Description
Book SynopsisThis collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.
Trade Review'The Transnational Beat Generation explores the global dimensions of Beat literature in a series of solidly researched essays about the world-wide influence of major and minor Beat authors during the second half of the twentieth century. This book will stimulate thought and provoke controversy as certainly as it will enlarge our frame of reference for Beat writing. It makes the case not only that Beat writers created literature that inspired resistance movements throughout the world, but also that they continue to represent the spirit of freedom to young readers everywhere.' Ann Charters, emeritus professor of American literature, University of Connecticut and editor of The Penguin Beat Reader and The Penguin Sixties Reader
'The Beat Generation has often been presented as quintessentially American despite its critique of American culture and politics. This collection brings new light to this avant-garde movement by re-examining the international aspects of its roots as well as later reverberations. With historical documentation and literary analysis these essays demonstrate convincingly that much of what we now associate with global postmodernism was already evident in the work of a more widely dispersed Beat Generation.' - Robin Lydenberg, Boston College
'In essays that range around the world and across cultures, The Transnational Beat Generation has marked out a rich field that makes a natural fit for artists who above all else lived and wrote beyond borders; this book will open up Beat Studies and point it in new, uncharted directions.' - Oliver Harris, president of the European Beat Studies Network
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Transnational Beat; N.M.Grace & J.Skerl PART I: TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS William S. Burroughs and U.S. Empire; A.Hibbard Jack Kerouac and the Nomadic Cartographies of Exile; H.Melehy Beat Transnationalism Under Gender: Bonnie Bremser's Troia; R.Johnson The Beat Manifesto: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Worlded Circuits of African-American Beat Surrealism; J.Fazzino The Beat Fairy Tale and Transnational Spectacle Culture: Diane di Prima and William S. Burroughs; N.M.Grace Two Takes on Japan: Joanne Kyger's Japan and India Journals and Philip Whalen's Scenes of Life at the Capital; J.Falk 'If All the Writers of the World Get Together': Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Literary Solidarity in Sandinista Nicaragua; M.Hardesty PART II: INTERVIEW WITH ANNE WALDMAN PART III: GLOBAL CIRCULATION 'They . . . took their time over the coming': The British/Beat 1955-65; R.J.Ellis Beating them to it? The Vienna Group and the Beat Generation; J.van der Bent Prague Connection; J.Rauvolf Cain's Book and the Mark of Exile: Alexander Trocchi as Transnational Beat; F.Paton Greece and the Beat Generation: the Case of Lefteris Poulios; C.Gair & K.Georganta Japan Beat: Nanao Sakaki; A.R.Lee
