Theo Davis is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University and the author of Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century.

2017 OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE, CHOICE

"And yet the use of Heidegger and Davis's astute sense of the critical tradition is precisely what allows her to pull off such impressive and singular readings of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. Indeed, Davis is truly at her best after she has provided the theoretical and philosophical ground upon which her argument rests. In an oversaturated field of scholarship, it seems to me for these reasons that Davis's work is one with which we must contend." --Alex Moskowitz, Studies in Romanticism

"The structure of Davis's book is fluid and reciprocating, folding and unfolding like a river current. Her lively "personal" voice, larded with allusions to continental theory and Buddhist scholarship, can seem somewhat idiosyncratic. However, Davis's essayistic style enhances this sleek treatment of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman, which borders at times on an aesthetic and critical manifesto. Her writing is entirely consistent with her essential claim: that Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's counter-poetics offer us a new approach to writing a phenomenal world that is in essence fluctuating and co-constructed - an approach that foregrounds the essential work of ornament as a means of marking-out, honoring, and giving praise." --Kylan Rice, The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin

"With this wonderful volume Davis...continues the masterful treatment of formalism in 19th-century American literature...Her readings of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman evoke both the sense of wonder (to contemplate) and the sense of wonder (to produce awe)...the study moves adeptly between classical studies of rhetoric and the politics of New Historicism. The three writers are covered in separate chapters. Davis's examinations are not exhaustive; rather, she establishes a theory of ornamentation in 19th-century American literature. Davis's readings...suggest a formalism present in American poetics. For Davis, poetic theory oscillates between classical theories of ornaments and the postmodern drive to undermine agency. The poet's world is neither representational nor purely phenomenological; rather, it resides in the interstices of poet/world and the world of reader/text." --R. T. Prus, CHOICE