ABSTRACT
A version of this celebration of a general return of the repressed can be said to characterize each of the nine essays collected in this varied, wide-ranging book. Intended as ‘an introduction to some contemporary theoretical issues by showing them in application’ and as a demonstration both of ‘the range of available poetry, and the similarities of concern between recent developments of criticism and poetry’ (p. 1), the essays in this book rarely divert their focus from the social, political and ideological possibilities contained within such a two-pronged extension of the canon (the critical canon, formerly dominated by the New Critical shibboleths of ‘unity’ and ‘coherence’, and the poetic canon, formerly dominated, or perceived to be dominated, by those poetic texts which best suited such critical values). The various applications of ‘theory’, indeed, all appear to be striving towards some form of accommodation with poststructuralist approaches to language and ‘meaning’ and an ideological or social application of theoretical techniques. The effect, at its best, does indeed begin to provide an effective advocacy of plurality: both on the textual and the societal level. Thus David
Murray, summarizing the collective focus of the essays, writes of the general attempt to reflect ‘the play of meanings within poetic texts, to which recent criticism has tried to be responsive, while at the same time demonstrating the various social discourses in which they are inevitably involved’ (p. 3).
