Home : Book details : Book description

Description of  Living in History: Poetry in Britain, 1945 1979 (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Avant-Garde Writing)

1399519859 pdf Challenging received ideas about the British Poetry Revival, Luke Roberts presents a new account of experimental poetry and literary activism. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and traditions, Living in History begins by examining the legacies of empire and exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. H. Prynne, and poets associated with the Communist Party and the African National Congress. It then focuses on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn and others, in the development of liberation struggles around gender, race and sexuality across the 1970s. Tracking the ambivalence between poetic ambition and political commitment, and how one sometimes interferes with the other, Luke Roberts troubles the exclusions of British Poetry as a category and tests the claims made on behalf avant-garde and experimental poetics against the historical record. Bringing together both major and neglected authorships and offering extended close readings, fresh archival research and new contextual evidence, Read more