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.

About the Author

A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent, UK, was Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, 1997-2011. 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).

Reviews

The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literatureis a survey of the non-American Beat writers, written by multiple specialists, divided by country. Many of the specialists are natives of these countries and understand their subjects from the inside.

While writers sometimes closely analyse a poem and passage of prose, the essays are jargon-free, light on theory and highly readable. Quotations are necessarily restricted in length but even so one encounters some striking excerpts.

-Alexander Adams

Book Information
ISBN 9781032095400
Author A. Robert Lee
Format Paperback
Page Count 366
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 675g