Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing

by Matthew Hart

Overview

Modernism is typically associated with novelty and urbanity. So what happens when poets identify small communities and local languages with the spirit of transnational modernity? Are vernacular poetries inherently provincial or implicitly xenophobic? How did modernist poets use vernacular language to re-imagine the relations between people, their languages, and the communities in which they live?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199324712
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	09/01/2013
Series:	Modernist Literature and Culture Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Matthew Hart is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Hometown:

London, England

Place of Birth:

Ottawa, Canada

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1 Vernacular Discourse from Major to Minor

Chapter 2 The Impossibility of Synthetic Scots; or,
Hugh MacDiarmid's Nationalist Internationalism

Chapter 3 A Dialect Written in the Spelling of the Capital:
Basil Bunting Goes Home

Chapter 4 Tradition and the Postcolonial Talent:
T. S. Eliot versus E. K. Brathwaite

Chapter 5 Transnational Anthems and the Ship of State:
Harryette Mullen, Melvin B. Tolson and the
Politics of Afro-Modernism

Epilogue Denationalizing Mina Loy

Editorial Reviews

"Hart writes with clarity and authority, and he connects his chapters effectively. Although Nations of Nothing but Poetry presents a sustained and unified argument, each chapter is also cohesive enough to be consulted individually...The time and financing that fostered Hart's research and writing has paid off in his fine book, which is likely to guide the terms of debate in important new criticism." —Style

"It is a real pleasure to have well-written, intelligent, sensitive, and properly sourced criticism on these poets...One of Hart's strengths is an intuitive sense for the structures of feeling that run through his poets' meters and their politics, and for what forces those structures are resisting. Another is the implications for more canonical and nation-bound modernisms." —Comparative Literature Studies

From the Publisher