A Mirror For French Poetry 1840 1940

Since the start of the twentieth century, poets have been irresistibly drawn to the image of the poem as a kind of data-handling, a way of mediating between the divergent scales of aesthetics and infrastructure, language and technology. Conrad Steel shows how the history of poetry—with its particular formal affordances, and the particular hopes and fears we invest it with—has always been bound up with our changing logistics of macroscale representation. The Poetics of Scale takes us back to the years before the First World War in Paris, where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed to have invented a new mode of poetry large enough to take on the challenges of the coming twentieth century. This history follows Apollinaire’s ideas across the Atlantic and examines how and why his work became such a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of intensive American economic expansion and up to the present day. Threading together Apollinaire’s work in the 1910s with three of his American successors—Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s, Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s, and Alice Notley from the 1970s onward—it shows how poetry as a cultural technique became the crucial test case for the scale of our collective imagination.

This book, written by a team of experts from many countries, provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which translation has brought the major literature of the world into English-speaking culture. Part I discusses theoretical issues and gives an overview of the history of translation into English. Part II, the bulk of the work, arranged by language of origin, offers critical discussions, with bibliographies, of the translation history of specific texts (e.g. the Koran, the Kalevala), authors (e.g. Lucretius, Dostoevsky), genres (e.g. Chinese poetry, twentieth-century Italian prose) and national literatures (e.g. Hungarian, Afrikaans).

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Though the work of Irish writers has been paramount in conventional accounts of literary modernism, Ireland itself only rarely occupies a meaningful position in accounts of modernism’s historical trajectory. With an itinerary moving not simply among Dublin, Belfast, and London but also Paris, New York, Addis Ababa, Rome, Berlin, Geneva, and the world’s radio receivers, Ireland and the Problem of Information examines the pivotal mediations through which social knowledge was produced in the mid-twentieth century. Organized as a series of cross-fading case studies, the book argues that an expanded sphere of Irish cultural production should be read as much for what it indicates about practices of intermedial circulation and their consequences as for what it reveals about Irish writing around the time of the Second World War. In this way, it positions the “problem of information” as, first and foremost, an international predicament, but one with particular national implications for the Irish field.

The Nobel Prize winning author Samuel Beckett is a literary treasure, and this work represents the only comprehensive reference to the concepts, characters, and biographical details mentioned by, or related to, Beckett. Painstakingly and lovingly compiled by acclaimed Beckett scholars C.J. Ackerley and S.E. Gontarski, it is alphabetical, cross-referenced, and laid out in a very user-friendly format. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett provides an organized trove of information for students and scholars alike, and is a must for any serious reader of Beckett. As most Beckettians know, “reading [him] for the first time is an experience like no other in modern literature.” (Paul Auster)