Browse

W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work—it changed the course of American poetry itself. This book takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's influence on American poetry. Combining a broad survey of Auden's midcentury U.S. cultural presence with an account of his dramatic impact on a wide range of younger American poets—from Allen Ginsberg to Sylvia Plath—the book offers a new history of postwar American poetry. For Auden, facing private crisis and global catastrophe, moving to the United States became, in the famous words of his first American poem, a new “way of happening.” But his redefinition of his work had a significance that was felt far beyond the pages of his own books. This book shows how Auden's signal role in the work and lives of an entire younger generation of American poets challenges conventional literary histories that place Auden outside the American poetic tradition. The book pays special attention to three of Auden's most distinguished American inheritors, presenting major new readings of James Merrill, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich. The result is a persuasive and compelling demonstration of a novel claim: In order to understand modern American poetry, we need to understand Auden's central place within it.

Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, this book argues that cultural politics—specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts—played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II. The book argues that this transfer reshaped the postwar literary space and shows how, during this time, new and efficient modes of cultural transmission, replication, and travel—such as radio and rapidly and globally circulated journals—completely transformed the position occupied by the postwar writer and the role of world literature. The book demonstrates that the nearly instantaneous translation of texts by George Orwell, Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Albert Camus, among others, into interrelated journals that were sponsored by organizations such as the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and circulated around the world effectively reshaped writers, critics, and intellectuals into easily recognizable, transnational figures. Their work formed a new canon of world literature that was celebrated in the United States and supposedly represented the best of contemporary thought, while less politically attractive authors were ignored or even demonized. This championing and demonizing of writers occurred in the name of anti-Communism—the new, transatlantic “civilizing mission” through which postwar cultural and literary authority emerged.

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

This is the first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. The book delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. It navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1935, the book illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past? Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, the book presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia's presence in African American culture was at its height.

This book is an exploration of modernism in Arabic poetry, a movement that emerged in Beirut during the 1950s and became the most influential and controversial Arabic literary development of the twentieth century. The book introduces English-language readers to a poetic movement that will be uncannily familiar—and unsettlingly strange. It provides an intellectual history of Lebanon during the early Cold War, when Beirut became both a battleground for rival ideologies and the most vital artistic site in the Middle East. Arabic modernism was centered on the legendary magazine Shi'r (“Poetry”), which sought to put Arabic verse on “the map of world literature.” The Beiruti poets—Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, and Unsi al-Hajj chief among them—translated modernism into Arabic, redefining the very idea of poetry in that literary tradition. This book includes analyses of the Arab modernists' creative encounters with Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, and Antonin Artaud, as well as their adaptations of classical literary forms. The book also reveals how the modernists translated concepts of liberal individualism, autonomy, and political freedom into a radical poetics that has shaped Arabic literary and intellectual debate to this day.

Boethius wrote Of the Consolation of Philosophy as a prisoner condemned to death for treason, circumstances that are reflected in the themes and concerns of its evocative poetry and dialogue between the prisoner and his mentor, Lady Philosophy. This classic philosophical statement of late antiquity has had an enduring influence on Western thought. It is also the earliest example of what this book identifies as a distinctive and vitally important medium of literary resistance: writing in captivity by prisoners of conscience and persecuted minorities. This book reveals why the great contributors to this tradition of prison writing are among the most crucial figures in Western literature. The book pairs writers from different periods and cultural settings, carefully examining the rhetorical strategies they used in captivity, often under the threat of death. It looks at Boethius and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as philosophers and theologians writing in defense of their ideas, and Thomas More and Antonio Gramsci as politicians in dialogue with established concepts of church and state. Different ideas of grace and disgrace occupied John Bunyan and Oscar Wilde in prison; Madame Roland and Anne Frank wrote themselves into history in various forms of memoir; and Jean Cassou and Irina Ratushinskaya voiced their resistance to totalitarianism through lyric poetry that saved their lives and inspired others. Finally, Primo Levi's writing after his release from Auschwitz recalls and decodes the obscenity of systematic genocide and its aftermath. This book speaks to some of the most profound questions about life, enriching our understanding of what it is to be human.

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

“We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,” this book claims. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite, or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation. In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, the book also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis. In doing so, it offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.

