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.

This fascinating book explores Beat Generation writing from a transnational perspective, using the concept of worlding to place Beat literature in conversation with a far-reaching network of cultural and political formations. Countering the charge that the Beats abroad were at best naive tourists seeking exoticism for exoticism s sake, World Beats finds that these writers propelled a highly politicized agenda that sought to use the tools of the earlier avant-garde to undermine Cold War and postcolonial ideologies and offer a new vision of engaged literature. With fresh interpretations of central Beat authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs as well as usually marginalized writers like Philip Lamantia, Ted Joans, and Brion Gysin World Beats moves beyond national, continental, or hemispheric frames to show that embedded within Beat writing is an essential universality that brought America to the world and the world to American literature. This book presents an original treatment that will attract a broad spectrum of scholars."

In this newly rediscovered memoir, Bonnie Bremser, ex-wife of Beat-poet Ray Bremser, chronicles her life on the run from the law in the early Sixties. When Ray fled to Mexico in 1961 to avoid imprisonment for armed robbery, a crime he claimed he did not commit, Bonnie followed with their baby daughter, Rachel. In a foreign country with no money and little knowledge of the language, Bonnie was forced into a life of prostitution to support her family and their drug habit. Just twenty-three years old, Bonnie was young and inexperienced, but very much in love with her husband; indeed, she was ready to go to any lengths in an attempt to keep their small family alive and together, even if it meant becoming une troia.

The first critical study of the key role that modern French literature played in the formation and development of the oeuvres of the major American Beat writers in the mid-20th century.

American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 explores the under-recognized complexity and variety of 1950s American literature by focalizing discussions through a series of keywords and formats that encourage readers to draw fresh connections among literary form and concepts, institutions, cultures, and social phenomena important to the decade. The first section draws attention to the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena that were new to the 1950s. The second section demonstrates the range of subject positions important in the 1950s, but still not visible in many accounts of the era. The third section explores key literary schools or movements associated with the decade, and explains how and why they developed at this particular cultural moment. The final section focuses on specific forms or genres that grew to special prominence during the 1950s. Taken together, the chapters in the four sections not only encourage us to rethink familiar texts and figures in new lights, but they also propose new archives for future study of the decade.

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Examining “the moment” as one of the primary motifs of Beat writing, Erik Mortenson offers the first book to investigate immediacy and its presence and importance in Beat writing. Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence places an expanded canon of Beat writers in an early postmodern context that highlights their importance in American poetics and provides an account of Beat practices that reveal how gender and race affect Beat politics of the moment. Mortenson argues that Beat writers focused on action, desire, and spontaneity to establish an authentic connection to the world around them and believed that “living in the moment” was the only way in which they might establish the kind of life that led to good writing. With this in mind, he explores the possibility that, far from being the antithesis of their times, the Beats actually were a product of them. Mortenson outlines the effects of gender and race on Beat writing in the postwar years, as well as the Beats’ attempts to break free of the constrictive notions of time and space prevalent during the 1950s. Mortenson discusses such topics as the importance of personal visionary experiences; the embodiment of sexuality and the moment of ecstasy in Beat writing; how the Beats used photographs to evoke the past; and the ways that Beat culture was designed to offer alternatives to existing political and social structures. Throughout the volume, Mortenson moves beyond the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Burroughs triumvirate commonly associated with Beat literature, discussing women—such as Diane di Prima, Janine Pommy Vega, and Joyce Johnson—and African American writers, including Bob Kaufman and Amiri Baraka. With the inclusion of these authors comes a richer understanding of the Beat writers’ value and influence in American literary history. !--?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /--

This collection of scholarly essays reassesses the Beat Generation writers in mid-century American history and literature, as well as their broad cultural impact since the 60s from contemporary critical, theoretical, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The traditional canon of major writers in this generation is expanded to include women and African Americans. The essays offer critiques of media stereotypes and popular cliches that influence both academic and popular discourse about the Beats, connect the literature of the Beat movement to music, painting, and film, and ultimately open new directions for study of the Beats in the 21st century.