Description
Book SynopsisThe paradigmatic figure of twentieth-century history is the ‘displaced person’, a concept which emerged from the demographic migrations, deportations and genocidal purges that accompanied two world wars, the destruction and construction of nation states and the restructuring of the global order which they occasioned. These processes almost inevitably fostered a poetry of exile and expatriation intimately bound up with the experience of modernity and the culture of modernism, culminating, in the postcolonial era, with the globalisation of displacement as the determining condition of postmodernity. In this timely new volume renowned poetry critic Stan Smith examines a number of poets – Plath, Larkin, Heaney, Walcott, Middleton, Fisher, Duffy – through the lens of displacement.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Introduction: Poetry, Place and Displacement
- 2. On the Edge of Things: Philip Larkin
- 3. A Double Man in a Double Place: Iain Crichton Smith
- 4. Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith’s Constellations
- 5. Lost Bearings: Christopher Middleton
- 6. ‘What Like Is It?’ Carol Ann Duffy’s Différance
- 7. Darkening English: Post-imperial Contestations in Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott
- 8. Living in History
- 9. An Age of Stimulation: Tall Tales and Short Stories
- 10. Nowhere Anyone Would Like To Get To
- 11. Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
