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In this pioneering study of contemporary Greek poetry, Karen Van Dyck investigates modernist and postmodernist poetics at the edge of Europe. She traces the influential role of Greek women writers back to the sexual politics of censorship under the dictatorship (1967-1974). Through responses to ...

In this pioneering study of contemporary Greek poetry, Karen Van Dyck investigates modernist and postmodernist poetics at the edge of Europe. She traces the influential role of Greek women writers back to the sexual politics of censorship under the dictatorship (1967-1974). Through responses to censorship -- including those of the dictator, the Nobel Laureate poet George Seferis, and the younger generation of poets -- she shows how women poets use strategies which, although initiated in response to the dictator's press law, prove useful in articulating a feminist critique. In poetry by Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, and Maria Laina, among others, she analyzes how the censors' tactics for stabilizing signification are redeployed to disrupt fixed meanings and gender roles.

As much a literary analysis of culture as a cultural analysis of literature, her book explores how censorship, consumerism, and feminism influence contemporary Greek women's poetry and also how the resistance to clarity in this poetry trains readers to rethink cultural practices. Van Dyck's comparative consideration of American beat poetry, Christa Wolf's "Cassandra", Poe's "The Purloined Letter", or Bakhtin's theory of the dialogical underscore the complexities of transnational exchange. Only with greater attention to the cultural and formal specificity of writing, Van Dyck argues, is it possible to "theorize" the lessons of censorship and women's writing.

Olga Orozco, considered one of the most important contemporary women poets in Latin America, serves as the touchstone for Jill Kuhnheim's examination of the tension between literature and life - or, as Kuhnheim quotes a student, of the universal question "Why read poetry?" Born in 1920 in Argentina ...

Olga Orozco, considered one of the most important contemporary women poets in Latin America, serves as the touchstone for Jill Kuhnheim's examination of the tension between literature and life - or, as Kuhnheim quotes a student, of the universal question "Why read poetry?" Born in 1920 in Argentina, Orozco has produced nine volumes of poetry, a play, and a narrative work. As a member of the "lost generation" of the forties, she is prominent among a group of poets whose work reveals a range of responses to historical circumstances. Taking a feminist approach, and focusing on the specific history of Argentina, Kuhnheim relates Orozco's writing to that of T. S. Eliot, Oliverio Girondo, Alejandra Pizarnik, and more recent Argentine women poets such as Cristina Pina, Diana Bellessi, Ines Araoz, and Liliana Lukin. Though much of their work appears to be far removed from social reality, Kuhnheim's reading reveals how even the most apparently distant poetry is inevitably involved with the political processes of the,time. Her comparative approach offers a method for reading lyric poetry that connects the aesthetic strand, which views a poem as something distant from the world, to a social thread that marks a particular historical moment.