Introduction -- Contemporary British Poetry and Enigmaticalness -- Continuing 'Poetry Wars' in Twenty-First-Century British Poetry -- Committed and Autonomous Art -- Iconoclasm and Enigmatical Commitment -- The Double Consciousness of Modernism -- Conclusion.

This book discusses contemporary British poetry in the context of metamodernism. The author argues that the concept of metamodernist poetry helps to recalibrate the opposition between mainstream and innovative poetry, and he investigates whether a new generation of British poets can be accurately defined as metamodernist. Antony Rowland analyses the ways in which contemporary British poets such as Geoffrey Hill, J. H. Prynne, Geraldine Monk and Sandeep Parmar have responded to the work of modernist writers as diverse as T. S. Eliot, H. D. and Antonin Artaud, and what Theodor Adorno describes as the overall enigma of modern art.

Postmodern theatre is dead. A new theatre is rising – one that combines the well-worn postmodern aesthetics of irony, detachment, and deconstruction with a paradoxical interest in authenticity, engagement, and re-construction. Whilst recent scholarship has treated these evolving interests as unrelated shifts in performance aesthetics, this volume proposes a new understanding: that these are part of a wider emerging cultural paradigm – metamodernism. Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre is the first book to focus on metamodernism and performance, offering a pioneering framework by which to identify and understand metamodern theatre. By drawing critical links between the works of performance theorists such as Anne Bogart and Andy Lavender and the metamodern as defined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, this book makes a clear, vital, and urgent case for the use of the term metamodernism within mainstream theatre scholarship. Focussing on small-scale theatre companies across the UK – including Poltergeist, YESYESNONO, Middle Child and The Gramophones, many of whom have not been documented in academia before – this book also provides a unique analysis of the theatre made by British millennials, a generation who have been distinctly affected by specific structures of contemporary precarity coinciding with this wider cultural shift. Through this, Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre makes a crucial contribution towards understanding emergent developments in post-millennial theatre practice across Britain and beyond.

Drawing on a range of authors that includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner, Ali Smith, Tom McCarthy, Jennifer Egan and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book provides an innovative and original analysis of the interdependencies between digital technology and metamodernism through a detailed study of the contemporary novel. We are currently living through a period of profound rupture, in which the way the world is perceived is undergoing significant change. Just as the interplay between capitalism and technology hastened the evolution of modernism and postmodernism, then so too are those same forces now taking us into uncharted waters. In an increasingly fragile world, in which the very existence of humankind is threatened, it is vital that we begin to understand this new landscape.

Explores contemporary fiction set in the near future to shed new light on our culture's relationship to the Anthropocene.

An examination of the nature and function of pastoral elegies in post-1960 British and Irish poetry.

Book, Text, Medium: Cross Sectional Reading for a Digital Age utilizes codex history, close reading, and language philosophy to assess the transformative arc between medieval books and today's e-books. It examines what happens to the reading experience in the twenty-first century when the original concept of a book is still held in the mind of a reader, if no longer in the reader's hand. Leading critic Garrett Stewart explores the play of mediation more generally, as the concept of book moves from a manufactured object to simply the language it puts into circulation. Framed by digital poetics, phonorobotics, and the rising popularity of audiobooks, this study sheds new light on both the history of reading and the negation of legible print in conceptual book art.

The first monograph-length study of Irish expatriate fiction in an era of transition from American to East Asian global hegemony.

An engagement with the continued importance of modernism is vital for building a nuanced account of the development of the novel after 1945. Bringing together internationally distinguished scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, these essays reveal how the most innovative writers working today draw on the legacies of modernist literature. Dynamics of influence and adaptation are traced in dialogues between authors from across the twentieth century: Lawrence and A. S. Byatt, Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, Forster and Zadie Smith. The book sets out new critical and disciplinary foundations for rethinking the very terms we use to map the novel's progression and renewal, enhancing our understanding not only of what modernism was but also what it might still become. With its global reach, The Legacies of Modernism will appeal to scholars working not only in the new modernist studies, but also in postcolonial studies and comparative literature.

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.