Robert Welch
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121879
- eISBN:
- 9780191671364
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121879.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in ...
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A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.Less
A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats' The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified — visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed — among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style ‘partnerships’, is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.
Tsitsi Ella Jaji
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199936373
- eISBN:
- 9780199346455
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199936373.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to ...
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This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. The book argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan British colony to gain independence, repeatedly issued calls to the black diaspora to “return” and participate in pan-African unity, and has been a primary destination for heritage tourism and grappling with slavery’s legacies. Senegal functioned similarly for the Francophone world, and Léopold Senghor’s formulation of négritude remains provocative, as demonstrated by the alternatives articulated by Senegalese and diasporan artists. Meanwhile, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle motivated unique forms of solidarity after the era of African independence movements with which many diasporans identified. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered expressions of what is theorized as stereomodernismalong axes counter to the colonizing process. Accounting for the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted—poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites—stereomodernism, lies at the intersection of music, media, and solidarity, tapping music’s capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth century black transnational ties.Less
This book analyzes how Africans have engaged with African American music and its representations in the long twentieth century (1890–2011) to offer a new cultural history that attests to pan-Africanism’s ongoing and open theoretical potential. The book argues that African American popular music appealed to continental Africans as a unit of cultural prestige, a site of pleasure, and most importantly an expressive form already encoded with strategies of creative resistance to racial hegemony. Ghana, Senegal, and South Africa are considered as three distinctive sites where longstanding pan-African political and cultural affiliations gave expression to transnational black solidarity. Ghana, the first sub-Saharan British colony to gain independence, repeatedly issued calls to the black diaspora to “return” and participate in pan-African unity, and has been a primary destination for heritage tourism and grappling with slavery’s legacies. Senegal functioned similarly for the Francophone world, and Léopold Senghor’s formulation of négritude remains provocative, as demonstrated by the alternatives articulated by Senegalese and diasporan artists. Meanwhile, South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle motivated unique forms of solidarity after the era of African independence movements with which many diasporans identified. The book shows how such transnational ties fostered expressions of what is theorized as stereomodernismalong axes counter to the colonizing process. Accounting for the specificity of various media through which music was transmitted and interpreted—poetry, novels, films, recordings, festivals, live performances and websites—stereomodernism, lies at the intersection of music, media, and solidarity, tapping music’s capacity to refresh our understanding of twentieth century black transnational ties.
Michael Sayeau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199681259
- eISBN:
- 9780191766015
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199681259.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of ...
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The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson—generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the “new” but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the ‘event.’Less
The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative investigates how a modernity famed for temporal acceleration—from Benjamin’s “shock” and “distraction” to the postmodern loss of historical consciousness diagnosed by Jameson—generated fictions defined, strangely enough, not just by the “new” but just as forcefully by everyday depletions of stasis and repetition, a flood of sameness in modern life. With close attention to the novels of Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, and Joyce, Against the Event relates this aspect of modernity to modernist and proto-modernist problems of narrative form, in particular the banalizing effects of genre, the threatening necessity of closure, and the obsolescence of the coherent narrator. In doing so, Against the Event is also an intervention into one of the pressing philosophical and theoretical issues of our time, that of the nature of the ‘event.’
Genevieve Abravanel
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199754458
- eISBN:
- 9780199933143
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754458.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, World Literature
At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the ...
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At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.Less
At the beginning of the twentieth century, many in Britain believed their nation to be a dominant world power that its former colony, the United States, could only hope to emulate. Yet by the interwar years, the United States seemed to some to embody a different type of global eminence, one based not only on political and economic stature but also on new forms of mass culture like jazz and the Hollywood film. Britain’s fraught transition from formidable empire to victim of Americanization is rarely discussed by literary scholars. However, the dawn of the “American century” is the period of literary modernism and, this book argues, the signs of Americanization—from jazz records to Ford motorcars to Hollywood films—helped to establish the categories of elite and mass culture that still inspire debate in modernist studies. This book thus brings together two major areas of modernist scholarship, the study of nation and empire and the study of mass culture, by suggesting that Britain was reacting to a new type of empire, the American entertainment empire, in its struggles to redefine its national culture between the wars. At the same time, British anxieties about American influence contributed to conceptions of Britain’s imperial scope, and what it meant to have or be an empire. Through its treatment of a wide range of authors and cultural phenomena, the book explores how Britain reinvented itself in relation to its ideas of America, and how Britain’s literary modernism developed and changed through this reinvention.
Alys Moody
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- November 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198828891
- eISBN:
- 9780191867361
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198828891.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of ...
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As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism uses this trope as a lens through which to examine contemporary literature’s engagement with modernism, arguing that hunger offers a way of grappling with the fate of aesthetic autonomy through modernism’s late twentieth-century afterlives. The art of hunger appears at moments where aesthetic autonomy enters a period of crisis, and in this context, the writers examined here develop an alternate theory of aesthetic autonomy, which imagines art not as a conduit for freedom, but rather as an enactment of unfreedom. This book traces this theme from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy’s delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism’s post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.Less
As literary modernism was emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of its most important figures and precursors began to talk about their own writing as a kind of starvation. The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism uses this trope as a lens through which to examine contemporary literature’s engagement with modernism, arguing that hunger offers a way of grappling with the fate of aesthetic autonomy through modernism’s late twentieth-century afterlives. The art of hunger appears at moments where aesthetic autonomy enters a period of crisis, and in this context, the writers examined here develop an alternate theory of aesthetic autonomy, which imagines art not as a conduit for freedom, but rather as an enactment of unfreedom. This book traces this theme from the origins of modernism to the end of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on three authors who redeploy the modernist art of hunger as a response to key moments in the history of modernist aesthetic autonomy’s delegitimization: Samuel Beckett in post-Vichy France; Paul Auster in post-1968 Paris and New York; and J. M. Coetzee in late apartheid South Africa. Combining historical analysis of these literary fields with close readings of individual texts, and drawing extensively on new archival research, this book offers a counter-history of modernism’s post-World War II reception and a new theory of aesthetic autonomy as a practice of unfreedom.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman ...
