Dennis, Helen

New Approach to the Poetry of Ezra Pound Through the Medieval Provençal Aspect

1996 0-7734-9010-8
This study investigates both the medieval Provençal troubadours particularly studied by Pound (after Dante), with reference both to their canzon and to the medieval biographies; and the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century use of these, in romantic popularizing works, in the works of serious essayists and scholars, and by poets, especially Browning.These investigations elucidate Pound's own use of Provençal materials in developing his concept of poetry as the lost art of combining words with music, the technical études of Arnaut Daniel, etc. culminating in "Langue d'Oc", and the development of his persona method. This latter development is traced from early poetic sequences, through the major Provençal personae, to "Near Perigord", "Provincia Deserta", and "Three Cantos" (1917), which discuss the problem of writing a "poem including history". Pound's transition to the ideogrammic method of The Cantos is demonstrated by a detailed reading of the first seven cantos. Finally, a discussion of The Pisan Cantos shows how Pound's early studies of Provençal techniques, and of its cult of emotions which linked it to pagan rites of renaissance, led to his recreation of the troubadour ethos of Amor as Poesis.

Willa Cather and European Cultural Influence

1996 0-7734-8858-8
This collection of essays investigates Cather's intellectual relation to European culture and how it was reflected in her literary work. These essays open up debates around a number of Cather texts and suggest the stature of Cather as an American author much influenced by European culture and European immigrant culture in the US. Essays include: Building Dwelling Thinking: the ends of language in Cather and Lawrence (Fiona Becket); Under the Linden Tree: passion and suppression in Cather and Goethe (Ian Bell and Meriel LLand); Whose Antonia? Appropriations in My Antonia (Bridget Bennett); "Tonight Mrs. Forrester began with 'Once upon a time'": origins and traces in the work of Willa Cather (Helen M. Dennis); Signifying the Subaltern: Europe's others in selected texts of Willa Cather (Alison Donnell); From Little French Mary to Cuzak's Boys: aspects of the immigrant experience in the work of Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather (Graham Frater); Willa Cather's Intellectual Milieu; Europe and Americanization (Guy Reynolds); A World Broken in Two: the writing of the European war in Willa Cather's One of Ours and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (Julie Sanders).