News of War

Civilian Poetry 1936-1945
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-062392-0
Verlag: OXFORD UNIV PR

Buch, Englisch, 384 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 734 g

From the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until the end of World War II, many poets around the world felt an obligation to write about the wars of their time. Famed poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ivor Gurney had earned their literary authority because of their experience fighting in the trenches during World War I, but civilian poets who wished to write about warfare doubted their own authority to write about the battles from afar. In News of War, Professor Rachel Galvin argues that this standard is a strongly gendered norm that is problematic for women writers, who were much less likely to have firsthand experience with war. Galvin indicates that the predicament of writing war without witnessing war is exemplified by six of the most prominent poets of the time: a Spanish-language poet, César Vallejo; a French-language poet, Raymond Queneau; and four English-language poets, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.

Although scholars have previously observed the anxieties of civilian poets writing about war, especially in the literature of World War I, Galvin gives the topic a new emphasis by developing the idea that the poets are in dialogue with journalism of the time and developing a framework within which to see their formal patterns for grappling with war at a distance. Expanding on the work of previous scholars who have written on poetry's relation to the news, News of War develops the idea of a strong tendency toward aesthetic self-reflexivity and ethical self-scrutiny in the poetry of the war.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Galvin, Rachel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Militärgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Acknowledgments

- Introduction

- Chapter One: Flesh Made Word: César Vallejo and the Spanish Civil War

- Chapter Two: W.H. Auden: Rushing to the Pumps, or Not, in Spain and China

- Chapter Three: W.H. Auden during World War II

- Chapter Four: Wallace Stevens in a “Sudden Time”

- Chapter Five: Raymond Queneau, Reading the Poor Paper

- Chapter Six: Marianne Moore and the Eyewitness Bind

- Chapter Seven: Gertrude Stein and the War She Saw

- Epilogue

- Works Cited

Über Autor(innen)

Rachel Galvin is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is a scholar, poet, and translator. Her essays appear in Boston Review, Comparative Literature Studies, ELH, Jacket 2, Los Angeles Review of Books, MLN, and Modernism/modernity.