The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats is the first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of eleven major Beat authors. The opening chapter discusses Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan as predecessors and important influences on the spiritual orientation of the Beats. David Stephen Calonne draws comparisons throughout the book between various approaches individual Beat writers took regarding sacred experience - for example, Burroughs had significant objections to Buddhist philosophy, while Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac both devoted considerable time to studying Buddhist history and texts. This book also focuses on authors who have traditionally been neglected in Beat Studies - Diane di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia and Philip Whalen. In addition, several understudied work such as Gregory Corso's 'The Geometric Poem' - inspired by Corso's deep engagement with ancient Egyptian thought - are given close attention. Calonne introduces important themes from the history of heterodoxy - from Gnosticism, Manicheanism and Ismailism to Theosophy and Tarot - and demonstrates how inextricably these ideas shaped the Beat literary imagination.

The first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of major Beat authors.

An exploration of Beat spirituality--seen through excerpts from the writings of the seminal writers of Beat Generation themselves. It’s been said that Jack Kerouac made it cool to be a thinking person seeking a spiritual experience. And there is no doubt that the writers he knew and inspired—iconic figures like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure—were thinkers seeking exactly that. In this re-claiming of their vision, Robert Inchausti explores the Beat canon to reveal that the movement was at heart a spiritual one. It goes deeper than the Buddhism with which many of the key figures became identified. It’s about their shared perception of an existence in which the Divine reveals itself in the ordinary. Theirs is a spirituality where real life triumphs over airy ideals and personal authenticity becomes both the content and the vehicle for a kind of refurbished American Transcendentalism.

The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.

Given Jack Kerouac's enduring reputation for heaving words onto paper, it might surprise some readers to see his name coupled with the word “poetics.” But as a native speaker of French, he embarked on his famous “spontaneous prose” only after years of seeking techniques to overcome the restrictions he encountered in writing in a single language, English. The result was an elaborate poetics that cannot be fully understood without accounting for his bilingual thinking and practice. Of the more than twenty-five biographies of Kerouac, few have seriously examined his relationship to the French language and the reason for his bilingualism, the Québec Diaspora. Although this background has long been recognized in French-language treatments, it is a new dimension in Anglophone studies of his writing. In a theoretically informed discussion, Hassan Melehy explores how Kerouac's poetics of exile involves meditations on moving between territories and languages. Far from being a naïve pursuit, Kerouac's writing practice not only responded but contributed to some of the major aesthetic and philosophical currents of the twentieth century in which notions such as otherness and nomadism took shape. Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory offers a major reassessment of a writer who, despite a readership that extends over much of the globe, remains poorly appreciated at home.

Beat Film, Beat Writers is the first monograph to analyze the films of Christopher Maclaine, Lawrence Jordan, ruth weiss, Ron Rice, Robert Frank, Barbara Rubin, Shirley Clarke, William S. Burroughs, and Joanne Kyger. The book is noteworthy for its emphasis on women filmmakers who have traditionally been excluded from close analysis by film scholars. Beat Film, Beat Writers also explores the ways Beat authors such as Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Wiliam S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Joanne Kyger, and others became deeply involved with the film communities of New York and California. The book discusses their roles as both actors and participants in the making of these films and demonstrates how many of the same themes that characterized Beat literature surface in cinema. The anxiety over the possibilities of nuclear war, the search for deeper modes of spirituality in the study of Buddhism as well as occult and esoteric systems, the struggle for equality for the LGBTQ+ community, the beginnings of the ecological movement, and the fight against censorship and the open depiction of sexuality are all themes that occur both in Beat film and in Beat literature. Beat Film, Beat Writers also features an Epilogue on the cinema of singer and poet Jim Morrison, who, although not part of the Beat movement, was deeply influenced by Beat literature and carried on many of the aesthetic and philosophical aims of the Beats into the late sixties.

'[This] survey of the many little magazines carrying the Beat message is impressive in its coverage, drawing attention to the importance of their paratextual content in providing valuable socio-political context. [...] The collection contains a range of insightful close readings, astute contextualizing, and inventive lateral pedagogical thinking, charting the transformation of the Beat scene from its free-wheeling, self-help, heady revolutionary 1960’s days to its contemporary position as an increasingly respectable component of the curriculum. [...] The Beats: A Teaching Companion is successful on a number of levels; it is a noteworthy contribution to the ever expanding field of Beat studies and, more broadly, cultural studies; and it is a collection that at its best gives hope that in referring to its ideas the inspired teacher may still be able to enlarge the lives of their students.' John Shapcott, Keele University