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? Nations of Nothing But Poetry answers these questions through case studies of British, Caribbean, and American poetries from the 1920s through the 1990s. With a combination of fresh insights and attentive close readings, Matthew Hart presents a new theory of a "synthetic vernacular"-writing that explores the aesthetic and ideological tensions within modernism's dual commitments to the local and the global. The result is an invigorating contribution to the field of transnational modernist studies. Chapters focus on a mixture of canonical and non-canonical writers, combining new literary histories--such as the story of how Melvin B. Tolson, while a resident of Oklahoma, was appointed Poet Laureate of Liberia--with analyses of poems by Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. More broadly, the book reveals how the language of modernist poetry was shaped by the incompletely globalized nature of a world in which the nation-state continued to be a primary mediator of cultural and political identity, even as its authority was challenged as never before. Through deft juxtaposition, Hart develops a new interpretation of modernist poetry in English-one that disrupts the critical opposition between nationalism and the transnational, paving the way for a political history of modernist cosmopolitanism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190452902
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	04/22/2010
Series:	Modernist Literature and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

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