Antony Rowland

Introduction -- Contemporary British Poetry and Enigmaticalness -- Continuing 'Poetry Wars' in Twenty-First-Century British Poetry -- Committed and Autonomous Art -- Iconoclasm and Enigmatical Commitment -- The Double Consciousness of Modernism -- Conclusion.

Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry

Jane Kilby

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the groundbreaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal commercial success of victim testimony (in the form of misery memoirs); and the emergence of disciplinary interest in genocide, terror, and other violent atrocities. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. At the volume’s core is an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a ‘new’ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists. The collection draws together an international range of case-studies, including discussion of the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, and Rwanda, and encompasses a cross-disciplinary set of texts, novels, plays, testimonial writing, and hybrid testimonies. The volume situates itself at the cutting-edge of debate and as such brings together the leading thinkers in the field, requiring that each address the future, anticipating and setting the future terms of debate on the importance of testimony.

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing

The Future of Testimony

Richard Crownshaw

Memory studies has become a rapidly growing area of scholarly as well as public interest. This volume brings together world experts to explore the current critical trends in this new academic field. It embraces work on diverse but interconnected phenomena, such as twenty-first century museums, shocking memorials in present-day Rwanda and the firsthand testimony of the victims of genocidal conflicts. The collection engages with pressing 'real world' issues, such as the furor around the recent 9/11 memorial, and what we really mean when we talk about 'trauma'.

The Future of Memory

Antony Rowland argues that the poetry of Tony Harrison is barbaric. The author discusses how Holocaust literature engages with a number of concepts challenged or altered by historical events, such as love, mourning, memory, culture and barbarism.

Tony Harrison and the Holocaust

Emma Liggins

Eriks Uskalis

Masculinity is becoming an increasingly popular area of study in areas as diverse as sociology, politics and cultural studies, yet significant research is lacking into connections between masculinity and literature. Signs of Masculinity aims at beginning to fill the gap. Starting with an introduction to, and intervention within, numerous debates concerning the cultural construction of various masculinities, the volume then continues with an investigation of representations of masculinity in literature from 1700 to the present. Close readings of texts are intended to demonstrate that masculinity is not a theoretical abstract, but a definitive textual and cultural phenomenon that needs to be recognised in the study of literature. It is hoped that the wide-ranging essays, which raise numerous issues, and are written from a variety of methodological approaches, will appeal to undergraduate, postgraduates and lecturers interest in the crucial but under-researched area of masculinity.

Men in Literature 1700 to the Present

Signs of Masculinity

Angelica Michelis

The first full-length collection of essays on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy's poetry is both respected by academics, and widely read and enjoyed by both children and adults. Approaches Duffy's work from a variety of literary theoretical perspectives, including feminism, masculinity, national identity and post-structuralism. Situates Duffy's work in relation to current debates about the state, value and social relevance of contemporary British poetry. Will become the benchmark anthology on Duffy.

The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

'Choosing Tough Words'

This book analyzes Holocaust poetry, war poetry, working-class poetry, and 9/11 poetry as forms of testimony. Rowland argues that testamentary poetry requires a different approach to traditional ways of dealing with poems due to the pressure of the metatext (the original, traumatic events), the poems’ demands for the hyper-attentiveness of the reader, and a paradox of identification that often draws the reader towards identifying with the poet’s experience, but then reminds them of its sublimity. He engages with the work of a diverse range of twentieth-century authors and across the literature of several countries, even uncovering new archival material. The study ends with an analysis of the poetry of 9/11, engaging with the idea that it typifies a new era of testimony where global, secondary witnesses react to a proliferation of media images. This book ranges across the literature of several countries, cultures, and historical events in order to stress the large variety of contexts in which poetry has functioned productively as a form of testimony, and to note the importance of the availability of translations to the formation of literary canons.

Antony Rowland

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