Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.
An invaluable resource for staff and students in literary studies and Australian studies, this volume is the first major critical survey on Australian poetry. It investigates poetry's central role in engaging with issues of colonialism, nationalism, war and crisis, diaspora, gender and sexuality, and the environment. Individual chapters examine Aboriginal writing and the archive, poetry and activism, print culture, and practices of internationally renowned poets such as Lionel Fogarty, Gwen Harwood, John Kinsella, Les Murray, and Judith Wright. The Companion considers Australian leadership in the diversification of poetry in terms of performance, the verse novel, and digital poetries. It also considers Antipodean engagements with Romanticism and Modernism.
Challenging received ideas about the British Poetry Revival, Luke Roberts presents a new account of experimental poetry and literary activism. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and traditions, Living in History begins by examining the legacies of empire and exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. H. Prynne, and poets associated with the Communist Party and the African National Congress. It then focuses on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn and others, in the development of liberation struggles around gender, race and sexuality across the 1970s. Tracking the ambivalence between poetic ambition and political commitment, and how one sometimes interferes with the other, Luke Roberts troubles the exclusions of 'British Poetry' as a category and tests the claims made on behalf avant-garde and experimental poetics against the historical record. Bringing together both major and neglected authorships and offering extended close readings, fresh archival research and new contextual evidence, Living in History is an ambitious and exciting intervention in the field.
The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature offers a comprehensive survey of an increasingly important field. It demonstrates the influence of the “age of migration” on literature and showcases the role of literature in shaping socio-political debates and creating knowledge about the migratory trajectories, lives, and experiences that have shaped the post-1989 world. The contributors examine a broad range of literary texts and critical approaches that cover the spectrum between voluntary and forced migration. In doing so, they reflect the shift in recent years from the author-centric study of migrant writing to a more inclusive conception of migration literature. The book contains sections on key terms and critical approaches in the field; important genres of migration literature; a range of forms and trajectories of migration, with a particular focus on the global South; and on migration literature’s relevance in social contexts outside the academy. Its range of scholarly voices on literature from different geographical contexts and in different languages is central to its call for and contribution to a pluriversal turn in literary migration studies in future scholarship. This Companion will be of particular interest to scholars working on contemporary migration literature, and it also offers an introduction to new students and scholars from other fields. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.
With contributions from over 100 scholars, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Centry provides essays on the careers, works, and backgrounds of more than 100 nineteenth-century poets. It also provides entries on specialized categories of twentieth-century verse such as hymns, folk ballads, spirituals, Civil War songs, and Native American poetry. Besides presenting essential factual information, each entry amounts to an in-depth critical essay, and includes a bibliography that directs readers to other works by and about a particular poet.
This book manifests at least four recent shifts and tendencies within Modernist studies in general that point at the expansion of this increasingly interdisciplinary field. First, Modernist studies has seen a temporal expansion, to the extent that scholars in the field have come to turn to both the pre- and posterior history of Modernism. Second, the field has witnessed a spatial expansion, in that increasingly so researchers have also come to scrutinize the Modernisms of regions at the fringes of Europe, and beyond. Thirdly, a vertical expansion too has marked Modernist studies in recent decades, not only by further expanding the canon of women writers and exploring the continuum between high- and lowbrow, but also by looking at the artistic and mediatized hierarchies and cross-fertilizations operative in the period. A fourth conceptual expansion of the field shows that whereas concepts such as “middlebrow”, “arrière-garde”, and to some extent even “avant-garde”, were once exotic notions of at best marginal importance in European Modernist studies, they now form part and parcel of the field, complicating and expanding it conceptually.
