The first comprehensive guide to the prose poem, this book covers the history of the genre from Aloyisius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit and Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen to its most important modern and contemporary practitioners. It gives special attention to the genre’s hybridity as well as to its propensity to engage in a dialogue with other genres, discourses and artistic forms. Written by prominent scholars of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem offers analytical and historically informed narratives of the genre’s transformations and variations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the next.
Author(s): Mary Ann Caws (editor), Michel Delville (editor)
Series: (Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities)
Edition: 1
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 360
Tags: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Prose Poem
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Preface
Introduction
Part I: Origins and Beginnings
1. The Birth of the Prose Poem in Nineteenth-Century France
2. Impressionism and the Prose Poem: Rimbaud’s Artful Authenticity
3. Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht and the Prose Poem avant la lettre
4. Thyrsus & Palimpsest: De Quincey’s influence on Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris
5. A Dangerous Hybridity: The Prose Poem at the fin de siècle
Part II: Visual Mediations
6. Cubism and the Prose Poem
7. The Modern French Prose Poem and Visual Art
8. The Homeless Heart: Abstraction and the Prose Poem
Part III: Genres and Discourses
9. The Prose Poem, Flash Fiction, Lyrical Essays and Other Microgenres
10. The Prose Poem and the Antinovel: Unsettling Form in Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes
11. Bishop, Lowell, and the Confessional Prose Poem
12. Trans-verse: Prose Poetry, Translation and Border Crossing in Baudelaire and Emerson
Part IV: Issues and Contexts
13. An Interruption of Boundaries: On Gender and the Prose Poem
14. Pastoral and Ecocritical Voices in Modern Prose Poetry
15. Grzegorz Wróblewski’s Kopenhaga and the Process of Inscription
16. The Chinese Prose Poem: Generic Metaphor and the Multiple Origins of sanwenshi
17. The sanbunshi (Prose Poem) in Japan
18. The Arabic Prose Poem in Iraq
19. After Poet’s Prose: Postgeneric Writing in the Ongoing Crisis of Verse
20. Prose in Prose in Contemporary French Poetic Practice: Appropriation, Repurposing and Pornography
Index
