Barbara Frietchie

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Thomas Fink

"This study analyzes the work of social poets who hail from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and geographical locations in the United States. These figures, who emerged as poets in the last two decades, utilize a diversity of aesthetic strategies to address issues of in/visibility, the erasure and reconstruction of history, and issues of inclusivity and exclusivity in formations of community. Issues of community raised involve race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual preference."--BOOK JACKET.

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Evie Shockley

Beginning with a deceptively simple question—What do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as “black”?—Evie Shockley’s <em>Renegade Poetics</em> separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century. Shockley argues that a rigid notion of black aesthetics commonly circulates that is little more than a caricature of the concept. She sees the Black Aesthetic as influencing not only African American poets and their poetic production, but also, through its shaping of criteria and values, the reception of their work. Taking as its starting point the young BAM artists’ and activists’ insistence upon the interconnectedness of culture and politics, this study delineates how African American poets—in particular, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Harryette Mullen, Anne Spencer, Ed Roberson, and Will Alexander—generate formally innovative responses to their various historical and cultural contexts. Out of her readings, Shockley eloquently builds a case for redefining black aesthetics descriptively, to account for nearly a century of efforts by African American poets and critics to name and tackle issues of racial identity and self-determination. In the process, she resituates innovative poetry that has been dismissed, marginalized, or misread because its experiments were not “recognizably black”—or, in relation to the avant-garde tradition, because they <em>were</em>.

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Renée R. Curry

"Just as the cultural background of readers shapes how they respond to texts, the context in which writers live shapes what they write. When a context is dominant within a culture, the effects of that context upon an author may be taken for granted and thus overlooked. Race is a powerful factor in shaping literary works. Literature by black writers, for example, often reflects the experiences of African Americans. At the same time, though perhaps less obviously, literature by white writers may similarly reflect the experience of being white. This book argues that H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath wrote from an unproclaimed dominant white perspective that becomes evident in their poetry. Loosely delineated, writing white constitutes writing authored from an acknowledged or unacknowledged white perspective; writing that implies or explicitly delivers the concept of whiteness to a text; writing that remains unconcerned with white racial politics internal and external to the text; and writing that uses the word white to maintain ideological systems of mastery and dichotomy. This book examines numerous poems in terms of whiteness. Each chapter places one poet in the larger context of historical and cultural racial events prevalent during the time of her writing and explores the particular poems created and published during that period." -- Amazon.com

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Claire Hoertz Badaracco

Between the turn of the century and about 1940, dramatic changes took place in both British and American print culture. Publishers scrambled as new markets developed or were created through advertising. Lithographers and designers helped establish the preeminence of "modern" aesthetics. And the centuries-old printing industry was transformed by unprecedented technological advances. In Trading Words Claire Hoertz Badaracco examines these fascinating developments in an engaging study of the economics of literary design. She investigates how writers sold their poetry by marketing their reputations, how book printers used American literature to break the long hold of European classics on the mass-market literary imagination, and how direct mail and advertising made or broke subscription publishing enterprises during the 1930s. Drawing on rare books and manuscript materials from distinguished collections in the history of printing and marketing, Badaracco freshly surveys the development of twentieth-century "mass culture" and reinterprets the philosophies, ideals, and schemes of the poets, typographers, and publishers who succeeded in capturing the public imagination.