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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Pp. xiv+193. $39.95.
The title of this engaging new book on Keats's odes appears to make "contemporary criticism" a principal subject; the preface proclaims the four "dominant critical paradigms of the present" to be the New Criticism, Paul de Manian deconstruction, the New Historicism, and Freudian psychoanalysis; and the contents page shows that each of the book's four chapters is devoted to one of Keats's major odes--in order, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, and To Autumn. One might expect, therefore, a series of essays in which each of the odes is read according to the methods and emphases of one of the dominant paradigms, which in the process is examined and evaluated for its usefulness as an aid to reading and understanding. Some such plan may have been in James O'Rourke's mind when he began the project as a doctoral dissertation in the 1980s. But the present result is much more encompassing and much more of an accomplishment than could have been achieved with so mechanical a plan. We are put in touch with distinguished critics associated with these paradigms (Helen Vendler as the most recent prominent exemplar of the New Criticism, Paul de Man and a host of Yale professors for deconstruction, Jerome McGann and Marjorie Levinson for the romantics version of New Historicism, Julia Kristeva among others for psychoanalysis). But the contemporary critic most in evidence is...
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