This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism’s most important, most vested, and perhaps least well-defined or definable terms. Rhythm in these essays is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. It is a key term through which Romantic, Modern, and contemporary literary theory define form, either in conversation with or opposition to meter. It has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poet ... More

This collection intervenes in recent debates over formalism, historicism, poetics, and lyric by focusing on one of literary criticism’s most important, most vested, and perhaps least well-defined or definable terms. Rhythm in these essays is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. It is a key term through which Romantic, Modern, and contemporary literary theory define form, either in conversation with or opposition to meter. It has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice if not identity as such. Through their exploration of rhythm’s genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form sorted out through scansion, description, and taxonomy and roped back into interpretation. Pressing beyond the poetry handbook’s isolated descriptions of technique as well as inductive declarations of what rhythm “is,” each essay builds toward methodological inquiry about what it means to think rhythm. With contributions from many of the foremost scholars in the fields of prosody and poetics, Critical Rhythm develops new critical models for understanding how rhythm, in light of its historicity and generic functions, permeates poetry’s composition, formal objectivity, circulation in national and other publics, performances, and present critical horizons.