Mastery's End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry

الغلاف الأمامي
University of Georgia Press, 01‏/01‏/2005 - 288 من الصفحات
Focusing on lyric poetry, Mastery's End looks at important, yet neglected, issues of subjectivity in post-World War II travel literature. Jeffrey Gray departs from related studies in two regards: nearly all recent scholarly books on the literature of travel have dealt with pre-twentieth-century periods, and all are concerned with narrative genres. Gray questions whether the postcolonial theoretical model of travel as mastery, hegemony, and exploitation still applies. In its place he suggests a model of vulnerability, incoherence, and disorientation to reflect the modern destabilizing nature of travel, a process that began with the unprecedented movement of people during and after World War II and has not abated since.

What the contemporary discourse concerning displacement, border crossing, and identity needs, says Gray, is a study of that literary genre with the least investment in closure and the least fidelity to ethnic and national continuities. His concern is not only with the psychological challenges to identity but also with travel as a mode of understanding and composition. Following a summary of American critical perspectives on travel from Emerson to the present, Gray discusses how travel, by nature, defamiliarizes and induces heightened awareness. Such phenomena, Gray says, correspond to the tenets of modern poetics: traversing territories, immersing the self in new object worlds, reconstituting the known as unknown. He then devotes a chapter each to four of the past half-century's most celebrated English-speaking, western poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, and Derek Walcott. Finally, two multi-poet chapters examine the travel poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey and others.

 

المحتوى

Elizabeth Bishops
24
Travelers and Tourists From Bishop to Lowell
63
Dandies and Flaneurs American Poetry and
88
John Ashberys Travel Agency
106
Three Beat Questions of Travel
145
The Travels of Derek Walcott
178
Lyn Hejinian and Nathaniel Mackey
212
The Trouble with Travel
234
Notes
249
Works Cited
267
Index
281
حقوق النشر

عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

نبذة عن المؤلف (2005)

Jeffrey Gray is an associate professor of English at Seton Hall University.

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