Transnational Beat Generation, The

Description: This book 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 post-World War II period and continuing into the1990s, the essays illustrate Beat participation in the global circulation of a poetics of dissent.

Review: 'In essays that range around the world and across cultures, "The Transnational Beat Generation" has marked out a rich field that makes a natural fit for artists who above all else lived and wrote beyond borders; this book will open up Beat Studies and point it in new, uncharted directions.' - Oliver Harris, president of the European Beat Studies Network "This outstanding collection . . . provides detailed, sometimes astonishing insights into the international reach of the Beat writers . . . . indispensable for the study of modern American literature. Summing Up: Highly recommended."a ""CHOICE"

Contents: Introduction: Transnational Beat; N.M.Grace& J.Skerl PART I: TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS William S. Burroughs and U.S. Empire; A.Hibbard Jack Kerouac and the Nomadic Cartographies of Exile; H.Melehy Beat Transnationalism Under Gender: Bonnie Bremser's Troia; R.Johnson The Beat Manifesto: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Worlded Circuits of African-American Beat Surrealism; J.Fazzino The Beat Fairy Tale and Transnational Spectacle Culture: Diane di Prima and William S. Burroughs; N.M.Grace Two Takes on Japan: Joanne Kyger's Japan and India Journals and Philip Whalen's Scenes of Life at the Capital; J.Falk 'If All the Writers of the World Get Together': Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Literary Solidarity in Sandinista Nicaragua; M.Hardesty PART II: INTERVIEW WITH ANNE WALDMAN PART III: GLOBAL CIRCULATION 'They ... took their time over the coming': The British/Beat 1955-65; R.J.Ellis Beating them to it? The Vienna Group and the Beat Generation; J.van der Bent Prague Connection; J.Rauvolf Cain's Book and the Mark of Exile: Alexander Trocchi as Transnational Beat; F.Paton Greece and the Beat Generation: the Case of Lefteris Poulios; C.Gair & K.Georganta Japan Beat: Nanao Sakaki; A.R.Lee



Author Biography: Nancy M. Grace is the Virginia Myers Professor of English and chair of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at The College of Wooster. She is the author of The Feminized Male Character in Twentieth-Century Literature, co-editor of Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (with Ronna C. Johnson), co-author of Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Beat Women Writers (with Ronna C. Johnson), and author of Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination. She the published and edited 681 Lexington Avenue: A Beat Education in New York City 1947-1945 (2008) by Elizabeth Von Vogt, sister of John Clellon Holmes. Grace is a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association and co-editor of The Journal of Beat Studies. Jennie Skerl was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at West Chester University and is a founding board member and past president of the Beat Studies Association. She has published William S. Burroughs, William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989 (co-edited with Robin Lydenberg), A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles, and Reconstructing the Beats. Skerl edited the Winter 2000 special issue of College Literature on Teaching Beat Literature and contributed to Naked Lunch @ 50 (edited by Oliver Harris and Ian Macfadyen).