Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry

Description

In this 2000 collection, an international team of contributors contest the conventional critical view of modernism as a transnational or supranational entity. They examine relationships between modernist poetry and place, and foreground issues of region and space, nation and location in the work of poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. The book brings the work of major canonical writers into juxtaposition with more neglected modernists such as Basil Bunting and Dylan Thomas, writers whose investment in the concepts of region and nation, it is argued, contributed to their relative marginalisation. These essays offer a fascinating perspective on contemporary valuations of modernism through their investigation of some of the Anglo-American locations of modernism, and assess the regional and nationalist affiliations of modernist poetry. The Locations of Literary Modernism maps a topography of poetic modernism that is quite different from what had hitherto been accepted as comprehensive.

"Essays juztapose well-known and neglected writers, lending a new perspective and challenge for rereading the works of such authors as ...Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes...Demanding and well documented." Choice "[Howarth] is a lucid writer with an exacting eye, and he clearly has given long study to these and other poets...What this book amounts to, finally, is compelling, rigorously researched, and old-fashioned (I use the term without prejudice) literary history." - Patrick Collier, Ball State University