Late Modernism and the Poetics of Place

This monograph offers a decisive reappraisal of both the literary history and the literary geography of Anglophone modernism by focusing attention on poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. Where recent studies of late modernism tend to regard it as an inter-war or mid-century phenomenon, this book contends that the period 1945-1975 marks a major phase of experiment and achievement in late modernist poetry. The author contends that what distinguishes the work of many late modernist poets (such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson) during this period is its multi-layered poetics of place. In part, he suggests, this is due to the engagement of individual writers with contemporary developments in human and physical geography. It is also manifest in the tendency of late modernist poets to foreground the cultural significance of regional and non-metropolitan places in their texts.

Author: Neal Alexander
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 02/12/2024
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.59d
ISBN: 9781474484411

About the Author

Neal Alexander is Lecturer in Twentieth-century Literature at Aberystwyth University. He is the author of Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Poetry & Geography (Liverpool University Press, 2013) and Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).