Multicultural Poetics: Re-visioning the American Canon

By Nissa Parmar

Argues that multiculturalism and hybridity are key components of the nation's poetry and its culture.

Multicultural Poetics provides a new perspective on American poetry that will contribute to the evolution of contemporary critical practice. Nissa Parmar combines formalist analysis with cultural studies theory to trace a lineage of hybrid poetry from the American Renaissance to what Marilyn Chin deemed America's "multicultural renaissance," the blossoming of multicultural literature in the 1980s and 1990s. This re-visionary literary history begins by analyzing Whitman and Dickinson as postcolonial poets. This critical approach provides an alternative to the factionalism that has characterized twentieth-century American poetic history and continues to inform literary criticism in the twenty-first century. Parmar uses a multiethnic, multigender method that emphasizes the relationship between American poetic form and cultural development. This book provides a new approach by using hybridity as the critical paradigm for a study that groups multiethnic and emergent authors. It thereby combats literary ghettoization while revealing commonalities across American literatures and the cross-fertilization that has informed their development.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 143846844X
• ISBN13: 9781438468440
• Release Date: January 2019
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 8.9"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher