Antony Rowland

M is the third collection from Antony Rowland, Professor of Literary Studies in English at the University of Salford, whose work has been compared with poets as disparate as John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. Jeffrey Wainwright has described his poetry as "significant and powerful", and nowhere is this more apparent than in M, an ode to Manchester in the present moment and to the world it finds itself in, awash with the movement of peoples, cultures, politics and words. The central sequence in M ('Manchester') responds to the murder in 2013 of Kieran Crump-Raiswell in Whalley Range, and tackles the contemporary themes of terrorism, industrial decline, and Icelandic violence. Ranging from Minorca to Cheetham Hill, Rowland's poetry covers a characteristic range of subjects and forms in what Peter Riley has termed 'an original and thoughtful handling of a major European modernist mode'. This collection also includes the poems that received the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012.

This book discusses contemporary British poetry in the context of metamodernism. The author argues that the concept of metamodernist poetry helps to recalibrate the opposition between mainstream and innovative poetry, and he investigates whether a new generation of British poets can be accurately defined as metamodernist. Antony Rowland analyses the ways in which contemporary British poets such as Geoffrey Hill, J. H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar have responded to the work of modernist writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, H. D. and Antonin Artaud, and what Theodor Adorno describes as the overall enigma of modern art.

Caldebroc introduces a range of characters from the Yorkshire and Lancashire borders and beyond, including the Brontes at their naughtiest, and crazed millionaires who try to ban January and pimp their filing cabinets. The title is an old English word for a Manchester district and the book includes a sequence about a friend murdered there in 2013. “Antony Rowland digs the word hoard to unearth sinewy lines of dark material – the insides of buried histories, public and private… Channelling influences such as Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison, Rowland sets out a project uniquely his own to rework history in these ‘measures against outrages’. These are formidable sequences, scrupulous to a taint, steeped in the earth.” Scott Thurston “It’s rare to find a poet so brilliantly dexterous with language… In Caldebroc, the reader travels across time and history – from the Brontës’ Haworth, to Icelandic sagas and global financial meltdown. Rowland constantly revives poetic language and, in doing so, uses the full artistic palette. The effect is both ecstatic and celebratory.” James Byrne

The Holocaust was the defining cataclysm of modernity. Now, more than three quarters of a century later, the immersive, interactive technologies of the digital age are dramatically refashioning our memory of that genocide. Virtual Holocaust Memory offers the first comprehensive account of a unique historical juncture, as twenty-first century digital culture meets the edge of living Holocaust memory. The book considers a range of projects that are being developed by museums, archives, businesses, and educational organizations in the USA and Europe, including interactive video testimony, Virtual Reality films, Augmented Reality apps, museum installations, and online exhibitions. Drawing on an original conceptual framework that incorporates connective memory, palimpsestic testimony, and a notion of 'truthfulness' first applied to testimonial writing by the survivor Charlotte Delbo, this groundbreaking book argues that the value of virtual Holocaust memory--that is to say its truthfulness--will ultimately come to rest on the connections that it establishes across a complex set of subject positions. These range from 'new bystanders', who encounter Holocaust memory from a position of relative safety, to the traumatized victims whose extreme physical and psychological experiences made communicating so difficult in the first place.

The Holocaust was the defining cataclysm of modernity. Now, more than three quarters of a century later, the immersive, interactive technologies of the digital age are dramatically refashioning our memory of that genocide. Virtual Holocaust Memory offers the first comprehensive account of a unique historical juncture, as twenty-first century digital culture meets the edge of living Holocaust memory. The book considers a range of projects that are being developed by museums, archives, businesses, and educational organizations in the USA and Europe, including interactive video testimony, Virtual Reality films, Augmented Reality apps, museum installations, and online exhibitions. Drawing on an original conceptual framework that incorporates connective memory, palimpsestic testimony, and a notion of 'truthfulness' first applied to testimonial writing by the survivor Charlotte Delbo, this groundbreaking book argues that the value of virtual Holocaust memory--that is to say its truthfulness--will ultimately come to rest on the connections that it establishes across a complex set of subject positions. These range from 'new bystanders', who encounter Holocaust memory from a position of relative safety, to the traumatized victims whose extreme physical and psychological experiences made communicating so difficult in the first place.

