Kirjahaku

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 argues 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.

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.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Ciaran Carson is one of the most challenging and inventive of contemporary Irish writers, exhibiting verbal brilliance, formal complexity, and intellectual daring across a remarkably varied body of work. This study considers the full range of his oeuvre, in poetry, prose, and translations, and discusses the major themes to which he returns, including: memory and history, narrative, language and translation, mapping, violence, and power. It argues that the singularity of Carson’s writing is to be found in his radical imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place. The city of Belfast, in particular, occupies a crucially important place in his texts, serving as an imaginative focal point around which his many other concerns are constellated. The city, in all its volatile mutability, is an abiding frame of reference and a reservoir of creative impetus for Carson’s imagination. Accordingly, the book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws upon geography, urbanism, and cultural theory as well as literary criticism. It provides both a stimulating and thorough introduction to Carson’s work, and a flexible critical framework for exploring literary representations of space.