Reading Poetry: An Introduction 2nd edition by Furniss, Tom, Bath, Michael (2007) Paperback

by Tom Furniss

Many readers will have already acquired the basis for self-conscious and self-critical reading strategies through their everyday responses to popular culture. This innovative new textbook will help develop these strategies and interpretive skills by recognising and explaining the open and multi-dimensional qualities of the poetic text. At the same time, Reading Poetry is theoretically informed and up-to-date, taking into account the wealth of theoretical speculation about poetry, and literature in general, the twentieth-century has produced. A wide spectrum of examples has been included, ranging from fifteenth-century lyrics and ballads to contemporary poetry from all over the English-speaking world. Features a unique combination of theory and practice unprecedented in an undergraduate textbook, arguments and discussions supported by analytic examples and case studies, chapter-end exercises to help develop critical analysis, and well-known 'canonical' poems placed alongside the poetry of marginalised groups to exemplify the different meaning and uses of poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Academic

Paperback

First published December 1, 1996

About the author

Tom Furniss is Senior lecturer in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He is author of Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology (1993) and Reading Poetry (20070, together with a number of articles on the politics and philoophy of the late Enlightenment. His interest in the Romantic writing of Scottish landscape is reflected in essays on the landscape and geology of the Trossachs and on James Hutton's 1788 'Theory of the Earth'.

Reviews

[Jamie Nickerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taught me how to analyze poems and prose.

[Indigo Wayworth · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this. Learned minimal, save for certain rhetorical and literary terms, and even then, the glossary is absolutely useless. Save your time, and don't if you have to read this for class? Godspeed, friends.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently structured. As it moves through higher-level (and more difficult) topics in analysis, it introduces new and more modern critical approaches.