Description: Designed for students, teachers, scholars, poets, and readers with a general interest in poetics, this book presents an intellectual history of the theory of lyric reading that has circulated both within and beyond the classroom, wherever poetry is taught, read, discussed, and debated today.
Brief description: Virginia Jackson is the UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading.
Review Quotes: The thesis of The Lyric Theory Reader--that the very existence of the genre is more a critical extrapolation than anything solid and real--may seem to be itself a kind of critical conceit, but only because the argument serves the Reader exceptionally well as a cogent frame for taking stock of a diversity of approaches. Accordingly, the Reader would seem especially useful as a primer for up and coming scholars. . . Overall, the Reader should be considered essential in the formation of a thoughtful scholar of poetry and its criticism.
--Peter Fields, Rocky Mountain Review