Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism explores the fraught relationship between the poetry of the mainstream and kinds of modernist poetry that have had to make their way outside it. Mainstream poets like Paul Muldoon, James Fenton and Carol Ann Duffy multiply voices and so draw on resources from the novel - Bakhtin's concept of the dialogic is therefore used to explain their techniques. By contrast, Shklovsky's concept of 'estrangement' is shown to be more useful in accounting for the radical experimentation of poets like Edwin Morgan, Christopher Middleton and Denise Riley. However, the book concludes by suggesting that - partly because of the influence of surrealism in women poets like Selima Hill and Jo Shapcott - the mainstream has recently been infiltrated by modernist and postmodernist estrangement effects.

This study of British and American poetry from the mid-1920s to the recent past, clarifies the complex interrelations of individuals, groups, and movements, and the contexts in which the poets worked.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry offers thirty-eight chapters of ground breaking research that form a collaborative guide to the many groupings and movements, the locations and styles, as well as concerns (aesthetic, political, cultural and ethical) that have helped shape contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. The book's introduction offers an anthropological participant-observer approach to its variously conflicted subjects, while exploring the limits and openness of the contemporary as a shifting and never wholly knowable category. The five ensuing sections explore: a history of the period's poetic movements; its engagement with form, technique, and the other arts; its association with particular locations and places; its connection with, and difference from, poetry in other parts of the world; and its circling around such ethical issues as whether poetry can perform actions in the world, can atone, redress, or repair, and how its significance is inseparable from acts of evaluation in both poets and readers. Though the book is not structured to feature chapters on authors thought to be canonical, on the principle that contemporary writers are by definition not yet canonical, the volume contains commentary on many prominent poets, as well as finding space for its contributors' enthusiasms for numerous less familiar figures. It has been organized to be read from cover to cover as an ever deepening exploration of a complex field, to be read in one or more of its five thematically structured sections, or indeed to be read by picking out single chapters or discussions of poets that particularly interest its individual readers.

Writing across the disciplines of sociology, literature, film, anthropology, and museology, the contributors examine the way in which radical postmodern shifts around knowledge and value have mobilized new relations between ourselves and others and transformed a range of cultural practices. This volume includes philosophical reflections and essays on museums and memory, visual culture, and relations with the other. Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject examines the altered frameworks that simultaneously help us to meet the contemporary challenge and raise the ethical stakes of our historical moment.

Examines the increasingly prevalent assumption that postmodernism is over and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics.

British culture today is the product of a shifting combination of tradition and experimentation, national identity and regional and ethnic diversity. These distinctive tensions are expressed in a range of cultural arenas, such as art, sport, journalism, fashion, education, and race. This Companion addresses these and other major aspects of British culture, and offers a sophisticated understanding of what it means to study and think about the diverse cultural landscapes of contemporary Britain. Each contributor looks at the language through which culture is formed and expressed, the political and institutional trends that shape culture, and at the role of culture in daily life. This interesting and informative account of modern British culture embraces controversy and debate, and never loses sight of the fact that Britain and Britishness must always be understood in relation to the increasingly international context of globalisation.

The persistence of Romantic thought and literary practice into the late twentieth century is evident in many contexts, from the philosophical and ideological abstractions of literary theory to the thematic and formal preoccupations of contemporary fiction and poetry. Though the precise meaning of the Romantic legacy is contested, it remains stubbornly difficult to move beyond. This collection of essays by prominent critics and literary theorists was first published in 1999, and explores the continuing impact of Romanticism on a variety of authors and genres, including John Barth, William Gibson, and John Ashbery, while writers from the Romantic and Victorian period include Wordsworth, Byron and Emily Brontë. Many critics have assumed that the forms and modes of feeling associated with the Romantic period continued to influence the cultural history of the the first half of the twentieth century. This was the first book to consider the mutual impact of postmodernism and Romanticism.

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.

Twentieth Century Marks A Watershed In Human History, Altering Significantly The Social, Moral, Psychological And Spiritual Dimensions Of Life. Reflecting These Changes Truthfully, Literature In English Written In Disparate Segments Of The Globe England, America And The Commonwealth Comes To Have A Significant Convergence Of Concerns And A Not-Too-Divergent Choice Of Artistic Strategies. The Present Volume Of Twentieth Century Literature In English Comprises Original Research Articles, Laying Bare Hitherto Unexplored Dimensions Of The Literature Of The Age Along These Lines.Prefaced By Incisive Insights Into Theoretical Aspects, Viz., The Modern Literary Scenario, Modernism And Post-Modernism, The Volume Includes Comprehensive Critiques Of The Works Of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Paul Mark Scott, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Tennesse Williams, Saul Bellow, Farhana Sheikh, Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala, Bhabani Bhattacharya, Manohar Malgonkar, Nayantara Sahgal, V.S. Naipaul, R.K. Narayan, Wole Soyinka, George Lamming And Christopher J. Koch.Incorporating Insightful Analysis Of Works Old And New Often From A Comparative Perspective, Involving Scrutiny Of Cliched Responses, The Present Volume Affords A View Of The Latest Research In The Field.