A. Robert Lee - The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL BEAT LITERATURE

Beat literature? Have not the great canonical names long grown familiar? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Likewise the frontline texts, still controversial in some quarters, assume their place in modern American literary history. On The Road serves as Homeric journey epic. Howl amounts to Beat anthem, confessional outcry against materialism and war. Naked Lunch, with its dark satiric laughter, envisions a dystopian world of power and word virus. But if these are all essentially America-centered, Beat has also had quite other literary exhalations and which invite far more than mere reception study. These are voices from across the Americas of Canada and Mexico, the Anglophone world of England, Scotland or Australia, the Europe of France or Italy and from the Mediterranean of Greece and the Maghreb, and from Scandinavia and Russia, together with the Asia of Japan and China. This anthology of essays maps relevant other kinds of Beat voice, names, texts. The scope is hemispheric, Atlantic and Pacific, West and East. It gives recognition to the Beat inscribed in languages other than English and reflective of different cultural histories. Likewise the majority of contributors come from origins or affiliations beyond the US, whether in a different English or languages spanning Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Greek, or Chinese. The aim is to recognize an enlarged Beat literary map, its creative internationalism.

A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent, UK, was Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, 19972011. His writing includes Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the 2004 American Book Award, and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010).

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The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF INTERNATIONAL BEAT LITERATURE

Edited by A. Robert Lee

CONTENTS

A. Robert Lee

Katharine Streip

Alberto Escobar de la Garma

Luke Walker

Fiona Paton

Nicholas Birns

Peggy Pacini

Maria Anita Stefanelli

Jaap van der Bent

Franca Bellarsi

Alexander Greiffenstern

Thomas Antonic

Estbaliz Encarnacin-Pinedo

Andrzej Pietrasz and Tomasz Sawczuk

Thomas Epstein

Lars Movin

Frida Forsgren

Lisa Avdic st

Harri Veivo

Polina Mackay

Erik Mortenson

El Habib Louai

A. Robert Lee

Benjamin J. Heal

Thomas Antonic, Dr. phil. [PhD], studied German, Philosophy and Musicology at the Universities of Vienna and Graz. From 2008 until 2015 he was project assistant at the Department of German at the University of Vienna, Austria, working on a research project on the life and works of Wolfgang Bauer. Since 2017 he has led a project entitled Transnational Literature: Austria and the Beat Generation. In 2013 he was Visiting Scholar at the FSI (Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies) at Stanford University, and in 2014 and 2015 Max Kade Fellow at the Department of German Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Besides his academic work, he is also a musician and a writer of fiction and poetry. He has published two novels in German (2013 and 2014), and in 2017 the bilingual English/German cut-up volume Flickering Paintings of Noxious Nighhtbirds/Flackernde Felsbilder bler Nachtvgel.

Franca Bellarsi is associate professor at the Universit libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. Her research interests and publications are equally divided between the Beat Generation, ecocriticism, and English Romanticism. Having devoted her PhD to Allen Ginsberg as a poet of the Buddhist Void, she has especially been interested in the mysticism and Western Buddhism of the Beats, as well as in their debts to European Romanticism. Her articles include William Blake and Allen Ginsberg: Imagination as a Mirror of Vacuity (2000), Alien Hieroglyphs of Eternity and Cold Pastorals: Allen Ginsbergs Siesta in Xbalba and John Keatss Great Odes (2013), and Burroughss Re-Invention of the Byronic Hero (2016). In addition to a book on Ginsberg, she is currently working on rereadings of the Beats ecopoetics. In October 2015, she was the local convener for the 4th Annual Meeting of the European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) in Brussels.

Nicholas Birns is the author of Understanding Anthony Powell (University of South Carolina Press, 2004) and the co-editor of A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900 (Camden House, 2007), which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book of the Year for 2008. His book Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century appeared from Broadview in 2010 and is now widely used in classrooms, and his monograph Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, a major overview of contemporary fiction from Down Under, appeared from Sydney University Press in 2015, and co-edited projects on teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature and Roberto Bolao as world literature are under contract with the Modern Language Association and Bloomsbury respectively. He is currently working on a book on ideas of the ordinary from 17501850. He has contributed to The New York Times Book Review