Product Description: Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt/M., New York, Oxford, Wien. The twenty-seven essays in this volume are the product of the Ninth Biennial Symposium on the Literatures and Cultures of the Asia-Pacific Region held in Singapore in December 1999...read more

Product Description: This book offers an introductory survey of contemporary poetry in English from all the regions that have developed into modern nations from the former British Empire. It is ideally suited for readers interested in world writing in English, contemporary literature, postcolonial writing, cultural studies, and postmodern culture...read more

Wallace Stevens is a fascinating and enigmatic poet; the vice-president of an insurance company, a corporate lawyer, an expert on the bond market, and, almost incidentally, one of America's greatest poets. Despite the many books written about him, Stevens remains a difficult poet, whose notorious injunction - 'Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully' - seems to haunt all his work, and especially the long poems. This study presents a close reading of Stevens' seven longest poems: 'The Comedian as the letter C', 'Owl's Clover', 'The Man with the Blue Guitar', 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction', 'Esthétique du Mal', 'The Auroras of Autumn' and 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven'. Dr Patke argues for the centrality of the long poem in Stevens' oeuvre, and of Stevens to the poetic and cultural heritage of modern times. Extensive reference is made to the shorter poems, prose and correspondence, and to the possible influences on the poetry. Critical jargon and theorising are kept at a minimum so that the pleasures of Stevens' poetic world can be made accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible.

Product Description: Provides a fresh account of modernist writing in a perspective based on the reading strategies developed by postcolonial studiesNeither modernity nor colonalism (and likewise, neither postmodernity nor postcoloniality) can be properly understood without recognition of their intertwined development...read more