Andrea Brady - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Andrea Brady

A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, 2018

Communism and Poetry, 2019

This chapter examines some of the gothic tropes in the work of British poet Sean Bonney, alongsid... more This chapter examines some of the gothic tropes in the work of British poet Sean Bonney, alongside his allusions to folk song, Ranter rhetoric, the Rimbaud of the Commune, and the submerged histories of London. These ‘countertraditions’ contribute to Bonney’s poetics of revolutionary temporality, a radical orientation toward both the past and the future which is opposed to capitalism’s ‘abstract time’. The chapter considers Bonney’s theorization of prosody, and his debt to Black music and poetries. It suggests that some of the limitations of Bonney’s revolutionary poetics become clear in comparison to the temporal legacies of slavery, what Christina Sharpe has called ‘wake time’, and the artworks that have emerged from it, particularly the poetries of Dionne Brand and M. NourbeSe Philip.

In Forces of the Imagination, Barbara Guest writes that "In the not too far off future the c... more In Forces of the Imagination, Barbara Guest writes that "In the not too far off future the curtain will be drawn on Modernism as it enters history. Already the shades are listing as Modernism begins to cross the border, exulting in a new freedom called the past." For Guest, modernism liberated artists to produce meaning through abstract form--what she refers to as "noble plasticity." Her texts achieve this plasticity through the manipulation of white space, collage, and the syntactical and graphic use of erasure. Although Guest herself was a poet with strong affiliations to modernist visual and literary art, her critiques of modernism also suggest that it had become a formal and ethical constraint. In response, her work is marked by a surprising tendency to idealize the medieval. The poems in Quill, Solitary Apparition seek the "new freedom" of the past through references to the medieval as a field of ethical and aesthetic associations on which beauty, ...

Journal of the British Academy, Nov 16, 2017

This essay explores love poetry in its most militant and perverse forms. It examines three 'deter... more This essay explores love poetry in its most militant and perverse forms. It examines three 'determinations' of love: first, how love is defined (determined), given that true love always feels new and singular, but language is a repetition engine which can make these professions of love seem quotational; second, why love is fixated on ends, including catastrophe, the apocalypse and death, and how it might be released (de-termined) from that fixation; and third, how love can teach us to be resolute (determined) to close the gap between the world we experience and the one we desire. Love has been described by poets and philosophers as fullness, and as lack or hunger; as fusion, and as splitting; as original, and as serial or repetitive; as the end of time, or a return to its beginnings in the lost paradises of infantile or primitive experience. Love provokes an anamnesis of an archaic experience of the ideal. It is associated with creativity and fecundity. But it also prompts poets to anticipate the catastrophes of death or the destruction of everything that is. That destruction includes the end of poetry itself. Poets from Shakespeare and Marvell to Shelley or Robert Creeley have affirmed love only through risking its negation (and with the negation of love, the negation also of their own poetic practice). Why is love poetry so drawn to the fantasy of destruction? What is the use of love poetry in times of catastrophe? If artistic remembrance-as Herbert Marcuse puts it-'spurs the drive for the conquest of suffering and the permanence of joy', how can remembering love through poetry help us to address a new future, particularly one in which the traditional hierarchies that encumber lyric and love itself can be overturned?

Huntington Library Quarterly, 2009

the exemplary life and death of Cicely Macwilliam, who married Thomas Ridgeway and became the... more the exemplary life and death of Cicely Macwilliam, who married Thomas Ridgeway and became the Countess of London-derry. It is a manuscript poem written on unbound foolscap sheets, part of the Win-stanley family papers held in the Record Office for Leicestershire, ...

