Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781107166844
• eBook ISBN: 9781316731291
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Diacritical Marks
• Introduction: Negotiating the Era of Decolonization
• Chapter 1 Provincializing the Greenwich Meridian
• Interchapter: Mbari Publications and the CIA
• Chapter 2 Editing the Commonwealth
• Interchapter: Derek Walcott and the London Magazine
• Chapter 3: Fashioning the Modern African Poet
• Interchapter: James Simmons’s Nigeria and the Honest Ulsterman
• Chapter 4 Publishing the Troubles
• Conclusion: The Haunting of Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill
• Notes
• Index