Brightness and unfixity: reframing epiphany in Oswald's Woods etc

Dixon, J. ORCID: 0000-0001-7932-8348, 2019. Brightness and unfixity: reframing epiphany in Oswald's Woods etc. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings, 7 (1), pp. 1-21. ISSN 2045-5224

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Abstract

Epiphany in contemporary British poetry is perceived by some poets and critics, often those who self-identify as being outside of the mainstream, as a uniform, coercive, teleological, and unchallenging literary mode. This article intervenes in these debates to show how mainstream contemporary poetry, like its more experimental and avant-garde counterparts, also disrupts the traditional epiphanic paradigm. Through new critical readings of selected poems from Alice Oswald's collection Woods etc. (2005), this article argues for a reframing that comprises epiphanies of ‘brightness’ and 'unfixity' and resists a teleological reading of this deep-rooted literary mode. It proposes that these poems offer a new way of thinking about epiphany as an ongoing process of revelation in contrast to the more familiar and well-established singular moment of insight.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings
Creators:	Dixon, J.
Publisher:	Open Library of Humanities
Date:	2019
Volume:	7
Number:	1
ISSN:	2045-5224
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.16995/c21.588 DOI
Rights:	© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	20 Sep 2019 11:46
Last Modified:	20 Sep 2019 12:00
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/37728

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