This is the first biography to tell the fascinating story of Eva Palmer Sikelianos (1874–1952), an American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Yet, as this book reveals, Eva's most spectacular performance was her daily revival of ancient Greek life. For almost half a century, dressed in handmade Greek tunics and sandals, she sought to make modern life freer and more beautiful through a creative engagement with the ancients. Along the way, she crossed paths with other seminal modern artists. Eva was a wealthy New York debutante who studied Greek at Bryn Mawr College before turning her back on conventional society to live a lesbian life in Paris. She later followed Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora) and his wife to Greece and married the Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos in 1907. With single-minded purpose, Eva recreated ancient art forms, staging Greek tragedy with her own choreography, costumes, and even music. Having exhausted her inheritance, she returned to the United States in 1933, was blacklisted for criticizing American imperialism during the Cold War, and was barred from returning to Greece until just before her death. This biography vividly recreates the unforgettable story of a remarkable nonconformist whom one contemporary described as “the only ancient Greek I ever knew.”

Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But behind the scenes, the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, this book exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau 's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as this book reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. This book details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, it shows that the Bureau's paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover's ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, this book is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

“We have many poets of the First Book,” the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, this book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, the book illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. The book investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. It shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, this book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.

This book offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context. The book argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life—and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of “affordances” from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms—wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks—have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. The book rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.

This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the American Civil War, the book identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. It contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, the book suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. It considers why European medievalism and the prehistory of Native Americans were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. It discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. It also analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson.

What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion “feels right”? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? This book argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form—of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion—with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian “intuitionist” philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, this book shows that when Victorians discussed the moral dimensions of reading novels, they were also subtly discussing the genre's formal properties. For most, Victorian moralizing is one of the period's least attractive and interesting qualities. But this book argues that the moral interpretation of novel experience was essential in the development of the novel form—and that this moral approach is still a fundamental, if unrecognized, part of how we understand novels. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, literary history, and narrative theory, the book shows that we cannot understand the formal principles of the novel that we have inherited from the nineteenth century without also understanding the moral principles that have come with them. The book helps us to understand the way Victorians read, but it also helps us to understand the way we read now.

This book explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. The book reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world—the fairy tale. Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. The book looks at the transformation of the Grimms' tales into children's literature, the Americanization of the tales, the “Grimm” aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales' utopian impulses. It shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. The book concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism. The book examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today's storytelling world.

For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times “out of joint,” their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. This book traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, the book also illuminates the “to be or not to be” politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike. On the Arab stage, Hamlet has been an operetta hero, a firebrand revolutionary, and a muzzled dissident. Analyzing productions from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, the book follows the distinct phases of Hamlet's naturalization as an Arab. The book uses personal interviews as well as scripts and videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian Hamlets. The result shows Arab theatre in a new light. It identifies the French source of the earliest Arabic Hamlet, shows the outsize influence of Soviet and East European Shakespeare, and explores the deep cultural link between Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and the ghost of Hamlet's father. Documenting how global sources and models helped nurture a distinct Arab Hamlet tradition, this book represents a new approach to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation.

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. This is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, the book explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. The book begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. It then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's Casabianca, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and Charles Wolfe's Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna. To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's Invictus and Rudyard Kipling's If –, asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today. Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, the book is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

Ever since it was first published in 1930, William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism—far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. This book remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, the book explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualised, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the ‘elegance’ of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal—and not just allegorical—senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed in the nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. The book lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet's intention, from the strictures of a single meaning.

The study of Homeric imitations in Vergil has one of the longest traditions in Western culture, starting from the very moment the Aeneid was circulated. This is the first English translation of one of the most important and influential modern studies in this tradition. As a revised and expanded edition it advances innovative approaches even as it recuperates significant earlier interpretations, from Servius to G. N. Knauer. Approaching Homeric allusions in the Aeneid as “narrative effects” rather than glimpses of the creative mind of the author at work, the book demonstrates how these allusions generate hesitations and questions, as well as insights and guidance, and how they participate in the creation of narrative meaning. The book also examines how layers of competing interpretations in Homer are relevant to the Aeneid, revealing again the richness of the Homeric tradition as a component of meaning in the Aeneid. Finally, the book goes beyond previous studies of the Aeneid by distinguishing between two forms of Homeric intertextuality: reusing a text as an individual model or as a generic matrix. For this edition, a new chapter has been added, and in a new afterword the author puts the book in the context of changes in the study of Latin literature and intertextuality. The book has valuable insights for the wider study of imitation, allusion, intertextuality, epic, and literary theory.