Linking worldview and geographical spaces, this chapter links place, aesthetic development, and ideological changes in the work of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. From the mix of fantasy, sci-fi, bebop, and rhythm & blues of his home town, Newark, through his years in the (largely) white, avant-garde culture of Greenwich Village and his transitional plunge into Harlem’s Cultural Nationalist milieu, to his long final activism as Newark’s pre-eminent Marxist-Leninist poet, Baraka became one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Throughout these changes, Baraka’s poetry, with its evolving combination of Black vernacular speech, avant-garde technique, and political acuity, profoundly influenced Black American poetry and, in the process, the nature of contemporary American poetry itself.

Twilight in Italy is shown to have led the way to the first version of Women in Love (1916, published 1999) and ‘The Reality of Peace’ to the second version (1917–19, published 1920). Motifs of disintegration, ‘the single desire for death’ and the commitment to polarised framing of the subject in hand are transferred to the novel in its first version but deployed more confidently, almost heroically, in the second. Realism is stripped back, characters are captured on the quick, and their psychic conditions become emblematic or indexical of a wider cultural predicament. Alarming subterranean gesturing at the individual and social condition balloons in the more polarised, sometimes operatic story-space of the hyper-charged second version. Gerald Crich’s case localises the general historical one in Twilight in Italy about the artificial shell of self-sacrifice having held the civilisation of the previous generation together. The long slow dissolution of social values (adapting thinking of Herbert Spencer) is sardonically savoured by Gudrun and Loerke; it will issue finally and catastrophically in the destructiveness of the unnamed war, localised in Gerald’s death-suicide.

Both John Milton and Andrew Marvell have been revaluated in recent years. Yet this is the first sustained scholarly work to compare the two great seventeenth-century poets. In his new book, which stands as the culmination of a distinguished academic career, Warren Chernaik examines the relationship of the two writers and their complex responses to their troubled times. The poets were close friends, yet the trajectory of their careers and their posthumous reputations differed significantly. As well as taking an active part in the major political and religious upheavals of their times, both poets engaged seriously with classical, Christian, and humanist thought. Combining close readings of their poetry and prose with detailed consideration of historical and intellectual context, Chernaik sheds fresh light on the enduring works of poets whose words still resonate strongly with today’s readers.

Chapter 4 opens Part II of the study with an overview of literary activity during the late ninth and early tenth centuries, and the political backdrop of the emergent kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. A summary of the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons itself is provided, followed by discussion of three categories of evidence: epistolary correspondences, the corpus of Alfredian Old English literature, and Asser’s Life of King Alfred. Throughout, several points of continuity with earlier decades of literary activity are stressed, particularly the continued importance of letter-writing and international communication. It is also emphasised that contemporary investment in vernacular literary production was extraordinary, yet Latin remained a valued commodity as well. Just as there would have been competing political visions within the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, so too there would have been preferences for literary patronage of Latin or Old English. The decision specifically to compose the Life of King Alfred in Latin is assessed, particularly in light of Asser’s intended audiences. The overview provided by this chapter sets the scene for the case studies explored in the subsequent two chapters.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

This chapter investigates how Charles Hérard-Dumesle’s 1824 Voyage dans le Nord de Haïti contributes to early Haitian writers’ production of Haitian sovereignty. Hérard-Dumesle contributes to this larger effort by contesting the imperial genre of natural history that instrumentalized Haitian people and nature. Against the imperial natural histories that justified colonial extractivism, Hérard-Dumesle offers a Haitian mode of natural history that weaves together the real and imagined natural cosmologies of the Taino people, rural Haitian small holders, and Haiti’s postcolonial elite. This expressly political Haitian natural history and the poetic eloquence on which it ran aspired to redress tyranny not only for Haiti but also on a planetary register.

This chapter considers three significant New Negro Renaissance poets: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Anne Spencer, and analyzes how they discussed themes of racism and gender inequality in their poetry. Although the critics of their day dismissed their poetry as raceless and apolitical, this chapter demonstrates how New Negro women writers utilized the domestic sphere of writing and wrote poetry that allowed them to articulate and explore their unspeakable desires. Black women poets were able to express their wholeness and sexual self-determination. Even though their writings may not have garnered critical acclaim and success, Black women writers were present and actively advancing Black feminist ideas. Extending the analysis of such scholars as Maureen Honey, Cheryl Wall, and Gloria T. Hull, this chapter illustrates that Black women writers fashioned a poetics that enabled them to discuss such subjects as sexuality and Black women’s right to autonomy and self-fashioned happiness. Their writings represent a profound yearning for freedom and sexual fulfillment, challenging the prevailing ideology that women’s primary realm of power was in the home.

