Constructions of Europe in Modern American Poetry

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American poets were at the core of the modernist movement, a position largely contingent on their being in Europe. But what role has European travel played in the development of American poetry since then Constructions of Europe in Modern American Poetry examines poems and other writings by over twenty American poets, focusing especially on the modernist moment and the postwar generation. This rich material reveals the foundational role that poets' travels in and to Europe have had on the development of American poetry, from the ways the modernists tackled tradition to the postwar poets' reckoning with their modernist precursors in Europe's places. European travel lays bare anxieties about the conflation of the roles of poet and tourist and is intimately connected to issues of poetic legitimacy and belatedness.

Author Bio

Elin Kck is Senior Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Linkping University, Sweden, where she serves as Director of Doctoral Studies and teaches English and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses mainly on modern and contemporary American poetry and poetics, but also on modernism more broadly. She has published essays on, for example, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on topics such as the historical avant-garde, ecocriticism, agency and place/space. Her work has appeared in, among others, Journal of Modern Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and European Journal of English Studies. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Approaches to Teaching the Poetry and Prose of William Carlos Williams (MLA) and is currently the Vice President of the William Carlos Williams Society.