Search results for ""Author Stan Smith""

The 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.

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Essays discussing the concept of globalisation as present in works of art and literature. Like Freud's `civilisation', globalisation is both cause and consequence of its own discontents, visible at times only in the resistances it generates. Study of the phenomenon has until recently been confined largely to economists and political and social scientists. The present volume brings a range of literary and cultural analyses to bear to demonstrate both its actual time-depth and the all-encompassing nature of its influences on culture and consciousness. The English language and English literature have been major elements in its forging, underwriting first British and then American cultural hegemony. Unlike most readings of globalisation, these essays depict notan irresistible juggernaut but a process that, in generating its own resistances, opens up the possibility of an alternative world order founded not on the inequities of power and capital, but on shared commitment to a fragile planet and a common and universal culture. Ranging from Homer to Michael Crichton, Shakespeare to Suleyman Al-Bassam, John Donne to Les Murray, John Keats to Derek Walcott, Conrad, Gissing and Edward Lear to V. S. Naipauland Salman Rushdie, and addressing, among many others, writers as diverse as Paul Valéry and Edouard Glissant, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, George Orwell, Martha Gellhorn and Storm Jameson, Eliot, Yeats and Auden, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, these essays explore a remarkable range of responses to the process of globalisation from earliest times to the present day. Contributors: STAN SMITH, GRAHAM HOLDERNESS, BRYAN LOUGHREY, JENNIFER BIRKETT, PHYLLIS LASSNER, SHARON OUDITT, TONY SHARPE, EDWARD LARRISSY, MICHAEL MURPHY, LIAM CONNELL

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