This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words that give direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson.

Winner of the 2009 Weatherford Award for Best Non-Fiction Book about Appalachia From Jewish publishers to Appalachian poets, Green's cultural study reveals the role of "mountain whites" in American racial history. Part One (1880-1935) explores the networks that created American pluralism, revealing Appalachia's essential role in shaping America's understanding of African Americans, Anglos, Jews, Southerners, and Immigrants. Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances...

This book mediates a dialectics between power and subjectivity versus history and politics. The invention of Africa is not merely a residue of Africa's encounter with Europe but a project in continuity in contemporary history of Africa, where history has become a location of struggle and meaning, a location of power and domination. Eze contends that postcolonial African studies that thrive by way of unanimity, analogy, or homogenenity are merely advancing a "defeatist" historicism. It attempts to gain essence by inverting the terms of colonial discourse and is decisively implicated in the...

Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to American poets in the wake of Donald Allen's 'New American Poetry' anthology.

The Poetry of Susan Howe provides a comprehensive survey of the major works of one of America's foremost contemporary poets. The book describes the relationship between poetic form and the various configurations of history, religious thought, and authority in Howe's writing. Will Montgomery argues that her highly opaque texts reflect the resistance that the past offers to contemporary investigation. Addressing lyric, literary history, collage and visual poetics, The Poetry of Susan Howe is a lucid and persuasive investigation of the volatile movements of this extraordinary body of work.

Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that pastoral has remained a significant mode in modern American poetry, often as a means of talking about who the ideal self or poet should be and how the poet fits into the larger national community. Influenced by the work of William James and John Dewey, Ann Mikkelsen deftly argues that the "pragmatic pastoral" mode depicts a transitory, evolving, experimental state of being rather than a static, ironic, or nostalgic worldview. By re-evaluating relationships between the poet and the people, the poem and life experience,...

This volume analyzes intergenerational solidarity from diverse interdisciplinary angles within the social sciences. It provides analytical tools to advance research and documents how societies are adjusting to major changes that affect the core of the social fabric. With a focus on the areas of youth, family and ageing, contributions seek to advance the understanding and promotion of intergenerational solidarity. In addition, the authors propose to mainstream intergenerational solidarity in the design of social policies through the adoption of an intergenerational perspective or lens to...

This collection of essays traces the emergence of the Western poem from the standpoint of its collision with "American" otherness, particularly, the Latin American tradition. Unlike works extending Western conceptions of writing or searching for an alleged American ethnopoetics, this book approaches literature as a Western invention and, in turn, seeks out correspondences between traditions

This collection of essays focuses on the remarkable late writings of Robert Duncan. Although praised by reviewers, Duncan's last two books of poetry have yet to receive the critical attention they merit. Written by a cast of emerging and established scholars, these essays bring together a diverse set of approaches to reading Duncan's writing.

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.