Dolpo is a Himalayan Indigenous minority community currently settled within the northern political boundary of Nepal, bordering Tibet, China. Since the territorial conquest of Mustang and other regions within the Himalayas, initiated by King Prithivi Narayan Shah and his forces under Bahadur Shah during the 1800s AD, the Dolpo community, primarily composed of semipastoralists engaged in subsistence farming and barter exchanges, appears to have followed a trajectory akin to that of Mustang (Regmi 1995). Subsequently, the Nepalese government exerted active control over northern border points with China by the 1950s, largely in response to the increasing presence of the Khamba rebellion in the border areas (McGranahan 2018). Prior to this governmental oversight, the people of Dolpo predominantly adhered to their customary governance system, sustaining subsistence-based agriculture, relative autonomy, and trans-Himalayan trade for nearly a century. Upon the consolidation of territorial control, the rural region witnessed not only the presence of Indian police and officials from the Nepali government, but also the segmentation of Dolpo communities into various political administrative divisions, including village development committees (VDCs) and wards, which were subsequently integrated into the district-level administrative entity known as Dolpa. These mechanisms emerged as a moral framework to proselytize the recalcitrant raite (subject). Despite the inclusion of certain community members within these lower-level structures, Hindu authorities implemented these social and political realities without consulting the Dolpo community.

With the strengthening of Indigenous movements during the 1990s and the subsequent institutionalization of the National Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) in the early 2000s, the Nepalese government recognized the Dolpo as one of the 59 Indigenous nationalities.

This chapter characterizes The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in New York at least once a month for two years and who advocated for Black women at trade publishers such as Random House, at magazines such as Ms. and Essence, and eventually in academic departments as they moved their intellectual labor from political organizing in the 1960s and early 1970s to literary organizing in the late 1970s and then, after the 1980s, into colleges and universities. It traces how The Sisterhood’s collaborative labor shaped the reach, form, and content of African American poetry through a Black feminist poetics rooted in a both/and way of thinking and writing that insisted on the interdependence of political, literary, and academic spheres. They believed in literature as a tool for Black liberation. In works by poets such as Harryette Mullen, Erica Hunt, Mahogany Browne, Tara Betts, and Evie Shockley, each of these aspects of The Sisterhood’s poetic legacy remains visible in Black feminist poetry today.

Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

Following the Black Arts Movement, emerging Black cosmopolitan poets such as Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa published poetry that appeared to be quite different than poetry of the 1960s and 1970s. Both poets took pains in their writing to assert both racial affiliation and a world citizen identity. While early cosmopolitan theory struggled to accommodate race, more recent scholarship by Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo (Black cosmopolitanism) and Susan Koshy (minority cosmopolitanism) provides useful conceptual frames that explain why a contemporary Black poet might pursue a cosmopolitan poetic and show how it works in actual poems. Readings of selected poems across both poets’ œuvres demonstrate their deepening cosmopolitan sensibility over time, revealing how they position themselves and their work within a frame inclusive of both Black identity and a relatively privileged, global perspective. Having established the features of a Black cosmopolitan poetics in the work of two major poets of this generation, a question arises. Does the poetry of the current generation of Black poets, those following Komunyakaa and Dove, perhaps exhibit a post-cosmopolitan perspective?

Nepali Dalit literature is a recent development in the literary history of the country. Nepali is one of the many modern Indo-European languages widely spoken in Nepal and in some parts in India. It is primarily written in the Nāgarī1 script. It was recognized as the national language of Nepal in 1958. Besides, it has been recognized as a major Indian literary language by the Sahitya Akademi2 in India (Hutt 1991: 5). The oldest literary specimens in Nepali are the royal edicts inscribed on stelae and copper plates, dated to the thirteenth century. Since the seventeenth century the literary canon in Nepali has been dominated by high-caste Hindu writers. The first notable Nepali poet was Suvanand Das who composed panegyric verses to praise King Prithvi Narayan Shah of Gorkha in the eighteenth century. Brahmin writer Bhanubhakta Acharya (1814–68) is widely considered as the “Father of Nepali Literature” (Hutt 1991: 5). Although high-caste Hindu writers dominate the field of literature in Nepal, many writers from different ethnic groups and marginalized castes have emerged in recent years to write about their struggles and experiences. Nepali Dalit literature is unquestionably the literary expression of Nepali Dalits. Emergence of Dalit literature in Nepal represents the act of writing back to power and caste hegemony by the Nepali Dalits.

The social structure in Nepal, much like in India, was heavily influenced by the caste system, resulting in a social hierarchy among the various groups of people. This system impacted the traditional customs and practices of the people, leading to the establishment of untouchability. Before introducing Nepali Dalit Literature, it is important first to introduce the broader sociocultural context which the Nepali Dalit literature is an integral part of.