This is our backup site. Click here to visit our main site at MellenPress.com

Study of Cultural Centres and Margins in British Poetry Since 1950 Poets and Publishers

Author: 
Year:
Pages:344
ISBN:0-7734-2275-7
978-0-7734-2275-9
Price:$219.95
Drawing on the author's experience both inside and outside the British literary milieu, this volume gives a unique and often contentious view of the late-twentieth-century poetry canon, and the way that this canon has been established. As well as offering an interpretive overview, the book is valuable in suggesting different perspectives on the poetry of several specific key figures writing in Britain, such as Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. But it does not neglect other writers who have been forced onto the periphery of the poetry-publishing world, such as representatives of various ethnic and gender groups working in Britain during this period (e.g., the Northern Ireland frontier, West Indian poets, feminist poets). It adds up to a stimulating and provocative account of what's been happening in British poetry in recent years.

Reviews

"Carefully researched and argued, its distinguishing quality is, however, a superb stylistic balance between the personal and the "objective" in its tone and between the vernacular and the academic in its language. Arising, in part, from Jackaman's acknowledged association with some of the poets and players at Cambridge in the 1960s, the book's air of genuine engagement with conflicting perspectives lends it a tone far removed from a ponderous tracing of literary history over forty years." - Leslie J. Monkman