Uwe Klawitter Book order

The political poetry produced over the last three decades in Britain and Ireland is marked by a rich diversity of commitments and concerns, a striving for the effective matching of poetic strategy and expressive purpose. The poets considered in this collection of essays differ widely in the intensity of their engagement and their ideological orientation. Their poems address social injustice, civil liberties, ethnic conflict and identity, sexual politics, green issues and urban development but turn also to the politics of aesthetics and the political role of poetry and poet as such. One of the main objectives of this volume is to sound out in how far all these different articulations of the political share common poetic patterns and modes of address or seek to achieve their political effects by completely different, even contrary, ways of discursive approach. Another objective is to provide fresh answers to the vexed question of what the benefits and limitations of a poetic approach to politics may be.

This study investigates the treatment of totalitarianism in 'English' fiction through the last six decades. It looks at the ideas and views developed as well as the strategies adopted to cope with the trauma and threat of this form of political oppression. The chosen novels are analysed within their own fictional and ethical framework. Their unique historical contribution is assessed in the context of the developing academic and public debate about totalitarianism. The discussion of native British and American/Canadian writers as well as Eastern European writers, who came to write about their first-hand experiences in the English language, leads to a comprehensive picture of Anglo-American fiction's response to the most important political phenomenon of our century.