The Poetic Avant-Garde compares three avant-garde groups active in the era between the world wars: those surrounding Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, and Andre Breton. These groups were composed of poets and writers who made use of the avant-garde's characteristic modes of self-expression: the publication of small journals, unorthodox attention-getting tactics, and interaction with the mainstream press. However, their differing aesthetic, social, and political agendas illustrate the surprisingly broad range of avant-gardism in the interwar era. Strong looks at the choices these three groups made when their radical goals collided with the forces of social and political change in the 1920s and 1930s, highlighting the disparity between their rhetoric and their actual achievements. The book focuses on the avant-garde's struggle to reconcile contradictory imperatives: a desire to be radically new while also finding an audience.

A literary and cultural study of three diverse manifestations in artistic exploration in the 1920s and 1930s - the groups surrounding Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, and Andre Breton.

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy presents a range of chapters written by a highly international group of scholars from disciplines such as literary studies, arts, theatre, and philosophy to analyze the ambitions of avant-garde artists. Together, these essays highlight the interdisciplinary scope of the historic avant-garde and the interconnectedness of its artists. Contributors analyze topics such as abstraction and estrangement across the arts, the imaginary dialogue between Lev Yakubinsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, the problem of the “masculine ethos” in the Russian avant-garde, the transformation of barefoot dancing, Kazimir Malevich’s avant-garde poetic experimentations, the ecological imagination of the Polish avant-garde, science-fiction in the Russian avant-garde cinema, and the almost forgotten history of the avant-garde children’s literature in Germany. The chapters in this collection open a new critical discourse about the avant-garde movement in Europe and reshape contemporary understandings of it.

Poetic Community examines the relationship between poetry and community formation in the decades after the Second World War. In four detailed case studies (of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the Caribbean Artists Movement in London, the Women's Liberation Movement at sites throughout the US, and the Toronto Research Group in Canada) the book documents and compares a diverse group of social models, small press networks, and cultural coalitions informing literary practice during the Cold War era. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival materials, Stephen Voyce offers new and insightful comparative analysis of poets such as John Cage, Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich, Kamau Brathwaite, and bpNichol. In contrast with prevailing critical tendencies that read mid-century poetry in terms of expressive modes of individualism, Poetic Community demonstrates that the most important literary innovations of the post-war period were the results of intensive collaboration and social action opposing the Cold War's ideological enclosures.

The surprising story of the relationship between experimental poetry and literary studies. In The Academic Avant-Garde, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews makes a provocative case for the radical poetic possibilities of the work of literary scholarship and lays out a foundational theory of literary production in the context of the university. In her examination of the cross-pollination between the analytic humanities and the craft of poetry writing, Andrews tells a bold story about some of today's most innovative literary works. This pathbreaking intervention into contemporary American literature and higher education demonstrates that experimental poetry not only reflects nuanced concern about creative writing as a discipline but also uses the critical techniques of scholarship as a cornerstone of poetic practice. Structured around the concepts of academic labor (such as teaching) and methodological work (such as theorizing), the book traces these practices in the works of authors ranging from Claudia Rankine to John Ashbery, providing fresh readings of some of our era's most celebrated and difficult poets.

Martin Puchner tells the story of political and artistic upheavals through the political manifestos of the 19th and 20th centuries. He argues that the manifesto was the genre through which modern culture articulated its revolutionary ambitions and desires.

The debate on literature and the arts provoked by the Italian neoavant-garde (neoavanguardia) is undoubtedly one of the most animated and controversial the country has witnessed from World War II to the present. Comprising the period between the late 1950s and the late 1960s, the phenomenon of the neoavanguardia involved key writers, critics, and artists, both as insiders - Sanguineti, Balestrini, Guglielmi, Eco, and others - and adversaries such as Pasolini, Calvino, and Moravia. In The New Avant-Garde in Italy - the first book in English to document the movement - John Picchione's objective is twofold: to provide a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical tenets that inform the works of the neoavanguardia and to show how they are applied to the poetic practices of its authors. The neoavanguardia cannot, Picchione argues, be defined as a movement with a unified program expressed in the form of manifestos or shared theoretical principles. It experiences irreconcilable internal conflicts that are explored as a split between two main blocs - one that is tied to the project of modernity, the other to post-modern aesthetic postures. This study suggests that some of the contentious views proposed by the neoavanguardia anticipated a wide range of issues that continue to be significant and pressing to this day.