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American Modern(ist) Epic: Novels to Refound a Nation

Adam Nemmers

American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, ... More

American Modern(ist) Epic argues that during the 1920s and ‘30s a cadre of minority novelists revitalized the classic epic form in an effort to recast the United States according to modern, diverse, and pluralistic grounds. Rather than adhere to the reification of static culture (as did ancient verse epic), in their prose epics Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos utilized recursion, bricolage, and polyphony to represent the multifarious immediacy and movement of the modern world. Meanwhile, H. T. Tsiang and Richard Wright created absurd and insipid anti-heroes for their epics, contesting the hegemony of Anglo and capitalist dominance in the United States. In all, I posit, these modern(ist) epic novels undermined and revised the foundational ideology of the United States, contesting notions of individualism, progress, and racial hegemony while modernizing the epic form in an effort to refound the nation. The marriage of this classical form to modernist principles produced transcendent literature and offered a strenuous challenge to the interwar status quo, yet ultimately proved a failure: longstanding American ideology was simply too fixed and widespread to be entirely dislodged.Less

The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry

Matt Theado (ed.)

This book collects fifteen academic essays that address the aesthetic, cultural, historical, and personal connections among Beat Generation poets and Black Mountain poets.

Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound

Walter Baumann, John Gery, and David McKnight (eds)

This volume gathers fourteen essays by authors from eight different countries who offer new interpretations on Ezra Pound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It ... More

This volume gathers fourteen essays by authors from eight different countries who offer new interpretations on Ezra Pound’s poetics, as well as new perspectives on his critical reception globally. It covers Pound’s work from his beginnings as a young poet in Philadelphia in the early1900s through his most productive years as a poet, critic, and translator, to the first critical treatments of his work in the 1940s and 50s, as well as translations of his poetry into other languages during the last half century. Although in our era such terms as “cross-cultural thinking,” “globalism,” “transnationalism,” and “internationalism” remain fluid and often stir controversy, especially in relation to modernism, the place of Pound as a prominent modernist figure worldwide remains unquestioned. Without attempting to be comprehensive, these essays provide a clear picture of the reach of Pound’s engagement, including the international scope of his literature, his translations, his editorial work on behalf of others, and the diverse historical, social, ideological, interdisciplinary, and theoretical contexts in which he can be read and interpreted. Divided into four categories, Cross-Cultural Ezra Pound considers his early influences, his collaborative, transnational, and interdisciplinary methods, questions of modernist translation (concerning both Pound’s translations and translations of his poetry), and cross-cultural readings of his literary stature.Less

Don Paterson

Ben Wilkinson

The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s ... More

The Scottish author Don Paterson is one of Britain’s leading contemporary poets. A popular writer as well as a formidably intelligent one, he has won both a dedicated readership and most of Britain’s major poetry prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions, the Forward Prize in every category, and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In this first comprehensive study of Paterson’s poetry, Ben Wilkinson presents him as a modern-day metaphysical, whose work is characterised by guileful use of form, musicality, colloquial diction and playful wit, negotiating the postmodern demands of the age in pursuit of poetry as a moral and philosophical project. Alongside the poet’s insistence on poetry as a mode of knowledge, the study argues that Paterson’s originality as a poet is evidenced by his rejection of an idiosyncratic poetic voice, seeking instead to refine a stylistic adaptability. Drawing on a wide range of commentators, Wilkinson traces Paterson’s development from collection to collection, providing detailed close readings of the poems framed by theoretical and literary contexts. An essential guide for students, specialists, and the general reader of contemporary poetry, it presents Paterson as a major lyric poet.Less

Forms of Late Modernist Lyric

Edward Allen (ed.)

