A look at experiment and continuity in North American poetry since the 1960s.

This bibliography describes in detail a valuable collection comprising archival materials related to the Black Sparrow Press from its founding in April 1966 to November 1970. The press was one of the most important private presses on the west coast of the United States, and it endured for 36 years. Its importance came from publishing some of the most avant-garde writers of the period. Their editions, published in limited runs, represent some of the most remarkable examples of fine press work in the late twentieth century. Publisher John Martin sold his collection of D. H. Lawrence first editions in order to finance Black Sparrow and to regularly publish Charles Bukowski's poetry, among works of other innovative writers, including John Ashbery, Diane Wakoski, Charles Reznikoff, and Kenneth Koch. Totalling over a thousand items, the Black Sparrow Press Archive includes manuscript drafts, typescripts, corrected proofs and galleys, letters, posters, original artwork, photographs, master reel-to-reel recordings, and various peripheral materials related to publications of the press.

The romantic idea of the writer as an isolated genius has been discredited, but there are few empirical studies documenting the role of "gatekeeping" in the literary process. How do friends, agents, editors, translators, small publishers, and reviewers-not to mention the changes in technology and the publishing industry-shape the literary process? This matrix is further complicated when books cross cultural and language barriers, that is, when they become part of world literature. Gatekeepers builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins, James English, and Mark McGurl, describing the multi-layered gatekeeping process in the context of World Literature after the 1960s. It focuses on four case studies: Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami. The two American authors achieved remarkable success overseas owing to canny gatekeepers; the two international authors benefited tremendously from well-curated translation into English. Rich in archival materials (correspondence between authors, editors, and translators, and publishing industry analyses), interviews with publishers and translators, and close readings of translations, this study shows how the process and production of literature depends on the larger social forces of a given historical moment. William Marling also documents the ever-increasing Anglo-centric dictate on the gatekeeping process. World literature, the book argues, is not so much a "republic of letters" as a field of chance on which the conversation is partly bracketed by historic events and technological opportunities.

Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the first study to offer complete and comprehensive explanations of the most significant philosophical references in James Joyce's avant-garde masterpiece. Philosophy is important in all of Joyce's works, but it is his final novel which most fully engages with that field. Robert Baines shows the broad range of philosophers Joyce wove into his last work, from Aristotle to Confucius, Bergson to Kant. For each major philosophical allusion in Finnegans Wake, this book explains the original idea and reveals how Joyce first encountered it. Drawing upon extensive research into Joyce's notebooks and drafts, Baines then shows how Joyce developed and adapted that idea through repeated revisions. From here, the final form of the idea as it appears in the Wake is explored. In carefully examining the Wake's key philosophical allusions, essential themes within the novel come into focus, including history, time, language, being, and perception. We see also how those allusions combine to create a network of ideas, thinkers, and texts which has a logic and an integrity. Ultimately, Philosophical Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake shows that the more one knows of the Wake's philosophical allusions, the more one can find meaning and reason in this famously perplexing book of the night.