The urban theatre which emerged under Anglo-European and local influences in colonial metropolises such as Calcutta and Bombay around the mid-nineteenth century marked the beginning of the ‘modern period’ in Indian theatre, distinct from classical, postclassical, and more proximate precolonial traditions. A Poetics of Modernity offers a unique selection of original, theoretically significant writings on theatre by playwrights, directors, actors, designers, activists, and policy–makers, to explore the full range of discursive positions that make these urban practitioners ‘modern’. The source-texts represent nine languages, including English, and about one-third of them have been translated into English for the first time; the volume thus retrieves a multilingual archive that so far had remained scattered in print and manuscript sources around the country. A comprehensive introduction by Dharwadker argues for historically precise definitions of theatrical modernity, outlines some of its constitutive features, and connects it to the foundational theoretical principles of urban theatre practice in modern India.

Addresses one of the key issues of European thought - how the crisis of values (ethics) relates to the crisis of imagination (poetics). This work explores the ways in which Continental philosophy, in both its modern and post-modern guises, has endeavoured to respond to these twin crises.

Exploring the boundaries of one of the most contested fields of literary study—a field that in fact shares territory with philology, aesthetics, cultural theory, philosophy, and even cybernetics—this volume gathers a body of critical writings that, taken together, broadly delineate a possible poetics of the contemporary. In these essays, the most interesting and distinguished theorists in the field renegotiate the contours of what might constitute "contemporary poetics," ranging from the historical advent of concrete poetry to the current technopoetics of cyberspace. Concerned with a poetics that extends beyond our own time, as a mere marker of present-day literary activity, their work addresses the limits of a writing "practice"—beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé in the late nineteenth century—that engages concretely with what it means to be contemporary. Charles Bernstein's Swiftian satire of generative poetics and the textual apparatus, together with Marjorie Perloff's critical-historical treatment of "writing after" Bernstein and other proponents of language poetry, provides an itinerary of contemporary poetics in terms of both theory and practice. The other essays consider "precursors," recognizable figures within the histories or prehistories of contemporary poetics, from Kafka and Joyce to Wallace Stevens and Kathy Acker; "conjunctions," in which more strictly theoretical and poetical texts enact a concerted engagement with rhetoric, prosody, and the vicissitudes of "intelligibility"; "cursors," which points to the open possibilities of invention, from Augusto de Campos's "concrete poetics" to the "codework" of Alan Sondheim; and "transpositions," defining the limits of poetic invention by way of technology.

This book introduces the canonical figure Sadegh Hedayat (1903–1951) and draws a comprehensive image of a major intellectual force in the context of both modern Persian Literature and World Literature. A prolific writer known for his magnum opus, The Blind Owl (1936), Hedayat established the use of common language for literary purposes, opened new horizons on imaginative literature and explored a variety of genres in his creative career. This book looks beyond the reductive critical tendencies that read a rich and diverse literary profile in light of Hedayat’s suicide, arguing instead that his literary imagination was not solely the result of genius but rather enriched by a vast network of the world’s literary traditions. This study reflects on Hedayat’s attempts at various genres of artistic creation, including painting, fiction writing, satire and scholarly research, as well as his persistent struggles for artistic authenticity, which transcended solidly established literary and artistic norms. Providing a critical reading of Hedayat’s work to untangle aspects of his writing – including reflections on science, religion, nationalism and coloniality – alongside his pioneering work on folk culture, and how humor informs his writings, this text offers a critical review of the status of Persian literature in the contemporary landscape of the world’s literary studies.

The literary scholar Alfrun Kliems explores the aesthetic strategies of Eastern European underground literature, art, film and music in the decades before and after the fall of communism, ranging from the ‘father’ of Prague Underground, Egon Bondy, to the neo-Dada Club of Polish Losers in Berlin. The works she considers are "underground" in the sense that they were produced illegally, or were received as subversive after the regimes had fallen. Her study challenges common notions of ‘underground’ as an umbrella term for nonconformism. Rather, it depicts it as a sociopoetic reflection of modernity, intimately linked to urban settings, with tropes and aesthetic procedures related to Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and, above all, pop and counterculture. The author discusses these commonalities and distinctions in Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, and German authors, musicians, and filmmakers. She identifies intertextual relations across languages and generations, and situates her findings in a transatlantic context (including the Beat Generation, Susan Sontag, Neil Young) and the historical framework of Romanticism and modernity (including Baudelaire and Brecht). Despite this wide brief, the book never loses sight of its core message: Underground is no arbitrary expression of discontent, but rather the result of a fundamental conflict at the socio-philosophical roots of modernity.

Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.

Poetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous—“stubbornly national,” in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, or “the most provincial of the arts,” according to W. H. Auden. But in A Transnational Poetics, Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination—in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post–World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing. Cross-cultural exchange and influence are, he argues, among the chief engines of poetic development in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Reexamining the work of a wide array of poets, from Eliot, Yeats, and Langston Hughes to Elizabeth Bishop, Lorna Goodison, and Agha Shahid Ali, Ramazani reveals the many ways in which modern and contemporary poetry in English overflows national borders and exceeds the scope of national literary paradigms. Through a variety of transnational templates—globalization, migration, travel, genre, influence, modernity, decolonization, and diaspora—he discovers poetic connection and dialogue across nations and even hemispheres.