Hopkins Against History

Scrutinizing the claim frequently made by critics that literary forms represent forms of consciousness, Eugene Hollahan attempts in Hopkins Against History a double-edged project. He applies popular critical methods - psychoanalytical, New Historical, interdisciplinary, and the like - as procedures in an examination of that rare poetic spirit Gerard Manley Hopkins. At the same time, and dialectically, the author uses Hopkins's life and oeuvre as a test case or paradigm case by which to measure some of the critical methods that attract much interest today. Hopkins Against History presents a new perspective on Gerard Manley Hopkins, the self-conscious unbordered soul struggling against history but in the process becoming a kind of antithetical hero, producing poems in sprung rhythm, a strange new poetic of lasting value.