Broken English/breaking English: A Study of Contemporary Poetries in English

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Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 313 pages
Broken English/Breaking English discusses the work of some prominent contemporary poets writing in English. It examines the challenges to a poetic discourse that was claimed in immediately post-Second World War England to be pure and English. The study begins with a scrutiny of what Donald Davie called Purity of Diction, and offers a contrary view generated earlier by emergent American (literary) English in the work of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. There follows consideration of the clash between Alfred Alvarez labeled the Gentility Principle and American-sourced confessionalism, before the debate moves to the contemporary period. Successive chapters are devoted to women's poetry as offering a challenge to Davie-style pure English; to the new poetic dictions breaking in ethnicminority poetry in England; to work going on in English on the British geographical frontiers - Northern Ireland and Scotland; and to poetry written in ex-British colonies and dominions, specifically Australia. Canterbury in New Zealand.

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