Books by Jahan (University of Virginia) Ramazani

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system - "suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse," in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. In this book, the author reveals modern and contemporary poetry's animated dialogue with other genres and discourses.

Uncovers the ocean-straddling energies of the poetic imagination - in modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; in post-World War II North America and the North Atlantic; and in ethnic American, postcolonial, and black British writing.

Postcolonial novelists such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul are widely celebrated, yet the achievements of postcolonial poets have been strangely neglected. This work argues that postcolonial poets have also dramatically expanded the atlas of literature in English.