This volume contains a selection of the proceedings of a conference on European problems of identity titled Europe and its Others, which was held in St Andrews in July 2007. It looks at some of the histories and stories that connect the European margins to an imagined or imaginary centre of this complex continent as seen mostly from within, and with self-reflective insights from literary, socio-historical and cinematic perspectives. By following the marginal route created by the essays, the volume juxtaposes, as in a mosaic, a range of artistic discourses produced in many European languages. Each of these discourses highlights a different perception of belonging or not belonging to Europe; and each of these discourses brings to the fore in its respective society a fresh perspective on new European territories seen not as 'the other' but rather as contiguous tiles in a mosaic of idiosyncrasies. Lying one next to the other, these territories engage in dialogue poetically - harmoniously or dissonantly - in an attempt to create through their juxtaposition an enigmatic poetic discourse of the margins.

In this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. History Matters does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature. Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history’s margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets—including John Ashbery, Olena Kaltyiak Davis, Louise Glück, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O’Hara, and C. K. Williams—as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet’s capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings.

This book investigates the possibility of identifying the central features of the modernist movement in order to develop a unified theory of modernism.

Discusses literary representations of death to explore the relation between writing and death--death understood as both the death of the individual and the death of meaning.

In this collection of essays, poet, translator, anthologist and critic Pierre Joris extends his "nomad poetics" to a remarkable zigzagging on the margins of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics. For Justifying the Margins refuses, precisely, to fill out spaces neatly to yield (to) straightened out, pre-set margins, be they cultural, literary, linguistic or political; Joris rather wanders through those spaces, and thereby "justifies" the margins properly speaking. His travel/travails set off with absorbing explorations of writing as such - traversing languages and crossing genres -, and seem to turn this collection into a marvelous group improvisation of texts, which range from journal entries, over lectures, essayistic writing, (auto)biographical notes, translation, obits and interview, to Joris's outstanding and characteristically intense readings. The author, moreover, brilliantly moves across - and vindicates - multiple fringes. Joris's observation with respect to French literature, for instance, namely that "the most interesting and explorative literary writing in French of the last fifty years has not come from Paris, but from the periphery of the old colonial empire," not only leads him to continually resurfacing meditations on North African and Arabic literature, or the rerouted Surrealism of Unica Zürn's anagrams, it also allows him to investigate the margins of English and American poetry, in Douglas Oliver and Ronald Johnson, or even to deftly (re)consider core figures such as Antonin Artaud, Charles Olson and Paul Celan - with, in turn, new offshoots in Jacques Derrida's pipe or Irving Petlin's paintings.A fascinating "travelogue," and a truly valuable read, Justifying the Margins is highly recommended to both the specialist and general reader interested in experimental art, thought, poetry and poetics!

As the visual representation of an essentially oral text, Sylvia Huot points out, the medieval illuminated manuscript has a theatrical, performative quality. She perceives the tension between implied oral performance and real visual artifact as a fundamental aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetics. In this generously illustrated volume, Huot examines manuscript texts both from the performance-oriented lyric tradition of chanson courtoise, or courtly love lyric, and from the self-consciously literary tradition of Old French narrative poetry. She demonstrates that the evolution of the lyrical romance and dit, narrative poems which incorporate thematic and rhetorical elements of the lyric, was responsible for a progressive redefinition of lyric poetry as a written medium and the emergence of an explicitly written literary tradition uniting lyric and narrative poetics. Huot first investigates the nature of the vernacular book in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, analyzing organization, page layout, rubrication, and illumination in a series of manuscripts. She then describes the relationship between poetics and manuscript format in specific texts, including works by widely read medieval authors such as Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume de Machaut, as well as by lesser-known writers including Nicole de Margival and Watriquet de Couvin. Huot focuses on the writers' characteristic modifications of lyric poetics; their use of writing and performance as theme; their treatment of the poet as singer or writer; and of the lady as implied reader or listener; and the ways in which these features of the text were elaborated by scribes and illuminators. Her readings reveal how medieval poets and book-makers conceived their common project, and how they distinguished their respective roles.