of textual and visual form to draw exciting new parallels between lines written and drawn by the poetic imagination

Jasmine Jagger is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Roehampton. She has published articles in Victorian Poetry, Romanticism, Literary Imagination, The Cambridge Quarterly, Apollo, and The Carrollian.