Book News: Hart Crane and transnational periodicals

Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Periodicals

BY FRANCESCA BRATTON

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781474481519

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-visionary-company.html

This book examines the poetry of Hart Crane and his circle within transnational modernist periodical culture. It reappraises Crane’s poetry and reception and introduces several lost works by the poet, including critical prose, reviews and ‘Nopal’, a poem written in Mexico. Through its exploration of Crane’s close engagement with periodical culture, it provides a rich and detailed panorama of twentieth-century literary and artistic communities. In particular, this monograph offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, examines the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation and explores Crane’s important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry.

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• Weds textual and literary-critical approaches to Hart Crane’s poetry and his avant-garde milieu, offering a fresh reading of transnational modernism
• Offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, introducing a wealth of new archival material, including previously unknown work from Crane’s last poetic project
• Explores the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation
• Theorizes periodical publishing as poetic form and creative-critical artistic practices
• Explores Crane’s important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry

Situating him deftly within different geographical contexts and cultural coteries, Bratton shows how Crane established truly transnational poetic and critical practices. Through judicious close readings and the excavation of exciting new archival material, she skilfully demonstrates Crane’s acute awareness of the publishing ecologies of modernism and the complexities of his writing and thought with which we continue to grapple. – Niall Munro, author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic

Francesca Bratton is a senior lecturer in American literature in the Department of English at Uppsala University. She has published articles and reviews in English, PN Review, Notes & Queries, and Year’s Work in English Studies. In 2013-14 she was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress.