New Materialism and Late Modernist Poetry [Hardcover]

Analyzing a number of important works from influential poets drawn from the Late Modernist period (ca. 1930-1970), this book demonstrates how the fresh insights provided by New Materialism can inform our thinking about poetry. This fresh theoretical perspective challenges longstanding assumptions about our anthropocentric worldview.First appearing in the social sciences in the last decade, the New Materialism offers a fresh way of looking at the ways in which humanity views its relationship to the material world. This study picks up on those key insights, analyzing works that challenge the anthropocentric worldview that has defined Western thinking for millennia. Poetry drawn from the period known as Late Modernism (roughly 1930s-1970s) is examined, with particular attention paid to the ways in which the authors anticipate New Materialist perspectives. The authors include influential figures representing various anglophone traditions. Special attention is paid to the long poems of each writer: Hugh MacDiarmid's On a Raised Beach, Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead, David Jones's The Anathemata, Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery, Louis Zukofsky's A, and Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems. A concluding chapter briefly looks ahead to the persistence of materialist thinking in a key Postmodernist text: Armand Schwerner's The Tablets. As New Materialism teaches, and these texts demonstrate, a renewed reckoning of humanity's interaction with the material world can help engender a greater self-awareness that humanity is not the only, or best, measure of the universeAnalyzing a number of important works from influential poets drawn from the Late Modernist period (ca. 1930-1970), this book demonstrates how the fresh insights provided by New Materialism can inform our thinking about poetry. This fresh theoretical perspective challenges longstanding assumptions about our anthropocentric worldview.A past US Fulbright Scholar, Joe Moffett, Ph.D., is Dean of Arts, English, anlS›