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to ... More

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial dimension of the evolving history of lyric.Less

Freedom Beyond Confinement: Travel and Imagination in African-American Cultural History and Letters

Michael Ra-Shon Hall

Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. ... More

Freedom Beyond Confinement examines the cultural history of African American travel and the lasting influence of travel on the imagination particularly of writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Using the paradox of freedom and confinement to frame the ways travel represented both opportunity and restriction for African Americans, the book details the intimate connection between travel and imagination from post Reconstruction (ca. 1877) to the present. Analysing a range of sources from the black press and periodicals to literary fiction and nonfiction, the book charts the development of critical representation of travel from the foundational black press and periodicals which offered African Americans crucial information on travel precautions and possibilities (notably during the era of Jim Crow) to the woefully understudied literary fiction that would later provide some of the most compelling and lasting portrayals of the freedoms and constraints African Americans associated with travel. Travel experiences (often challenging and vexed) provided the raw data with which writers produced images and ideas meaningful as they learned to navigate, negotiate and even challenge racialized and gendered impediments to their mobility. In their writings African Americans worked to realize a vision and state of freedom informed by those often difficult experiences of mobility. In telling this story, the book hopes to center literary fiction in studies of travel where fiction has largely remained absent.Less

The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Volume 1 (1716-1992)

David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase (eds)

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. ... More

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. Covering three hundred years of Irish theatre history from 1716 to 2016, it is the most comprehensive study of plays written by Irish women to date. These short chapters provide both a valuable introduction and innovative analysis of key playtexts, bringing renewed attention to scripts and writers that continue to be under-represented in theatre criticism and performance. Volume One covers plays by Irish women playwrights written between 1716 to 1992, and seeks to address and redress the historic absence of Irish female playwrights in theatre histories. Highlighting the work of nine women playwrights from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as thirteen of the twentieth century’s key writers, the chapters in this volume explore such varied themes as the impact of space and place on identity, women’s strategic use of genre, and theatrical responses to shifts in Irish politics and culture.Less

The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, Volume 2 (1992-2016)

David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase (eds)

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. ... More

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women’s playwriting with forty-two chapters written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. Covering three hundred years of Irish theatre history from 1716 to 2016, it is the most comprehensive study of plays written by Irish women to date. These short chapters provide both a valuable introduction and innovative analysis of key playtexts, bringing renewed attention to scripts and writers that continue to be under-represented in theatre criticism and performance. Volume Two contains chapters focused on plays by sixteen Irish women playwrights produced between 1992 and 2016, highlighting the explosion of new work by contemporary writers. The plays in this volume explore women’s experiences at the intersections of class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity, pushing at the boundaries of how we define not only Irish theatre, but Irish identity more broadly.Less

Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933-1958)

Deirdre F. Brady

This book presents a vivid history of the pioneering women involved in the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements, and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish print ... More

This book presents a vivid history of the pioneering women involved in the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements, and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish print culture. As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissent texts, as political campaigner against creative censorship, and for the right to intellectual freedom, a radical group of women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for women writers. This book offers a history of the Women Writers’ Club (1933-1958), examining its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Exploring the period through a history of the book approach, this book covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, intellectual circles, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and connections to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, co-mingling with other artistic groups to fight for freedom of expression and the right to earn a living by the pen.Less

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures: Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats

Ragini Mohite

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures offers a fresh critical perspective on the work of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their ... More

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures offers a fresh critical perspective on the work of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their international collaborations most significantly influence the cross-border lives of their literature. This book foregrounds the Yeats-Tagore relationship, Yeats’s complex engagement with South Asia, the fraught beginning to Tagore’s international fame and the value of reading his English translations as independent products on the global stage. Exploring the thematic parallels and generic innovations in the two authors’ works allows us to recognize the significant moments of tension, intersections, and divergence in their oeuvres. Engaging with their works across genres, with particular attention to the socio-cultural and political backgrounds of the time, this comparative study examines the transnational lives of the texts and provides a timely perspective on how aesthetic and cultural dialogues carry national conversations across borders and into the present day.Less

The Page is Printed: Ted Hughes's Creative Process

Carrie Smith

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author’s ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to ... More

