Postcolonial Poetry In English

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series (general editor: Elleke Boehmer) offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Poetry in English provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of English poetry in all the regions that were once part of the British Empire. The idea of postcolonial poetry is held together by three factors: the global community constituted by English; the creative possibilities accessible through English; and patterns of literary development common to regions with a history of recent decolonization. In showing how diverse poetic traditions in English evolved from dependency to varying degrees of cultural self-confidence, the book answers two broad questions: how is postcolonial studies relevant to the interpretation of poetry, and how does poetry contribute to our idea of postcolonial writing? The book is divided into three parts: the first works out a method of analysis based on recent publications of outstanding interest; the second narrates the development of poetic traditions in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, and the settler colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand; the third analyses key motifs, such as the struggle for minority self-representation; the cultural politics of gender, modernism, and postmodernity; and the experience of migration and self-exile in contemporary Anglophone societies. Postcolonial Poetry in English provides a succinct and wide-ranging introduction to some of the most exciting poetic writing of the twentieth century. It is ideally suited for readers interested in world writing in English, contemporary literature, postcolonial writing, cultural studies, and postmodern culture.

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.

Postcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul are widely celebrated, yet the achievements of these poets have been strangely neglected. This work argues that these poets have dramatically expanded the atlas of English literature.

This Companion is the first to explore postcolonial poetry through regional, historical, political, formal, textual and gender approaches.

Postcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul are widely celebrated, yet the achievements of these poets have been strangely neglected. This work argues that these poets have dramatically expanded the atlas of English literature.

"Postcolonial Poetry in English provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of English poetry in all the regions that were once part of the British Empire. In showing how diverse poetic traditions in English evolved from dependency to varying degrees of cultural self-confidence, the book answers two broad questions: How is postcolonial studies relevant to the interpretation of poetry? How does poetry contribute to our idea of postcolonial writing?"--BOOK JACKET.

"Pilar Villar-Argáiz's sustained, meticulous, and exacting study of Eavan Boland opens up and articulates in a fresh way the key dimensions of her poetry. It succeeds not only in tracking the far-reaching ramifications of Eavan Boland's politicized aesthetic as a postcolonial writer but in urging us to revisit the crystalline and precisely etched poems of one of the most significant artists in contemporary Irish culture." Professor Anne Fogarty, University College, Dublin (from the Introduction) This monograph is an original and important contribution to the growing body of critical studies devoted to one of Ireland's major living poets: Eavan Boland (see Haberstroh 1996; Hagen & Zelman 2005). It details the controversies that were prompted by the inclusion of Ireland in a postcolonial framework and then tests the application of an array of cogent theories and concepts to Boland's work. In an attempt to explore the richness and complexity of her poetry, Villar- Argáiz discusses the contradictory pulls in her desire to surpass, and yet at the same time epitomize, Irish nationality. Boland's remarkable achievement as a poet lies in her ability to stretch, by constant negotiations and re-appropriations, the borderlines of inherited definitions of nationality and femininity. Chapters include: Re-examining the postcolonial: Gender and Irish studies, Towards an understanding of Boland's poetry as minority/ postcolonial discourse, A post-nationalist or a post-colonial writer?: Boland's revisionary stance on Mother Ireland, To a "third" space: Boland's imposed exile as a young child, The subaltern in Boland's poetry, Boland's mature exile in the US: An 'Orientalist' writer? and Conclusion. Review: "This rigorous and informative exploration of the poetry of Eavan Boland by Pilar Villar-Argáiz proves the validity of drawing upon the resources of postcolonial theory to illuminate her work. Through the lens of postcolonialism, the deep-seated preoccupations and complex imaginative foundations of Boland's writing are carefully excavated and interpreted. Villar-Argáiz, moreover, in her observant close readings of poems from different phases of the author's oeuvre reveals how recurrent issues such as the problem of national and cultural identity, the ethical responsibility of engaging with the past, and the quest for fluidity and openness are variously engaged with, both aesthetically and philosophically. Villar-Argáiz's sustained, meticulous, and exacting study of Eavan Boland opens up and articulates in a fresh way key dimensions of her poetry. It succeeds not only in tracking the far-reaching ramifications of Eavan Boland's politicized aesthetic as a postcolonial writer but in urging us to revisit the crystalline and precisely etched poems of one of the most significant artists in contemporary Irish culture." - Professor Anne Fogarty, Department of English, University College Dublin, Ireland About the Author: Dr. Pilar Villar-Argáiz lectures in the Department of English Philology at the University of Granada, Spain, where she obtained a European Doctorate in English Studies (Irish Literature). She is the author of Eavan Boland's Evolution As an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider within an Outsider's Culture (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). She has also published extensively on the representation of femininity in contemporary Irish women's poetry, on cinematic representations of Ireland, and on the theoretical background and application of feminism and postcolonialism to the study of Irish literature. In addition, Dr. Villar Argáiz has co-edited two books on English literature. Irish Research Series, No.51