Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature
Cambridge University Press, 7/10/2017
EAN 9781107166844, ISBN10: 1107166845
Hardcover, 298 pages, 24 x 16.5 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.
Introduction
negotiating the era of decolonization
1. Provincializing the Greenwich meridian
Interchapter
Mbari publications and the CIA
2. Editing the Commonwealth
Interchapter
Derek Walcott and the London Magazine
3. Fashioning the modern African poet
Interchapter
James Simmons's Nigeria and the Honest Ulsterman
4. Publishing the troubles
Conclusion
the haunting of Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill.