Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature

The book reveals how mid-twentieth-century African, Caribbean, Irish, and British poets profoundly affected each other in person and in print.

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (Author)

9781107166844, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 July 2017

298 pages, 6 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

'Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature is meticulously researched, drawing on archival sources at Emory University, the Harry Ransom Center, Leeds University, and in Belgium and Nigeria. It is also theoretically sophisticated, constantly illuminating, often counterintuitive, beautifully written, and filled with keenly observed close readings - an astonishing achievement in a first book.' Coilin Parsons, breac

Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.

Introduction: negotiating the era of decolonization
1. Provincializing the Greenwich meridian
Interchapter: Mbari publications and the CIA
2. Editing the Commonwealth
Interchapter: Derek Walcott and the London Magazine
3. Fashioning the modern African poet
Interchapter: James Simmons's Nigeria and the Honest Ulsterman
4. Publishing the troubles
Conclusion: the haunting of Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Poetry [DC]