Constructions of Europe in Modern American Poetry

Elin Käck is Senior Associate Professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Linköping University, Sweden, where she serves as Director of Doctoral Studies and teaches English and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses mainly on modern and contemporary American poetry and poetics, but also on modernism more broadly. She has published essays on, for example, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on topics such as the historical avant-garde, ecocriticism, agency and place/space. Her work has appeared in, among others, Journal of Modern Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and European Journal of English Studies. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Approaches to Teaching the Poetry and Prose of William Carlos Williams (MLA) and is currently the Vice President of the William Carlos Williams Society.

• Preface AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Off to Europe: European Travel from Modernism to Postwar Poetry1. Approaching Europe: The Poetic Mapping of Storied Spaces2. Sight and Site: Between Poet and Tourist3. “Solidified Nostalgia”: Pastness, Historicity, and the Cliché4. Relational Geographies: Place Names, Power, and Poetic Proximities5. Geology and Landscape: On European Soil6. Concluding Remarks: Post-Europe?NotesBibliographyIndex

Luminous and brilliantly researched: this is a grand tour of American poets struggling with Europe’s imaginary holds. The obscure object of desire in Käck’s study is less a fixed subject than a haunting map, less Western literary tradition than the fleeting possibilities of non-nativist poetics. Watch these literary Ahabs in hot pursuit of new forms for ever changing lines.