Skip to main content

A Transnational Poetics

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 in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World 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 templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.



240 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2009

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Reviews

“Offering an insightful study of transnational poetics, Ramazani links modernity, transnationalism, and postcolonialism through a network of writers as they find themselves in a multiculture of global technologies and the remnants of the British empire....Enjoyable as well as important.”

Choice

“Ramazani’s mission to reconsider poetry’s transnational tendencies has been accomplished with perspicacity.”—Journal of Philosophy

Beerendra Pandey | Journal of Philosophy

A Transnational Poetics is welcoming, curious, throughtful, and eager to persuade. Ramazani is occasionally critical of scholars who insist on identifying the unique ‘citizenship’ of poems, but he seems optimistic that his colleagues will give up their national pradigms once they see what he sees. For many scholars, lyric interiority is inhospitable to global concerns. Ramazani pushes against this view by emphasizing transnational materials, histories, and techniques. . . . Thanks to Ramazani’s eloquent and persuasive book, we have a much richer sense of how transnationalism has shaped modern and contemporary poetry in English. If his book inspires us to read more poetry, as it surely will, it also urges us to change how we edit, anthologize, interpret, and teach it.”

Rebecca L. Walkowitz | Modern Language Quarterly

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1          Poetry, Modernity, and Globalization
2          A Transnational Poetics

3          Traveling Poetry

4          Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Poetry of Mourning

5          Modernist Bricolage, Postcolonial Hybridity

6          Caliban’s Modernities, Postcolonial Poetries

7          Poetry and Decolonization

8          Poetry and the Translocal: Blackening Britain

           
Notes
Index

Awards

American Comparative Literature Association: Harry Levin Prize
Won

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press