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This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This book explores the complex process in which the roman à clef emerged to challenge fiction’s apparent autonomy from the social and political world. These diffuse yet potent experiments conducted by readers, writers, and critics provoked not only a generative aesthetic crisis, but a gradually unfolding legal quandary that led Britain’s highest courts to worry that fiction itself might be illegal. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D. H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own. Close reading and archival excavation mix in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde’s trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. This book thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early 20th century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.Less
This book advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early 20th century revived the long-despised codes of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This book explores the complex process in which the roman à clef emerged to challenge fiction’s apparent autonomy from the social and political world. These diffuse yet potent experiments conducted by readers, writers, and critics provoked not only a generative aesthetic crisis, but a gradually unfolding legal quandary that led Britain’s highest courts to worry that fiction itself might be illegal. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D. H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own. Close reading and archival excavation mix in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde’s trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. This book thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early 20th century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.
W. J. McCormack
- Published in print:
- 1985
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198128069
- eISBN:
- 9780191671630
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198128069.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The period between Burke's last years and the generation of Yeats and Joyce was a critical force in the development of modernist literature in the origins of Protestant Ascendancy ideology. This ...
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The period between Burke's last years and the generation of Yeats and Joyce was a critical force in the development of modernist literature in the origins of Protestant Ascendancy ideology. This study uncovers the origins of Ascendancy and traces its cultural significance by means of a series of detailed critiques of central texts and concepts.Less
The period between Burke's last years and the generation of Yeats and Joyce was a critical force in the development of modernist literature in the origins of Protestant Ascendancy ideology. This study uncovers the origins of Ascendancy and traces its cultural significance by means of a series of detailed critiques of central texts and concepts.
Sarah Cole
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780195389616
- eISBN:
- 9780199979226
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389616.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often ...
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This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.Less
This book argues that the literature of the early twentieth-century in England and Ireland was deeply organized around a reckoning with grievous violence, imagined as intimate, direct, and often transformative. The book aims to excavate and amplify a consistent feature of this literature, which is that its central operations (formal as well as thematic) emerge specifically in reference to violence. The book offers a variety of new terms and paradigms for reading violence in literary works, most centrally the concepts it names “enchanted and disenchanted violence.” In addition to defining key aspects of literary violence in the period, including the notion of “violet hour,” the book explores three major historical episodes: dynamite violence and anarchism in the nineteenth century, which provided a vibrant, new consciousness about explosion, sensationalism, and the limits of political meaning in the act of violence; the turbulent events consuming Ireland in the first thirty years of the century, including the Rising, the War of Independence, and the Civil War, all of which play a vital role in defining the literary corpus; and the 1930s build-up to WWII, including the event that most enthralled Europe in these years, the Spanish Civil War. These historical upheavals provide the imaginative and physical material for a re-reading of four canonical writers (Eliot, Conrad, Yeats, and Woolf), understood not only as including violence in their works, but as generating their primary styles and plots out of its deformations. Included also in this panorama are a host of other works, literary and non-literary, including visual culture, journalism, popular novels, and other modernist texts.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199972128
- eISBN:
- 9780190608965
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199972128.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. ...
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Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.Less
Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.
Justin Quinn
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198744436
- eISBN:
- 9780191805783
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744436.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing US poetry through a ...
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This book is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing US poetry through a consideration of overlooked radical poets of the mid-century, and then asking what such transactions tell us about the way that anglophone culture absorbed new models during this period. The Cold War synchronized culture across the globe, leading to similar themes, forms, and critical maneuvers. Poetry, a discourse routinely figured as distant from political concerns, was profoundly affected by the ideological pressures of the period. But beyond such mirroring, there were many movements across the Iron Curtain, despite the barriers of cultural and language difference, state security surveillance, spies, traitors, and translators. This book shows how such factors are integral to transnational cultural movements during this period, and have influenced even postwar anglophone poetry that is thematically distant from the Cold War. For this purpose, the exchanges between anglophone and Czech poetry are examined; the latter stood on the other side of the Iron Curtain as receptor and, which has been overlooked, part creator of the anglophone tradition in this period. By stepping outside the frameworks by which anglophone poetry are usually considered, this book provides original readings of such figures as Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and Seamus Heaney, and shows the ideological mechanisms that were at work behind the promotion of the aesthetic as a category independent of political considerations, foremost among these postcolonial theory.Less
This book is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing US poetry through a consideration of overlooked radical poets of the mid-century, and then asking what such transactions tell us about the way that anglophone culture absorbed new models during this period. The Cold War synchronized culture across the globe, leading to similar themes, forms, and critical maneuvers. Poetry, a discourse routinely figured as distant from political concerns, was profoundly affected by the ideological pressures of the period. But beyond such mirroring, there were many movements across the Iron Curtain, despite the barriers of cultural and language difference, state security surveillance, spies, traitors, and translators. This book shows how such factors are integral to transnational cultural movements during this period, and have influenced even postwar anglophone poetry that is thematically distant from the Cold War. For this purpose, the exchanges between anglophone and Czech poetry are examined; the latter stood on the other side of the Iron Curtain as receptor and, which has been overlooked, part creator of the anglophone tradition in this period. By stepping outside the frameworks by which anglophone poetry are usually considered, this book provides original readings of such figures as Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg, and Seamus Heaney, and shows the ideological mechanisms that were at work behind the promotion of the aesthetic as a category independent of political considerations, foremost among these postcolonial theory.
