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Product Description: Examining the evolution of American film comedy since the beginning of the sound era (c. 1930), Christopher Beach focuses on how language, class, and social relationships in early sound comedies by the Marx Brothers, the screwball comedies of the 1930s by Capra, Sturges and others, and 1950s comedies of Frank Tashlin and Vincente Minnelli, and contemporary films by Woody Allen, Whit Stillman, and the Coen brothers...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In Poetic Culture, Christopher Beach questions the cultural significance of poetry, both as a canonical system and as a contemporary practice. By analyzing issues such as poetry's loss of audience, the "anthology wars" of the 1950s and early 1960s, the academic and institutional orientation of current poetry, the poetry slam scene, and the efforts to use television as a medium for presenting poetry to a wider audience, Beach presents a sociocultural framework that is fundamental to an understanding of the poetic medium...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Artifice and Indeterminacy gathers the strongest and most representative writings of the past two decades and shows more clearly than ever before the depth and breadth of  contemporary American poetics. Collectively, these essays break with conventional interpretive frameworks and traditional generic boundaries of poetry to give fresh voice to the  poetics of our time...read more

Product Description: This text draws on contemporary cultural and historical theory to portray Walt Whitman's poetry as a balancing act between the personal and the social, the literary and the plainspoken.

Product Description: In this first full-length study of Pound's influence on American poetry after World War II, Beach argues that Pound's experimental mode created a new tradition of poetic writing in America. Often neglected by academic critics and excluded from the "canon" of American poetic writing, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and later members of this experimental tradition have maintained the sense of an American avant garde in keeping with Pound's modernist experiments of the 1910s and 1920s...read more