Ideas, culture, and capital flow across national borders with unprecedented speed, but we tend not to think of poems as taking part in globalization. Jahan Ramazani shows that poetry has much to contribute to understanding literature in an extra-national frame. Indeed, the globality of poetry, he argues, stands to energize the transnational turn in the humanities.
Poetry in a Global Age builds on Ramazani’s award-winning A Transnational Poetics, a book that had a catalytic effect on literary studies. Ramazani broadens his lens to discuss modern and contemporary poems not only in relation to world literature, war, and questions of orientalism but also in light of current debates over ecocriticism, translation studies, tourism, and cultural geography. He offers brilliant readings of postcolonial poets like Agha Shahid Ali, Lorna Goodison, and Daljit Nagra, as well as canonical modernists such as W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Marianne Moore. Ramazani shows that even when poetry seems locally rooted, its long memory of forms and words, its connections across centuries, continents, and languages, make it a powerful imaginative resource for a global age. This book makes a strong case for poetry in the future development of world literature and global studies.
Author(s): Jahan Ramazani
Edition: 1
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 304
Tags: Literary Criticism, World Literature, Poetry
Contents
Introduction
1. “Cosmopolitan Sympathies”: Poetry of the First Global War
2. The Local Poem in a Global Age
3. Poetry and Tourism in a Global Age
4. Modernist Inflections, Postcolonial Directions
5. Poetry and the Transnational Migration of Form
6. Yeats’s Asias: Modernism, Orientalism, Anti-orientalism
7. Poetry, the Planet, and the Ecological Thought: Wallace Stevens and Beyond
8. Seamus Heaney’s Globe
9. Code-Switching, Code-Stitching: A Macaronic Poetics?
10. Poetry, (Un)Translatability, and World Literature
Epilogue. Lyric Poetry: Intergeneric, Transnational, Translingual?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index