Poetry makes nothing happen," wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s--the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Muriel Rukeyser.

Thurston combines close textual reading of the...

Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture.

Organized around the idea of -incorporation---embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism--Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's -hot house style-; the president's penis in American political life; myth-making and the Hoover Dam; trauma, poetics, and the Armenian genocide; feminist...

Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture.

Organized around the idea of -incorporation---embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism--Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's -hot house style-; the president's penis in American political life; myth-making and the Hoover Dam; trauma, poetics, and the Armenian genocide; feminist...

The hero's descent into the Underworld is not only one of the oldest stories in western literature; it is also one of the most often retold. Why do so many modern poets-British and American, black and white, male and female, from the metropole and from the margins-stage Underworld descents in their works? Through a series of contextualized close readings, this study traces the cultural work performed by modern deployments of the classical narrative. While some poets engage their literary forebears to exorcise anxiety and others use Hell to sharpen their cultural critique, most recent poets,...

Combining detailed explorations of both mainstream and experimental poets with a clear historical and literary overview, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry offers readers at all levels an ideal guide to the rich body of poetic works published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century.

• Features detailed discussions of individual poems that are widely available in anthologies and selected poems volumes
• Pays explicit attention to how to read the poems, focusing on language and form and the institutional conditions of literary possibility in...