Sam Ladkin argues that O'Hara and the New York School revive Mannerism. Turning away from interpretations of O'Hara's Transcendentalism, Romanticism, or pastoralism, 'mid-century Mannerism' helps explain O'Hara's self-conscious style, its play with sweet and grand grace, contortion of conventional measure, risks with affectation, conceits, nonchalance, and scrambling of high/low culture. Mannerism clarifies the sociability implicit in the formal innovations of the New York School.
The work also studies the kinship between art mediums by retooling rhetoric and recovering a perennial manneristic tendency beyond period style. Genealogies of grace, the
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