The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem
Published on 1. May 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
360 pages
978-1-3995-4854-0 (ISBN)
Description
The first comprehensive guide to the prose poem, this book covers the history of the genre from Aloyisius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit and Baudelaire's Paris Spleen to its most important modern and contemporary practitioners. It gives special attention to the genre's hybridity as well as to its propensity to engage in a dialogue with other genres, discourses and artistic forms. Written by prominent scholars of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem offers analytical and historically informed narratives of the genre's transformations and variations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the next.
Reviews / Votes
No longer to be understood as just another genre, the prose poem emerges here as a form of writing that unsettles our very notions of what poetry is or should be. From Novalis and Baudelaire, to such multinational writers as the Polish-Danish Grzegorz Wroblewski, from Rimbaud's Illuminations to the Japanese sanbunshi and the Surrealist prose poems of post-Saddam Iraq, these essayists give us a heady new sense of what "postgeneric writing," as Steven Fredman calls it, can look like. There is something for everybody in this groundbreaking and truly global anthology. * Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
3 black and white illustrations, 4 colour illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 245 mm
Width: 175 mm
Thickness: 24 mm
Weight
616 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-4854-0 (9781399548540)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Mary Ann Caws works on the relations between literature and art, and is the co-editor, with Hermine Riffaterre, of The Prose Poem in France.Theory and Practice (1983). Her recent publications include Pierre Reverdy (2013), the Modern Art Cookbook (2014), Surprised in Translation (2006), Surrealism (2004), and Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason (2017). She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita and Resident Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the past president of the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, the editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and the translator of Andre? Breton, Rene? Char, Robert Desnos, Paul Eluard, Ghe?rasim Luca, Ste?phane Mallarme?, and Tristan Tzara. Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liege. He is the author or co-author of The American Prose Poem, J.G. Ballard, Hamlet & Co, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde and Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond. He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics.
Content
Notes on contributorsPreface, Rosemary Lloyd
Introduction, Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville
Part I: Origins and Beginnings
1. The Birth of the Prose Poem in Nineteenth-Century France, Joseph Acquisto
2. Impressionism and the Prose Poem: Rimbaud's Artful Authenticity, Aimee Israel-Pelletier
3. Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht and the Prose Poem avant la lettre, Jonathan Monroe
4. Thyrsus & Palimpsest: De Quincey's influence on Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, Nikki Santilli
5. A Dangerous Hybridity: The Prose Poem at the fin de siecle, Margueritte Murphy
Part II: Visual Mediations
6. Cubism and the Prose Poem, Mary Ann Caws
7. The Modern French Prose Poem and Visual Art, Emma Wagstaff
8. The Homeless Heart: Abstraction and the Prose Poem, Richard Deming
Part III: Genres and Discourses
9. The Prose Poem, Flash Fiction, Lyrical Essays and Other Micro-Genres, Michel Delville
10. The Prose Poem and the Anti-Novel: Unsettling Form in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes, Jane Monson
11. Bishop, Lowell, and the Confessional Prose Poem, Lizzy LeRud
12. Trans-verse: Prose Poetry, Translation and Border Crossing in Baudelaire and Emerson, Adam Ross Rosenthal
Part IV: Issues and Contexts
13. An Interruption of Boundaries: On Gender and the Prose Poem, Alyson Miller
14. Pastoral and Ecocritical Voices in Modern Prose Poetry, Lynn Domina
15. Grzegorz Wroblewski's Kopenhaga and the Process of Inscription, Piotr Gwiazda
16. The Chinese Prose Poem: Generic Metaphor and the Multiple Origins of Sanwenshi, Nick Admussen
17. The sanbunshi (Prose Poem) in Japan, Scott Mehl
18. The Arabic Prose Poem in Iraq, Sinan Antoon
19. After Poet's Prose: Postgeneric Writing in the Ongoing Crisis of Verse, Stephen Fredman
20. Prose in Prose in Contemporary French Poetic Practice: Appropriation, Repurposing and Pornography, Jeff Barda
Index
Introduction, Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville
Part I: Origins and Beginnings
1. The Birth of the Prose Poem in Nineteenth-Century France, Joseph Acquisto
2. Impressionism and the Prose Poem: Rimbaud's Artful Authenticity, Aimee Israel-Pelletier
3. Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht and the Prose Poem avant la lettre, Jonathan Monroe
4. Thyrsus & Palimpsest: De Quincey's influence on Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, Nikki Santilli
5. A Dangerous Hybridity: The Prose Poem at the fin de siecle, Margueritte Murphy
Part II: Visual Mediations
6. Cubism and the Prose Poem, Mary Ann Caws
7. The Modern French Prose Poem and Visual Art, Emma Wagstaff
8. The Homeless Heart: Abstraction and the Prose Poem, Richard Deming
Part III: Genres and Discourses
9. The Prose Poem, Flash Fiction, Lyrical Essays and Other Micro-Genres, Michel Delville
10. The Prose Poem and the Anti-Novel: Unsettling Form in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes, Jane Monson
11. Bishop, Lowell, and the Confessional Prose Poem, Lizzy LeRud
12. Trans-verse: Prose Poetry, Translation and Border Crossing in Baudelaire and Emerson, Adam Ross Rosenthal
Part IV: Issues and Contexts
13. An Interruption of Boundaries: On Gender and the Prose Poem, Alyson Miller
14. Pastoral and Ecocritical Voices in Modern Prose Poetry, Lynn Domina
15. Grzegorz Wroblewski's Kopenhaga and the Process of Inscription, Piotr Gwiazda
16. The Chinese Prose Poem: Generic Metaphor and the Multiple Origins of Sanwenshi, Nick Admussen
17. The sanbunshi (Prose Poem) in Japan, Scott Mehl
18. The Arabic Prose Poem in Iraq, Sinan Antoon
19. After Poet's Prose: Postgeneric Writing in the Ongoing Crisis of Verse, Stephen Fredman
20. Prose in Prose in Contemporary French Poetic Practice: Appropriation, Repurposing and Pornography, Jeff Barda
Index