Like a porcupine or hedgehog?: The prose poem as post-romantic fragment Atherton, Cassandra and Hetherington, Paul 2016, Like a porcupine or hedgehog?: The prose poem as post-romantic fragment, Creative approaches to research, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 19-38. Attached Files Name Description MIMEType Size Downloads Title Like a porcupine or hedgehog?: The prose poem as post-romantic fragment Author(s) Atherton, Cassandra Hetherington, Paul Journal name Creative approaches to research Volume number 9 Issue number 1 Start page 19 End page 38 Total pages 20 Publisher [RMIT Publishing] Place of publication Melbourne, Vic. Publication date 2016-07 ISSN 1835-9442 Keyword(s) prose poetry Romantic Fragment postmodernism infinity whole incomplete Summary Prose poems are frequently characterised as fragmentary or incomplete in the way that they gesture to a larger, often unnamed, frame of reference; present small, sometimes unfinished narratives which are implied to be parts of larger narrative structures; and are often characterised by considerable indeterminacy. In this respect, it may be argued that prose poetry traces part of its lineage back to Romantic fragment poems—indeed, at least as far back as James Macpherson’s Ossian “translations”. In the Romantic period, fragments were understood as reflecting the idea of the imperfectability of contemporary human existence, aided by the antiquarian attraction of many Romantic writers to the ruins and relics of the classical past and an associated preference for the evocation of notions of infinitude and boundlessness. This paper argues that prose poems gesture to this Romantic genealogy in their concern with openness and diversity, and the reshaping of literary-aesthetic boundaries to metonymically explore incompleteness. The paper takes its name from Friedrich Schelgel’s Igel. Schlegel famously described the fragment as an Igel, or hedgehog, because of its autonomy and isolation from the wider world. One way of understanding the renaissance of the prose poem in the last 35 years, is to apply the Schlegelian metaphor of a hedgehog to contemporary prose poems in order to argue that this hybrid genre remains in dialogue with the fragmented literary works of the past. This paper argues that as prose poetry continues to explore fissured identity and plurality in a postmodern society, it owes a significant debt to postmodernism’s Romantic and fragmented inheritance. Language eng Field of Research 190402 Creative Writing (incl Playwriting) 200503 British and Irish Literature 1303 Specialist Studies In Education 1999 Other Studies In Creative Arts And Writing Socio Economic Objective 970119 Expanding Knowledge through Studies of the Creative Arts and Writing HERDC Research category C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal ERA Research output type C Journal article Copyright notice ©2016, Creative Approaches to Research Persistent URL http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30086418 Document type: Journal Article Collection: Alfred Deakin Research Institute Related Links Link Description Connect to published version Go to link with your DU access privileges     Unless expressly stated otherwise, the copyright for items in DRO is owned by the author, with all rights reserved. Versions Version Filter Type Fri, 30 Sep 2016, 18:37:19 EST Sat, 01 Oct 2016, 05:00:32 EST Mon, 03 Oct 2016, 07:42:55 EST Sat, 08 Oct 2016, 05:13:46 EST Tue, 25 Oct 2016, 11:44:45 EST Tue, 25 Oct 2016, 11:48:21 EST Tue, 25 Oct 2016, 11:50:24 EST Fri, 21 Jul 2017, 10:32:26 EST Wed, 14 Feb 2018, 09:15:14 EST Wed, 14 Feb 2018, 09:15:55 EST Filtered Full Citation counts:   Cited 0 times in TR Web of Science Cited 0 times in Scopus Search Google Scholar Access Statistics: 185 Abstract Views, 3 File Downloads  -  Detailed Statistics Created: Fri, 30 Sep 2016, 18:37:19 EST

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