Virginia Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton) and the editor (with Yopie Prins) of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology. How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuries Before Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper-as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people-Black, White, male, female, Indigenous-almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry. A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called "the deep design" of American lyric. "If there is a kind of 'poet's poet,' might there also be a kind of 'poet's scholar,' someone a poet reads for lucid, explosive doses of insight and history? Yes: Virginia Jackson. Actually, she's more than a poet's favorite scholar, she is a poet's favorite pathfinding detective. Her brilliant Before Modernism is a radical reorientation of American lyric literary assumptions. Virginia Jackson unearths the overlooked, undervalued Black poets at the root of modern American poetry, and every branch of contemporary poetry trembles with new fruit."-Terrance Hayes, author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin "Before Modernism is a bold, powerful book. Exquisitely dialectical, the argument nonetheless centers the work of Black poets in the historical invention of American lyric. Jackson shows us why we often don't find what we're looking for in this poetry, and she teaches us new ways to read, new things to see."-Carolyn Williams, author of Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody "Vibrant, surprising, and ceaselessly edifying. Before Modernism is an adventurous and often astonishing intervention into the linked domains of Americanist literary critique, poetics, and the long bloody history of gendered racialization in the misnamed New World. A hugely accomplished book."-Peter Coviello, author of Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

Mode of access: World Wide Web