Based entirely on archival research, Poets in the Public Sphere traces the emergence of the "New Woman" by examining poetry published by American women in newspapers and magazines between 1800 and 1900. Using sources like the Kentucky Reporter, the Cherokee Phoenix, the Cincinnati Israelite, and the Atlantic Monthly, Bennett is able to track how U.S. women from every race, class, caste, region, and religion exploited the freedom offered by the nation's periodical press, especially the poetry columns, to engage in heated debate with each other and with men over matters of mutual concern. Far from restricting their poems to the domestic and personal, these women addressed a significant array of political issues--abolition, Indian removals, economic and racial injustice, the Civil War, and, not least, their own changing status as civil subjects. Overflowing with a wealth of heretofore untapped information, their poems demonstrate conclusively that "ordinary" nineteenth-century women were far more influenced by the women's rights movement than historians have allowed. In showing how these women turned the sentimental and ideologically saturated conventions of the period's verse to their own ends, Bennett argues passionately and persuasively for poetry's power as cultural and political discourse. As much women's history as literary history, this book invites readers to rethink not only the role that nineteenth-century women played in their own emancipation but the role that poetry plays in cultural life.

Based entirely on archival research, Poets in the Public Sphere traces the emergence of the "New Woman" by examining poetry published by American women in newspapers and magazines between 1800 and 1900. Using sources like the Kentucky Reporter, the Cherokee Phoenix, the Cincinnati Israelite, and the Atlantic Monthly, Bennett is able to track how U.S. women from every race, class, caste, region, and religion exploited the freedom offered by the nation's periodical press, especially the poetry columns, to engage in heated debate with each other and with men over matters of mutual concern. Far from restricting their poems to the domestic and personal, these women addressed a significant array of political issues--abolition, Indian removals, economic and racial injustice, the Civil War, and, not least, their own changing status as civil subjects. Overflowing with a wealth of heretofore untapped information, their poems demonstrate conclusively that "ordinary" nineteenth-century women were far more influenced by the women's rights movement than historians have allowed. In showing how these women turned the sentimental and ideologically saturated conventions of the period's verse to their own ends, Bennett argues passionately and persuasively for poetry's power as cultural and political discourse. As much women's history as literary history, this book invites readers to rethink not only the role that nineteenth-century women played in their own emancipation but the role that poetry plays in cultural life.

Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, José Martí, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story. Dalleo's comparative approach will be important to Caribbeanists from all of the region's linguistic traditions, and his book contributes even more broadly to debates in Latin American and postcolonial studies about postmodernity and globalization.

Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin M. Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.

Hitchens provides rich evidence that his own sallies as a political journalist are nourished by a close engagement with a broad sweep of novelists.

This book locates H.D. within an Anglo-American 'public sphere' of women writers, a discursive arena in which individuals come together in debate and discussion. The theoretical framework used is that outlined in Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, modified inorder to consider this group as a 'counter-public sphere', a non-dominant group whose interests were non-identical to those of the dominant public sphere.From 1913 a network of little magazines enabled women writers to come together in unprecedented numbers in public exchange. The ethos of this public sphere was a challenge to all convention, including challenges to the perceived sentimentality of earlier women's writing; H.D.'s Imagism was crucialin this. Initially this public sphere avoided engagement with the wider socio-political world, focusing instead on psychic reality. Writing became increasingly experimental in a new wave of avant-garde activity, fuelling heated debate in the magazines around the nature of 'literature'.By the mid 1920s this particular literary sphere had lost direction, but continued to experiment and seek new ways forward. New discussions around cinematic forms (in which H.D. participated) kept critical discussion very much alive. In the 1930s the work emerging from this network was increasinglypolitically aware. This was a period of highly disturbed writing such as H.D.'s Nights and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, internalizations of the sadomasochism enacted on the world stage.After the war, this public sphere declined into personal exchanges in letters and private circulation of manuscripts.

This important and inspiring collection is a sweeping overview of poetry written in New York in the year after the 9/11 attacks . . . This anthology contains poems by forty-five of the most important poets of the day, as well as some of the literary world’s most dynamic young voices, all writing in New York City in the year immediately following the World Trade Center attacks. It was inspired by the editors' observation that after the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, poetry was being posted everywhere in New York—on telephone poles, on warehouse walls, on bus shelters, in the letters-to-the-editor section of newspapers ... New Yorkers spontaneously turned to poetry to understand and cope with the tragedy of the attack. Full of humor, love, rage and fear, this diverse collection of poems attests to that power of poetry to express and to heal the human spirit. Featuring poems by Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn; Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman; National Book Award winner and New York State Poet Jean Valentine; the first ever Nuyorican Slam-Poetry champ; poets laureate of Brooklyn and Queens; and a poem and introduction by National Book Award finalist Alicia Ostriker.