TriQuarterly, 2003

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English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century, 2006

Nathaniel Friend’s narrative of his son John’s death, introduced in Chapter 2, reveals many featu... more Nathaniel Friend’s narrative of his son John’s death, introduced in Chapter 2, reveals many features of early modern consolation. It also provides evidence of how the funerary ritual incorporated elegiac verse. In this chapter, the elegiac commonplace which draws on funeral symbolism will be illuminated through attention to the historical development of funeral customs. In Section 3.2, I argue that the exclusivity of the funeral did not prevent loyal mourners or ambitious elegists from intruding to express their love for the dead. These displays of intrusive affection were not merely symbolic; elegies were actually pinned to the hearse or carpeted the grave. Conversely, some elegists asserted their bonds with the dead through a rejection of the funeral rites. Section 3.3 explains the mechanics of funerary exclusivity. The heralds sought to maintain the purity of the nobility by policing the funeral procession, but participation could also be restricted based on class or gender, and even the funeral feast was striated with social distinctions. However, Section 3.4 reveals that the heralds increasingly found their exclusive management of the funeral under threat from families who wished to memorialise their dead without interference from the state. Another form of exclusion, literacy, is the theme of Section 3.5. Textual and graphical representations of the funeral could involve a large number of participants in the obsequies of civic heroes.

Critical Inquiry, 2021

Being less than an activity we empty out the life that hangs like code in the air, but for how lo... more Being less than an activity we empty out the life that hangs like code in the air, but for how long does it survive there if the air is white and lush, more benevolent to the city than ever, whose leaves are out of a season we are missing. It hangs on the window like a recrimination, a rainbow trail, the wolf's chalky invite to the last kid hiding in the clock. And like a call; and is filled with calls of the chattering species whose voices are carried from house to house parties and face times, many heard, the more silent. And like nothing but indifference growing warmer in the tangled biome to its human carriers. We pick our way prudently down the street. The person who passes is like us: a matrix of infection. We turn around at the head of the aisle that has someone in it, and wash our hands and shrink. Our hands are very dry now. Our mean gestures have all changed. When in this poem I say we I mean a nuclear family in London who are lucky. Having outside space.

The Blackwell Companion to Renaissance Poetry, 2017

Renaissance funeral elegy had two primary functions: to remember the dead, and to console the liv... more Renaissance funeral elegy had two primary functions: to remember the dead, and to console the living. As a work of persuasion (of the bereaved not to grieve, or of the reader to admire the dead), it drew on classical rhetoric for guidance in the gathering and disposition of materials and their effective delivery. But as a social action-an intervention at the scene of death-determined by its occasion, it can also be read according to contemporary formalist and poststructuralist theories of genre (Miller 1984). Todorov argues that "it is because genres exist as an institution that they function as 'horizons of expectation' for readers, and as "models of writing" for authors" (Todorov 1976, 163). This essay will examine the interaction between elegy and other theological and social institutions which organized death. As an institution, elegy conforms strongly to traditions and reader expectations; but this implies a rigidity which is belied by elegists' ...

Communism and Poetry: Writing against Capital, 2019

In the first chapter of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx critiques a ‘belief in miracles’ which ‘bel... more In the first chapter of the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx critiques a ‘belief in miracles’ which ‘believed the enemy to be overcome when he was only conjured away in imagination, and lost all understanding of the present in an inactive glorification of the future that was in store for it and the deeds it had in mind but did not want to carry out yet.’ This is perhaps the most famous articulation of the complex temporality of revolutionary Marxism – the vision of a future communism is subordinated to the active critique of the present which alone can bring it about. This essay examines the radical and sometimes Gothic temporalities of Sean Bonney's poetry, in relation to communism, the figure of the crack or fissure, the experience of political defeat, and the wake work performed within the Black radical tradition - not only the music of Coltrane, but also the poetries of Amiri Baraka, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip. It also explores the alignment of Bonney's poetics with R...

Emotions in the Household, 1200–1900

A death in the household temporarily set a family apart. If they could afford it, early modern fa... more A death in the household temporarily set a family apart. If they could afford it, early modern families adopted mourning dress, hung escutcheons on the house and swathed rooms with black baize. The poorest families could reflect their distinction in grief through alterations of comportment, daily routine, speech and attitude. The funeral helped to reintegrate these displaced families into the community and to regulate their grief. It is generally the case that, although deep grief might be countenanced within the household as the ‘natural’ response to loss, mourners were subject to stricter discipline when they left its bounds and assumed their social roles as members of a community, congregation or class. But funeral decorum could not always contain individual displays of inventive, spontaneous and personal sorrow. And the idea that the household served as a limit for emotional display is misleading, as the space of the home was regularly filled with visitors, doctors, ministers and friends, who offered consolation and prevented the indulgence of unchristian or unhealthy melancholy in fulfilment of their neighbourly duty to the bereaved. As the accounts discussed below reveal, modern notions of public and private spaces did not apply in early modern England. David Cressy argues that ‘the early modern world allowed no separate private sphere (in the modern sense), no place where public activity did not intrude.

