Synopses & Reviews
The Beat Generation writers and artists are typically identified as an American movement. Yet travel, Buddhism, drug experimentation, and European surrealism and romanticism were an integral part of the ethos behind the movement. This collection of essays will map writers such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti globally and explore parallel movements and writers in other countries. Incorporating contemporary theories of globalization and transnationalism, this insightful book provides a more nuanced understanding of both the Beats and America.
This volume will look at:
• Beat critiques of postwar capitalism
• Beat resistance to oppressive political regimes
• Beat reaction to sweeping cultural changes
The essays are written in a lively and accessible manner and the collection will serve as an introduction to Beat Studies because of its comprehensive nature. It will be a natural adoption for courses on the beats - a substantial subset of 20th-century literature courses - and will fit into 20th-century literature surveys, and courses on transnational literature, as well.
Review
'
The Transnational Beat Generation explores the global dimensions of Beat literature in a series of solidly researched essays about the world-wide influence of major and minor Beat authors during the second half of the twentieth century. This book will stimulate thought and provoke controversy as certainly as it will enlarge our frame of reference for Beat writing. It makes the case not only that Beat writers created literature that inspired resistance movements throughout the world, but also that they continue to represent the spirit of freedom to young readers everywhere.'—Ann Charters, emeritus professor of American literature, University of Connecticut and editor of
The Penguin Beat Reader and
The Penguin Sixties Reader'The Beat Generation has often been presented as quintessentially American despite its critique of American culture and politics. This collection brings new light to this avant-garde movement by re-examining the international aspects of its roots as well as later reverberations. With historical documentation and literary analysis these essays demonstrate convincingly that much of what we now associate with global postmodernism was already evident in the work of a more widely dispersed Beat Generation.' - Robin Lydenberg, Boston College
'In essays that range around the world and across cultures, The Transnational Beat Generation has marked out a rich field that makes a natural fit for artists who above all else lived and wrote beyond borders; this book will open up Beat Studies and point it in new, uncharted directions.' - Oliver Harris, president of the European Beat Studies Network
Review
'In essays that range around the world and across cultures, The Transnational Beat Generation has marked out a rich field that makes a natural fit for artists who above all else lived and wrote beyond borders; this book will open up Beat Studies and point it in new, uncharted directions.' - Oliver Harris, president of the European Beat Studies Network
"This outstanding collection . . . provides detailed, sometimes astonishing insights into the international reach of the Beat writers . . . . indispensable for the study of modern American literature. Summing Up: Highly recommended."—CHOICE
Synopsis
This collection maps the Beat Generation movement, exploring American Beat writers alongside parallel movements in other countries that shared a critique of global capitalism. Ranging from the immediate post-World War II period and continuing into the 1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.
About the Author
Nancy M. Grace is the Virginia Myers Professor of English and chair of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at The College of Wooster. She is the author of
The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature, co-editor of
Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (with Ronna C. Johnson), co-author of
Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers (with Ronna C. Johnson), and author of
Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. She the published and edited
681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947-1945 (2008) by Elizabeth Von Vogt, sister of John Clellon Holmes. Grace is a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association and co-editor of
The Journal of Beat Studies.
Jennie Skerl was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at West Chester University and is a founding board member and past president of the Beat Studies Association. She has published William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989 (co-edited with Robin Lydenberg), A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles, and Reconstructing the Beats. Skerl edited the Winter 2000 special issue of College Literature on Teaching Beat Literature and contributed to Naked Lunch @ 50 (edited by Oliver Harris and Ian Macfadyen).
Table of Contents
Introduction:Transnational Beat - Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl * PART I: Transnational Flows * William S. Burroughs and U.S. Empire - Allen Hibbard * Jack Kerouac and the Nomadic Cartographies of Exile - Hassan Melehy * Beat Transnationalism Under Gender: Bonnie Bremser's Troia - Ronna Johnson * The Beat Manifesto: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Worlded Circuits of African-American Beat Surrealism - Jimmy Fazzino * The Beat Fairy Tale and Transnational Spectacle Culture: Diane di Prima and William S. Burroughs - Nancy M. Grace * Two Takes on Japan: Joanne Kyger's Japan and India Journals and Philip Whalen's Scenes of Life at the Capital - Jane Falk * "If All the Writers of the World Get Together": Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Literary Solidarity in Sandinista Nicaragua - Michele Hardesty * PART II: Interview with Anne Waldman * PART III: Global Circulation * "they . . . took their time over the coming": The British/Beat 1955-65 - R. J. Ellis * Beating them to it? The Vienna Group and the Beat Generation - Jaap van der Bent, Radboud University Nijmegen * Prague Connection - Josef Rauvolf, Prague * Cain's Book and the Mark of Exile: Alexander Trocchi as Transnational Beat - Fiona Paton * Greece and the Beat Generation: the Case of Lefteris Poulios - Christopher Gair and Konstantina Georganta * Japan Beat: Nanao Sakaki - A. Robert Lee