A Transnational Poetics

by Ramazani, Jahan

• ISBN13: 9780226703442
• ISBN10: 0226703444
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Poetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous"stubbornly national," in T. S. Eliot's phrase, or "the most provincial of the arts," according to W. H. Auden. But inATransnational Poetics,Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imaginationin modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in postWorld War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templatesglobalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diasporahe discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres. Exceptionally wide-ranging in scope yet rigorously focused on particulars,A Transnational Poeticsdemonstrates how poetic analysis can foster an aesthetically attuned transnational literary criticism that is at the same time alert to modernity's global condition.

Author Biography

Jahan Ramazani is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Virginia. He is coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and the author of three books, including, most recently, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, also published by the University of Chicago Press.