Two revolutionary texts by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) lie at the heart of this book, the poem Un Coup de dés and the prose collection Divagations. An international team of scholars from Paris to New York explores the multiple connections between Mallarmé and Australia, especially as they are embodied in the works of Sydney poet Chris Brennan (1869-1932), whose writing, according to Mallarmé, offered a «parenté de songe» («a kinship of dream») with his own. With its focus on divagation - or wandering, reverie, and exploration - this book summons forth a Mallarmé seen through a specifically Australian lens, through the focus of a century of critical and creative responses to his work, a Mallarmé whose poetics enfold a particular femininity as well as a particular response to the feminine, and a Mallarmé who possessed the extraordinary gift of seeing inspiring contemporary art.

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.

Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure "ivory-tower poet," Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé's quest for "scientific" language, and convincingly links the poet's production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé's poetry and his circumstantial writings.

The canon of Ezra Pound would be incomplete without a representative collection in the master's lighter vein. Pavanes and Divagations seeks to meet this need. Included are Pound's long essay ''Indiscretions, '' one of his rare autobiographical writings, an assortment of facetious verses, his superb translations from the dialogues of Fontenelle, causeries on topics ranging from religion to the mores of moneyed society, as well as a miscellany of editorials, denunciations, and literary masquerades. Pound's barbed wit is displayed here to its best advantage. But more than a simple diversion, this volume presents an important but neglected aspect of the prime shaper of modern poetry in English.

Publisher Description

Australian literature wasn¿t all stockmen and billabongs when it blossomed in the 1890s. From then till now the parallel strand of modernist sophistication has been equally popular with top writers. John Hawke looks at the enthusiastic reception European symbolism got in Colonial times, as well as the alarming politics of literary figures, and the striking originality that modern global influences brought out in Slessor, Judith Wright, A.D. Hope and other leading writers.