The Cambridge companion to the Beats
By: edited by Steven Belletto (Lafayette College)
Series: Cambridge companions; Cambridge companions to topics; Cambridge companions to topics
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 297
ISBN-13: 9781316635711; 9781107184459
Subjects: History and criticism; American literature; Beats (Persons)
Other titles: Beats
Description: The Cambridge Companion to the Beats offers an in-depth overview of one of the most innovative and popular literary periods in America, the Beat era. The Beats were a literary and cultural phenomenon originating in New York City in the 1940s that reached worldwide significance. Although its most well-known figures are Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, the Beat movement radiates out to encompass a rich diversity of figures and texts that merit further study. Consummate innovators, the Beats had a profound effect not only on the direction of American literature, but also on models of socio-political critique that would become more widespread in the 1960s and beyond. Bringing together the most influential Beat scholars writing today, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the Beat movement, asking critical questions about its associated figures and arguing for their importance to postwar American letters.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 279-283) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction.; title: The Beat half-century  -- Steven Belletto; title: Were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs a generation?  -- William Lawlor; title: Beatniks, hippies, yippies, feminists, and the ongoing American counterculture  -- Jonah Raskin; title: Locating a Beat aesthetic  -- Regina Weinreich; title: The Beats and literary history : myths and realities  -- Nancy M. Grace; title: Allen Ginsberg and Beat poetry  -- Erik Mortenson; title: Five ways of being Beat, circa 1958-59  -- Steven Belletto; title: Jack Kerouac and the Beat novel  -- Kurt Hemmer; title: William S. Burroughs : Beating postmodernism  -- Oliver Harris; title: Memory babes : Joyce Johnson and Beat memoir  -- Brenda Knight; title: Beat writers and criticism  -- Hilary Holladay; title: The Beats and gender  -- Ronna C. Johnson; title: The Beats and sexuality  -- Polina Mackay; title: The Beats and race  -- A. Robert Lee; title: Ethnographers and networks : on Beat transnationalism  -- Todd. F. Tietchen; title: Buddhism and the Beats  -- John Whalen-Bridge; title: Beat as beatific : Gregory Corso's Christian poetics  -- Kirby Olson; title: Jazz and the Beat Generation  -- Michael Hrebeniak; title: The Beats and visual culture -- David Sterritt.