
Contemporary British Poetry
Essays in Theory and Criticism
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This collection of original essays focuses on new and continuing movements in British Poetry. It offers a wide ranging look at feminist, working class, and other poets of diverse cultural backgrounds.
Description
Devoted to close readings of poets and their contexts from various postmodern perspectives, this book offers a wide-ranging look at the work of feminists and "post feminist" poets, working class poets, and poets of diverse cultural backgrounds, as well as provocative re-readings of such well-established and influential figures as Donald Davie, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Craig Raine.
Contributors include many respected theorists and critics, such as Antony Easthope, C. L. Innes, John Matthias, Edward Larrissy, Linda Anderson, Eric Homberger, Alastair Niven, R. K. Meiners, and Cairns Craig, in addition to new writers working from new theoretical perspectives. Their approaches range from cultural theory to poststructuralism; each essayist addresses a general audience while engaging in debates of interest to postgraduates and specialists in the fields of twentieth-century poetry and cultural studies. The book's strength lies in its diversity at every level.
James Acheson is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is coeditor of Beckett's Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, and editor of The British and Irish Novel Since 1960 and British and Irish Drama Since 1960. Romana Huk is Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.
Reviews
"Acheson and Huk have gathered a set of critical essays that fairly defines a whole new set of energies and directions in Contemporary British Poetry. It is a kind of watershed document; it frames an historical period that we can now see as having existed between the end of the Second World War and the mid to late 1980s, and it fairly predicts the new impulses and emergent energies of a new generation. " — Vincent Sherry, Villanova University
"British Poetry has not been a part of American literary awareness for some time. A few poets are known and taught, but the energy and brilliant inventiveness in British Poetry since the 1970s is largely unknown. This book offers an entrance into a rich field, and will become an important part of a general reconsideration of British Poetry in America. " — Michael Anania, University of Illinois at Chicago