Visionary Company

This book examines the poetry of Hart Crane and his circle within transnational modernist periodical culture. It reappraises Crane's poetry and reception and introduces several lost works by the poet, including critical prose, reviews and 'Nopal', a poem written in Mexico. Through its exploration of Crane's close engagement with periodical culture, it provides a rich and detailed panorama of twentieth-century literary and artistic communities. In particular, this monograph offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, examines the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation and explores Crane's important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry.

Visionary Company is an academic book, but it reads better than most and can profitably be enjoyed by anyone interested in Crane's work, periodical culture, modernism, or all of these. It's impeccably documented and draws capaciously from a wide variety of sources. With every page the reader shares the rewards of Bratton's trawling through files and folders in dusty archives to bring this all to life again - and Crane himself, too.--Don Share "PN Review 270"

Situating him deftly within different geographical contexts and cultural coteries, Bratton shows how Crane established truly transnational poetic and critical practices. Through judicious close readings and the excavation of exciting new archival material, she skilfully demonstrates Crane's acute awareness of the publishing ecologies of modernism and the complexities of his writing and thought with which we continue to grapple.

Francesca Bratton is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of English at Uppsala University. She has published articles and reviews in English, PN Review, Notes & Queries and Year's Work In English Studies. In 2013-14 she was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress.

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