The Poetics of Otherness War, Trauma, and Literature [Hardcover]

Using the concept of otherness as an entry point into a discussion of poetry, Jonathan Hart's study explores the role of history and theory in relation to literature and culture. Chapters range from trauma in Shakespeare to Bartolom? de Las Casas' representation of the Americas to the trench poets to voices from the Holocaust.1. Introduction 2. Trauma 3. The Literary and the Other 4. Trauma in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries 5. Travel, Alterity, and Culture 6. Violence, War, and Poetry 7. Representing the Great War 8. Poetry and the First World War 9. Poetry and the Second World War 10. Voices from the Holocaust 11. Conclusion

Examining the work of major poets, including Homer, Las Casas, Shakespeare, Yeats, and Brecht, Hart illustrates how each poem he reads engages with the traumatic wound that it represents. & the author provides a welcome orientation to those interested in discovering how literary criticism contributes to the study of war, colonialism, and genocide. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and Upper-division undergraduates~ graduate students. (M. Roberts, Choice, Vol. 53 (4), December, 2015)

Jonathan Hart's The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature is the capstone to a brilliant series of books he has written in recent years on the European colonization and its effect on aboriginal peoples, seen in the light of the culture of the Early Modern period, the Renaissance. But the present book looks forward to organized violence in the twentieth century as well - and organized verbal responses to it. - Gordon Teskey, Professor of English, Harvard University, USA

Jonathan Hart is an extremely distinguished historian, literary critic, theorist, rhetorician, and poet. The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature brings together all of his commitments as a scholar and writer. It examines in admirable detail not only European treatment of indigenous peoples in both North and South America, butlÓÍ