A systematic transnational investigation of post-war literary experiments in Europe and the Americas What are the forms in which the avant-garde returns after the Second World War? How does the literary avant-garde re-invent itself without losing its affinity with historical avant-garde currents such as surrealism and futurism? This book explores the international relevance of the concept of neo-avant-garde for the study of post-war literary innovations covering North American, Latin American, Caribbean, Austrian, French, British, Belgian, Dutch and German cases. Each of the twenty-one newly commissioned chapters combines theoretical reflection with practical analysis. Together, they provide a multi-faceted account of diverse group and trends, such as the New Realists, Black Arts Movement, Labris and the Vienna Group. They also focus on a wide range of authors, like Pierre Alferi, Amiri Baraka, Konrad Bayer, Mario Bellatín, Kamau Brathwaite, and Anna Kavan. In addition, they pay attention to specific techniques, including erasure, lyricisation, and montage, and to specific genres such as comic books, experimental fiction, and visual poetry. Bart Vervaeck is Professor of Dutch Literature and Narrative Theory at the University of Leuven.
This book examines the poetries of two Aboriginal Australian poets, namely Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker; 1920–1993) and Lionel Fogarty (1958– ) and two African American Black Arts poets , namely Amiri Baraka (formerly Everett LeRoi Jones; 1934–2014) and Sonia Sanchez (1943– ) to demonstrate their role in the struggle for civil and human rights of their peoples from the 1960s. The book demonstrates commonalities and differences in the strategies of these poets’ literary and political resistance. These poet-activists, though ethnically diverse and geographically dispersed, share comparable socio-political concerns and aspirations. Their activism is not a reflection of a single ideological current, but a bricolage of many ideologies and perspectives. They have engaged in trans-Pacific political movements and transgressed the borders of any one ideological territory. It is important to establish Aboriginal and African American trans-Pacific communication because these poets have collaborated and engaged in global politics (whether in the form of Garveyism or the “transnation”). Their poetries are characterized by an irresistible drive towards international rhizomatic collaboration and engagement. This is a transcontinental literary influence exerted by African American poets on Aboriginal poets during the 1960s and beyond.
Although North America and Australasia occupy opposite ends of the earth, they have never been that far from each other conceptually. The United States and Australia both began as British colonies and mutual entanglements continue today, when contemporary cultures of globalization have brought them more closely into juxtaposition. Taking this transpacific kinship as his focus, Paul Giles presents a sweeping study that spans two continents and over three hundred years of literary history to consider the impact of Australia and New Zealand on the formation of U.S. literature. Early American writers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Joel Barlow and Charles Brockden Brown found the idea of antipodes to be a creative resource, but also an alarming reminder of Great Britain's increasing sway in the Pacific. The southern seas served as inspiration for narratives by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. For African Americans such as Harriet Jacobs, Australia represented a haven from slavery during the gold rush era, while for E.D.E.N. Southworth its convict legacy offered an alternative perspective on the British class system. In the 1890s, Henry Adams and Mark Twain both came to Australasia to address questions of imperial rivalry and aesthetic topsy-turvyness. The second half of this study considers how Australia's political unification through Federation in 1901 significantly altered its relationship to the United States. New modes of transport and communication drew American visitors, including novelist Jack London. At the same time, Americans associated Australia and New Zealand with various kinds of utopian social reform, particularly in relation to gender politics, a theme Giles explores in William Dean Howells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Miles Franklin. He also considers how American modernism in New York was inflected by the Australasian perspectives of Lola Ridge and Christina Stead, and how Australian modernism was in turn shaped by American styles of iconoclasm. After World War II, Giles examines how the poetry of Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others was influenced by their direct experience of Australia. He then shifts to post-1945 fiction, where the focus extends from Irish-American cultural politics (Raymond Chandler, Thomas Keneally) to the paradoxes of exile (Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey) and the structural inversions of postmodernism and posthumanism (Salman Rushdie, Donna Haraway). Ranging from figures like John Ledyard to John Ashbery, from Emily Dickinson to Patricia Piccinini and J. M. Coetzee, Antipodean America is a truly epic work of transnational literary history.
What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future? The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on: the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf. Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future. This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.