Does it matter when and where a poem was written? Or on what kind of paper? How do the author’s ideas about inspiration or how a poem should be written precondition the moment of putting pen to paper? This monograph explores these questions in offering the first full-length study of Ted Hughes’s poetic process. Hughes’s extensive archives held in the UK and US form the basis of the book’s unique exploration of his writing process. It analyses Hughes’s techniques throughout his career, arguing that his self-conscious experimentation with the processes by which he wrote profoundly affected both the style and subject matter of his work. The book considers Hughes’s changing ideas about how poetry ‘ought’ to be written, discussing how these affect his creative process. It presents a fresh exploration of Hughes’s major collections across the span of his career to build a detailed illustration of how his writing methods altered. The book thus restores the materiality of paper and ink to Hughes’s poems, reading their histories, the stories they tell of their composition, and of the intellectual and creative environments in which they were gestated, born and matured. In the process, it offers a template for new approaches in authorship studies, reframing one of the twentieth century’s most iconic literary figures through the unseen histories of his creative process.Less

Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses, 1924-1948

Jacqueline Couti

Sex, Sea, and Self excavates forgotten voices and their layered discourses to underscore the complexity of identity politics in the French Caribbean between 1924 and 1948. This study looks at a time ... More

Sex, Sea, and Self excavates forgotten voices and their layered discourses to underscore the complexity of identity politics in the French Caribbean between 1924 and 1948. This study looks at a time of chaotic transition and renewed conflict to transform our understanding of Francophone literary canons. An emphasis on women’s experiences and feminine authorship, for instance, insists on the significance of theoretical contributions by French Antillean women intellectuals to the domain of Caribbean critical theory. However, this study also offers original approaches to works by male authors of African descent. Putting in contrast Suzanne Lacascade’s, the Nardal sisters’, Mayotte Capécia’s, Jenny Alpha’s, Sully Lara’s, and Raphaël Tardon’s visions of Black humanism, history, knowledge construction, and selfhood reveals their conflicted rhetorics and performance, the ambivalent, slippery, and contradictory beliefs at the heart of their texts. These writers at times both reject and reproduce the metropolitan or white Creole exotic colonial mythology of Creole women and sexual stereotypes for their own political, cultural, and personal ends. Teasing out the politics of eroticism and the rhetoric of victimization in the expression of nation-building exposes the epistemic complicity between Black and white, colonial, and postcolonial discourses. Indeed, the social fabric of the twentieth century owes much to that of the nineteenth century, into which white Creole ideology and colonial discourse were woven. Sex, Sea, and Self (re)calibrates the canon of French Caribbean literature underpinning Caribbean critical theory, colonial history, and literary aesthetics, which allows for the exploration of novel paradigms of selfhood.Less

Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music

Alison Rice (ed.)

Transpositions examines a variety of new Euro-Mediterranean literary, cinematic, artistic, and musical works that are inspired in many senses by the movements of contemporary migration. Divided into ... More

Transpositions examines a variety of new Euro-Mediterranean literary, cinematic, artistic, and musical works that are inspired in many senses by the movements of contemporary migration. Divided into four parts, the collective volume focuses first on diverse representations of migration in chapters that explore “Mediterranean Crossings.” It then turns to questions of translation, multilingualism, and plurality in chapters united under the heading “Multilingual Aesthetics and Poetics.” In reflections on creative expression in genres ranging from theatrical works to films to the fine arts, the third section titled “Performance Arts” is devoted to migration and exile. The final portion of the publication, “Musical Movements,” focuses on music as a form of composition as well as a the thematic and stylistic influence on depictions of displacement, underscoring its capacity to add multiple layers of meaning to the migratory experience. Transpositions is attentive to the innovative forms of French—to new Francophonies—that are emerging in recent texts wherein authors and artists are compelled to transpose migratory realities into a different linguistic and cultural context. The works that embody transpositions into French may not be fully comprehensible to the reader or the listener since these films, plays, pieces of art, musical compositions, and written publications are so often situated beyond the borders of what is customary. They nonetheless communicate a great deal as they incorporate new, inventive elements that push the limits of formal composition to speak to—and represent—an expanding audience, and this volume revels in these new creations.Less