Forms of Poetic Attention
Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida

There is a widely told story in literary studies, in which historicism was supposed to have dominated across the millennium, exerting at least a default influence long past its methodologically and polemically “New Historicist” phase in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite this narrative, and undermining it, a shift toward poetics-based approaches has been visible as a groundswell of works and research gestalts over the same span of years. The recent trend of book titles using a “poetics” moniker, when on first blush another term might seem equally functional, is only its most visible expression. In my own primary field of scholarship, British Romanticism, quite a number of excellent monographs with poetics appearing in the title or subtitle have been published within the last decade (for starters: McGrath 2013; Guyer 2015; Gurton-Wachter 2016; Rohrbach 2016; Ford 2018). One might cite as a condition of possibility for...