Expanding Authorship
Expanding Authorship
Transformations in American Poetry since 1950
Expanding Authorship collects important essays by Peter Middleton that show the many ways in which, in a world of proliferating communications media, poetry-making is increasingly the work of agencies extending beyond that of a single, identifiable author. In four sections—Sound, Communities, Collaboration, and Complexity—Middleton demonstrates that this changing situation of poetry requires new understandings of the variations of authorship. He explores the internal divisions of lyric subjectivity, the vicissitudes of coauthorship and poetry networks, the creative role of editors and anthologists, and the ways in which the long poem can reveal the outer limits of authorship. Readers and scholars of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rae Armantrout will find much to learn and enjoy in this groundbreaking volume.
As the title promises, (Expanding Authorship) expands the familiar definition of authorship to connect it directly to a theoretical engagement with the ‘material text’ of language.
Expanding Authorship develops the oxymoronic concept of ‘correlated disordered states’ to describe the possibility that order, both biological and linguistic, exists in diversity and variety and even chaos. Middleton really has his finger on the pulse of several paradigm shifts in innovative thinking, and this book will be one of our best guides to what those shifts mean.
Peter Middleton is an emeritus professor in the Department of English at the University of Southampton. He is the author and editor of several books, including Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold Warand After and Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry.