Melting is a familiar trope in early modern erotic poetry, where it can signify the desire to tra... more Melting is a familiar trope in early modern erotic poetry, where it can signify the desire to transform the beloved from icy chastity through the warmth of the lover’s passion. However, this Petrarchan convention can be defamiliarised by thinking about the experiences of freezing and melting in this period. Examining melting in the discourses of early modern meteorology, medicine, proverb, scientific experiments, and preservative technologies, as well as weather of the Little Ice Age and the exploration of frozen hinterlands, this essay shows that our understanding of seeming constants – whether they be the physical properties of water or the passions of love – can be modulated through attention to the specific histories of cognition and of embodiment.

for my sistersIt is a seduction in which I do not know where the other is, and in which I therefo... more for my sistersIt is a seduction in which I do not know where the other is, and in which I therefore do not know what it would take to please her, and in which I therefore take the risk that my pleasure can also be hers: in other words, in which I can seduce the other only by relinquishing myself into my own art.-Simon Jarvis, "Why Rhyme Pleases"If of this woman only were rememberedshe was useless in a firestorm,as though she looked towards a sunless planet,her motorized jaw green with mould.Lost her nerve abuse go out she providing 1,265 kW she singing.I think the speech went out of her at last.I heard it as she woke.She shifts her weight in the car seat,she is proud to be the tiercel on his warm shaded wrist.Awake at dawn with her Lamenta parliamentary career misrepresenting who she wasknow all those outreaches of convex preserve herpleasures but her hands are not so white'for she her sex under this strange purport did hide!Lined up in a room and gassed with ethylene ...

An anticipatory elegy attributed to Nicholas Oldisworth advises Ben Jonson to hurry up and ‘Die J... more An anticipatory elegy attributed to Nicholas Oldisworth advises Ben Jonson to hurry up and ‘Die Johnson: crosse not our Religion so/As to bee thought immortall. Lett us know/Thou art a Man.’ Jonson’s ‘great Creations’ make readers ‘idol’ and think him ‘eternall’.1 This morbid expressions of rivalry was not unique; Anne Bradstreet’s father Thomas Dudley, for example, received several elegies on his own death following his contest for the governorship of Massachusetts Bay Colony.2 Elegists also commonly asserted that their subject had died in order to prove the susceptibility of prodigies to death. Katherine Philips ‘left us wrapt in Admiration/That she could dye; as we’re before to see / That such Perfection in her Sex could be’;3 female excellence surprises her elegist as much as her mortality does. Jonson’s admirer, meanwhile, urges the laureate finally to recognise that praise ‘Is shortned meerly by this length of dayes’ he lives. His ‘warm breath’ ‘Casts a thick mist before thy W...

The rhetorical work of building a community of shared loss drags against elegists’ desire to indi... more The rhetorical work of building a community of shared loss drags against elegists’ desire to individuate themselves as writers. Elegy holds exemplarity and tradition, the consolatory promise of the continuity of the same, in tension with the poet’s assertions of his or her particularity or difference. To evaluate the demands of tradition, this chapter will focus on the meaning of the term ’elegy’ and its derivation from epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. Elegy could also be understood as a particular metre, the elegiac distich. A brief discussion of the perceived faults of this metre in the early modern period will pave the way for a return to the subject of prosody in Chapter 6. As a genre, elegy is identified by its content: praise and lament. The forces shaping lament will be investigated in Chapter 2. Here, elegy’s commonalities of purpose and utility with epideictic reveal the social nature of praise, discussed in Section 1.2. Praise was perceived to improve the moral charac...