Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War

by Mark W. van Wienen

Overview

Partisans and Poets explores the popular poetries that interacted with American political culture during World War I. Van Wienen describes how poetry in mainstream newspapers and major-press anthologies bolstered dominant, nationalist ideologies, and demonstrates how pacifist and socialist verse mobilized minority groups contending for hegemonic power. While recovering the work of many forgotten modern poets, Partisans and Poets asserts that wartime poetry engaged in complex negotiations with specific and often dangerous political and historical circumstances.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521110068
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2009
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #107
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; Partisan poetics, circa 1914; 1. I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier: The Woman's Peace Party and the Pacifist Majority; 2. The new society within the shell of the old: Wobbly Parody Poetical and Political; 3. The barbarians at the gate: The Soldier-Poet and the Great War in Black and White; 4. Marketing patriotism: The Frugal Housewife and the Consumption of Poetry; 5. Beating the competition: The Woman's Peace Party and the Industrial Workers of the World on Trial; 6. While this war lasts: Readerly Resistance on the Colour Line and the Bread Line; Conclusion: history and poetry in the age of irony.

Editorial Reviews

"A rich and full view of a period that combines important social critique and historical perspective, this volume also rescues a sizeable body of poetry from obscurity." B. Adler, Choice

"Readers interested in revisonist narratives of modernism, intersections of culture and politics, or the history of dissent in the United States will welcome Mark Van Wienen's new study of American poetry during the Great War. This well-researched project explores a wide range of fascinating and original sources.... ...this is a boldly polemical and original study that is certainly worth the attention of scholars of the twentieth century." Caren Irr, American Literature

"...one of the best cultural studies of poetry I have ever read." American Studies

From the Publisher