The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English » (1st Edition)

Jahan Ramazani is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime.

In recent decades, much of the most vital literature written in English has come from the former colonies of Great Britain. But while postcolonial novelists have been widely celebrated, the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected. In The Hybrid Muse, Jahan Ramazani argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English, infusing modern and contemporary poetry with indigenous metaphors, rhythms, and creoles. A rich and vibrant poetry, he contends, has issued from the hybridization of the English muse with the long resident muses of Africa, India, and the Caribbean.

Engaging an array of critical topics, from the aesthetics of irony and metaphor to the politics of nationalism and anthropology, Ramazani reconceptualizes issues central to our understanding of both postcolonial literatures and twentieth-century poetry. The first book of its kind, The Hybrid Muse will help internationalize the study of poetry and, in turn, strengthen the place of poetry in postcolonial studies.

Publishers Weekly

While crowds admire South Asian and African novelists like Rushdie or Achebe, American readers academic and otherwise don't care enough about verse from developing nations. Jahan Ramazani (Poetry of Mourning) hopes to change all that with The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English. In cogent and illuminating chapters, Ramazani (who teaches at the University of Virginia) considers both the cultural work and the aesthetic choices of five key poets, among them Louise Bennett (Jamaica), Okot p'Bitek (Uganda), A.K. Ramanujan (India) and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.