Parker, Robert Dale (Bishop, Elizabeth)

The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop

ISBN: 0252015096
Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. First Edition. Hardcover. “Parker places Bishop among her ancestors and contemporaries in American poetry, especially Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Lowell, and further compares her work to the poetry or prose of Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor, as well as to some of Bishop’s own translations from Brazilian fiction and poetry. He suggests that Bishop’s writing grows out of an anxiety over creativity that pervades contemporary American poetry. Gathering her work into poems of wish, where, and retrospect, Parker explores Bishop’s troubled family background and her concerns with gender and sexuality to offer new and persuasive readings of her poems and her poetic career.”--from inside front cover of dust jacket. Robert Dale Parker (b. 1953) is an American writer, professor, and Critical Theorist. Parker's scholarship and teaching pursue interests in literary form and aesthetics, history, gender, the socio-political roles of literature, and a pleasure in thinking through critical theory. Parker has published two books and many articles on the fiction of William Faulkner, including Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination and “Absalom, Absalom!”: The Questioning of Fictions, as well as The Invention of Native American Literature, a critical and theoretical study of the emergence of American Indian literature and American Indian literary studies across the twentieth century. Offered today is one of Parker’s most lauded and critically beloved works, The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (1988). Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) was an American poet, painter, and short-story writer. As a painter as well as a poet, her verse, like visual art, is known for its ability to capture significant scenes. Though she was independently wealthy and thus enjoyed a life of some privilege, much of her poetry celebrates working-class settings: busy factories, farms, and fishing villages. While not a hammer-and-sickle-in-hand gleaming example of proletarian poetry, Bishop’s work places a delicate yet steady gaze on these working-class settings and themes making her poetry feel familiar, grounded and dripping with pathos. Robert Parker, as per the inside front flap of the dust jacket: “ranges widely through literary history and theory to give the poems of Elizabeth Bishop the serious critical attention they deserve. The Unbeliever shows that Bishop’s poems, already famous for their clear and quite tone, also struggle with confusion and wonder about things she can never make quiet or clear–about sexuality, politics, the burdens of imagination, the fate of the self.” From the collection of Laurence Goldstein (1943-2023), a renowned American author, film critic, poet, editor & academician here at the University of Michigan. Hardcover in unclipped dust jacket. First Edition though not explicated as such at copyright page, first printing as indicated by number sequence thereon. Book is in very fine condition with only minor wear to fine edges; dust jacket in very fine condition with light wear to fine edges and minor smudging to front and back covers. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #7272]

Price: $40.00