What is it about?
The aim of this study is to explore two important dimensions of Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry, her “neo”- and “post”-romanticism.
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Why is it important?
The aim of this study is to explore two important dimensions of Naomi Shihab Nye's poetry, her “neo”- and “post”-romanticism. We see these two distinct but interconnected dimensions, which have received no serious critical attention, as among her most original contributions to postmodern poetic discourse and as key to understanding much of her thought. By “neo”-romanticism, we refer to Nye's both echo and recreation of the thoughts and structures of traditional, 19th-century British and American Romanticism, especially with respect to the impact of nature on the self and the role of the imagination. By “post”-romanticism, we refer to the impact of daily, domestic, and mundane urban objects on the self. The interesting outcome of these two dimensions – paradoxically, at once opposed and parallel – is not duality but hybridity, which is what Postmodernism is in great part about. The study also implicitly reveals that, while Postmodernism and Romanticism often radically differ, they can at times be quite compatible.
Perspectives
We hope in what we have delineated above, however, to have given a clear idea about how Nye revives Romanticism and keeps it alive well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We hope also to have highlighted, through focusing on what Nye does to domestic or urban objects, how she has turned the urban landscape in the modern world into what the natural was in Romanticism, a landscape which evokes uplifting, transforming mystical experiences. We have, furthermore, shown how she often mingles or reconstitutes the natural and the urban elements to produce a new, much-valued hybrid effect. In doing all of this – i.e. in being influenced by the Romantics on the one hand and in countering and adding to Romantic thinking on the other, thus epitomizing the Bloomian “anxiety of influence” in its most elegant forms (Bloom, 1997) Nye’s engagement with tradition proves to be worthy of much attention and appreciation. It also makes her one of the best Postmodern American poets.
Professor Wafa Awni Alkhadra
American University of Madaba
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This page is a summary of: Noami Shihab Nye's Neo- and Post-Romanticism : The Mystique of Separate and Hybrid Landscapes = الأبعاد الرومانسية الجديدة و أبعاد ما بعد الرومانسية في شعر نعومي شهاب ناي : وقع المشاهد منفردة و مدمجة, Dirasat Human and Social Sciences, January 2014, The University of Jordan,
DOI: 10.12816/0019849.
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