This book analyzes Holocaust poetry, war poetry, working-class poetry, and 9/11 poetry as forms of testimony. Rowland argues that testamentary poetry requires a different approach to traditional ways of dealing with poems due to the pressure of the metatext (the original, traumatic events), the poems’ demands for the hyper-attentiveness of the reader, and a paradox of identification that often draws the reader towards identifying with the poet’s experience, but then reminds them of its sublimity. He engages with the work of a diverse range of twentieth-century authors and across the literature of several countries, even uncovering new archival material. The study ends with an analysis of the poetry of 9/11, engaging with the idea that it typifies a new era of testimony where global, secondary witnesses react to a proliferation of media images. This book ranges across the literature of several countries, cultures, and historical events in order to stress the large variety of contexts in which poetry has functioned productively as a form of testimony, and to note the importance of the availability of translations to the formation of literary canons.

This book discusses contemporary British poetry in the context of metamodernism. The author argues that the concept of metamodernist poetry helps to recalibrate the opposition between mainstream and innovative poetry, and he investigates whether a new generation of British poets can be accurately defined as metamodernist. Antony Rowland analyses the ways in which contemporary British poets such as Geoffrey Hill, J. H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar have responded to the work of modernist writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, H. D. and Antonin Artaud, and what Theodor Adorno describes as the overall enigma of modern art.

This book analyzes Holocaust poetry, war poetry, working-class poetry, and 9/11 poetry as forms of testimony. Rowland argues that testamentary poetry requires a different approach to traditional ways of dealing with poems due to the pressure of the metatext (the original, traumatic events), the poems’ demands for the hyper-attentiveness of the reader, and a paradox of identification that often draws the reader towards identifying with the poet’s experience, but then reminds them of its sublimity. He engages with the work of a diverse range of twentieth-century authors and across the literature of several countries, even uncovering new archival material. The study ends with an analysis of the poetry of 9/11, engaging with the idea that it typifies a new era of testimony where global, secondary witnesses react to a proliferation of media images. This book ranges across the literature of several countries, cultures, and historical events in order to stress the large variety of contexts in which poetry has functioned productively as a form of testimony, and to note the importance of the availability of translations to the formation of literary canons.

The first critical study of post-Holocaust poetry in Britain. Under the umbrella term 'Holocaust poetry', this book argues that distinctions need to be made between the writing of Holocaust survivors and those who were not involved in the events of 1933 to 1945. This study focuses on the post-Holocaust writers Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes, while also stressing the links between them and the Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan, Miklos Radnoti, Primo Levi and Janos Pilinszky. Developing his theory of 'awkwardness' Antony Rowland argues that post-Holocaust poetry can play an important part in our understanding of Holocaust writing by stressing its self-conscious, imaginative engagement with the Holocaust, as well as the literature of survivors. The book illustrates that 'awkward' poetics enable post-Holocaust poets to provide ethical responses to history, and avoid aesthetic prurience. This probing and sensitive reassessment of Holocaust-related poetry will appeal to academics and students working in the areas of Holocaust Studies, contemporary poetry, and twentieth-century literature in general. Features * Focus on post-Holocaust poetry. * New critical vocabulary and concept of 'awkward poetics' to discuss the poets' writing. * Original reading of Sylvia Plath's 'camp poetics'. * One of the first books to use material from the Ted Hughes archives at Emory University (Atlanta) and the first book to use Tony Harrison's workbooks for Prometheus.

This book argues that Tony Harrison’s poetry is barbaric. It revisits one of the most misquoted passages of twentieth-century philosophy: Theodor Adorno’s apparent dismissal of post-Holocaust poetry as ‘impossible’ or ‘barbaric’. His statement is reinterpreted as opening up the possibility that the awkward and embarrassing poetics of writers such as Harrison might be re-evaluated as committed responses to the worst horrors of twentieth-century history. Most of the existing critical work on Harrison focuses on his representation of class, which occludes his interest in other aspects of historiography. The poet’s predilection for establishing links between the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prospect of global annihilation is examined as a commitment to oppose the dangers of linguistic silence. Hence Harrison’s work can be read fruitfully within the growing field of Holocaust Studies: his texts enter into arguments about the ethics of representing traumatic incidents that still haunt the contemporary. Harrison’s status as a ‘non-victim’ author of the events is stressed throughout. His writing of the Holocaust, allied bombings and atom bomb is mediated by his reception of the events through newsreels as a child, and his adoption and subversion, as an adult poet, of traditional poetic forms such as the elegy and sonnet. This book also discusses the ways in which Holocaust literature engages with a number of concepts challenged or altered by the historical events, such as love, mourning, memory, humanism, culture and barbarism, articulacy and silence.