In contemporary Western societies, lyric poetry is often considered an elitist or solipsistic literary genre. Yet a closer look at its history reveals that lyric has always been intertwined with the politics of community formation, from the imagining of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in episodes of collective action, protest, and social resistance. Poetic forms have circulated between languages and traditions from around the world and across time. But how does lyric poetry address or even create communities — and of what kinds? This volume takes a global perspective to investigate poetic communities in dialogue with recent developments in lyric theory and concepts of community. In doing so, it explores both the political potentialities and the perils of lyric poetry.
Irene Fantappiè is Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) of Comparative Literature at the University of Cassino. After completing her PhD at the University of Bologna, she was Humboldt Fellow and researcher at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and later directed a three-year DFG research project at Freie Universität Berlin.
Francesco Giusti is Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Previously he held fellowships at the University of York, the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, and the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He has published two books devoted respectively to the ethics of mourning and to creative desire in lyric poetry.
Laura Scuriatti is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Bard College Berlin. Her research focuses on modernist literature, with special interest in life-writing, aesthetics and gender.
Table of Contents
- Lyric Address and the Problem of Community
- Millay Repairs Baudelaire
- Gestural Communities: Lyric and the Suspension of Action
- Rabindranath Tagore’s সমাজ/Samaj/Communities of Song
- The Transnational Lyric Community of Soviet Unofficial Music under Late Socialism
- Mina Loy’s Interrupted Communities
- Lyric Poetry and Community Good: Kaaps and the Cape Flats
- Casting Dispersions: Revising Lyric Privacy in Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed
- ‘So Clear That One Can See the Breaks’: Colonialism, Materiality, and the Lyric in Jen Bervin’s The Desert
- Lyric, Detachment, and Collectivity: On Carl Phillips’s ‘Hymn’
- Being a Perpetual Guest: Lyric, Community, Translation