John Berryman and the American Legacy of Dylan Thomas

Lost in the celebration of the 2014 Dylan Thomas centenary was why Thomas’s reputation, at least among literary historians and particularly fellow poets, had declined so much in the nearly sixty years since his death. That those poets once influenced by Thomas – and they were legion – produced a kind of ‘Dylan Effect’, diluting what was once impressive is one thesis of this article, even as non- professional readers continue to this day to revere some of his work. Another poet whose reputation has perhaps declined as greatly, a man born days apart from Thomas, is the American John Berryman. Berryman met Thomas only a handful of times over twenty- six years, but Thomas remained not an influence but a ghostly presence for Berryman. As this article tries to explain, Berryman’s greatest work, The Dream Songs, does not so much imitate Thomas as assimilate his forms of oral performance and gaiety, if not his existential optimism. To use a legal term, the legacy of Thomas in the work of Berryman is the casus omissus – the missing case – among the statutory narratives of literary history. This article contextualises Berryman’s very belated elegy for Thomas, with the Tennysonian title ‘In Memoriam’, which came well after the deeply elegiac 385 Dream Songs were completed. It is, in effect, both a post- scripted Dream Song as well as a kind of weirdly posthumous Dream Song for Berryman himself, whose own death would follow shortly after its composition.Englis

Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

The introductory essay outlines the way in which Change and Exchange places literature, and, in a wider sense, imaginative practice, at the centre of early modern economic knowledge. Probing the affinity between economic and metaphorical experience in terms of the transactional processes of change and exchange, it sets up the parameters within which the essays in the volume collectively forge a language to grasp early modern economic phenomena and their epistemic dimensions. It prepares the reader for the stimulating combination of materials that the book presents: the range of generic contexts engendered by emergent economic practices, structures of feeling and modes of knowing made available by new economic relations, and economies of transformation in discursive domains that are distinct from ‘economics’ as we understand it but cognate in their intuition of change and exchange as shaping agents

Towards a Labouring-Class Poetics: Recovering Edward Rushton

The notion of ‘lost Romantics’ requires one to engage in questions of historical and ideological as well as aesthetic order, pointing as it does towards the processes underlying the inclusion, no less than the exclusion, of texts, discourses, and histories from the perceived canon of literature (itself a contested notion), as produced over that particular historical segment—in other words, its own status as synecdoche of a ‘whole’, the nature of which is permeable to change.It also implicitly questions the way we teach Romanticism, how we shape and hand down knowledge to the younger generations of undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral students. The subject is of great relevance, to the extent that the acquisition and transmission of critical awareness of the mechanisms whereby a canon is constructed, and texts are absorbed into or expelled from the circuits of knowledge transmission, is in many ways a matter regarding politics, as integral in the method no less than the merit of what we do.As to the merit, it may well be argued that focalising on ‘marginal’, or ‘forgotten’, or ‘lost’ Romantics inherently embraces the study of how power relations are substantiated into and shape the repositories of literary culture