Overview

This monograph offers a decisive reappraisal of both the literary history and the literary geography of Anglophone modernism by focusing attention on poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. Where recent studies of late modernism tend to regard it as an inter-war or mid-century phenomenon, this book contends that the period 1945 1975 marks a major phase of experiment and achievement in late modernist poetry. The author contends that what distinguishes the work of many late modernist poets (such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson) during this period is its multi-layered poetics of place. In part, he suggests, this is due to the engagement of individual writers with contemporary developments in human and physical geography. It is also manifest in the tendency of late modernist poets to foreground the cultural significance of regional and non-metropolitan places in their texts.

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9781474484411

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Reviews

"Alexander has produced a nuanced and insightful book; through reading it, a reader becomes a better reader of these poets and a better reader of place.--Eric Magrane, New Mexico State University ""cultural geographies"" Alexander boldly expands the temporal and spatial reach of late modernist poetry by tracing its lively dialogues with geography. The analysis of six diverse poets traverses wastelands; excavates geological and cultural strata; navigates waves, currents and archipelagos; explores edge lands and floodwaters; treads thrown together streets; tunes in to multifarious soundscapes and encounters spirits of place where they dwell and journey. Meticulously researched and lucidly argued, this generative study maps nuanced negotiations of place with sharpened relevance for times of globalisation and ecological crisis. This book opens up new channels of possibility through which to hear the here here. --Mandy Bloomfield, University of Plymouth"

Author Information

Neal Alexander is Lecturer in Twentieth-century Literature at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Poetry & Geography (Liverpool University Press, 2013) and Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

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