Professor Of English Research Articles

From the Editor Jennifer L. Airey In our last issue, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature had the honor of publishing on the special topic of “Contemporary Black British Women’s Writing,” guest edited by Elisabeth Bekers, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, and Helen Cousins. The issue focuses on literary innovations and experimental forms of writing by British women of African and African Caribbean descent since the 1990s. Through five articles and interviews with four contemporary authors, the guest editors craft an issue that “raises critical questions about the extent to which precedence has been given to the politics over the aesthetics of their writing.”1 The issue recognizes Black women’s writing as a driving force of contemporary literary innovation in Britain. It was a pleasure to work with the guest editors on the issue and to publish this important work. With this special issue, we had three new members join our editorial board: Robin Hackett, Cynthia Richards, and Mary Youssef. Since I was not able to announce them in our last issue, their introductions appear below along with the editorial board members joining with this issue: Gabeba Baderoon, Kimberly Anne Coles, and Laura E. Tanner. While I am looking forward to working with all these exemplary scholars, I am always sad to bid farewell to those rotating off the board. With great appreciation, I say goodbye to Anupama Arora, Mary Jean Corbett, Marilyn Francus, Hala Halim, Jean Mills, and Carrie J. Preston. Robin Hackett is Associate Professor of English at University of New Hampshire, where she specializes in feminist theory, queer theory, British literature after 1800, and modernisms. She is the author of Sapphic Primitivism: Productions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Key Works of Modern Fiction (2004) and coeditor of Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (2019) and At Home and Abroad in the Empire: British Women Write the Thirties (2009). She has contributed to several collections including Communal Modernisms: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literary and Cultural Texts in the College Classroom (2013), At Home and Abroad in the Empire, and Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press) and published articles in venues including Woolf Studies Annual, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Cynthia Richards is Professor of English and Richard P. Veler Endowed Chair in English at Wittenberg University, where she directs the Center for Teaching and Innovation, the Women’s Studies Program, and the Writing Across the Curriculum Program. She is the editor of The Wrongs of Woman; [End Page 5] or Maria and Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (2003) and coeditor of Approaches to Teaching Behn’s “Oroonoko” (2013), Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (2021), and Quotidian Fevers in the Enlightenment: Patient Narratives of the Eighteenth Century (in progress). She is also currently completing a monograph, The Body, Trauma, and War, 1667–1798 (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press), which focuses on re-thinking the representation of the body and domestic space in eighteenth-century canonical works using the perspective of disability studies and trauma theory. Richard has also published numerous articles in venues including Literature Compass, English Language Notes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, analyzing the works of Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is a Contributing Behn Editor at The Scriblerian and a Fulbright Scholar Alumni Ambassador. Mary Youssef is Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, with a courtesy appointment in the Translation and Research Instruction Program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her book, Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel (2018), critically examines discourses surrounding race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, and language within the Egyptian literary and socio-cultural arenas through case studies of the novels of Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Ṭahir, ᶜAlaᵓ al-Aswani, Yusuf Zaydan, Muᶜtazz Futayha, Ashraf al-Khumaysi, and Miral al-Tahawi. She has published in journals including Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Journal of African Literature Association (JALA), and International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and has contributed to Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies...

Reviewed by: Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu Poetry in a Global Age. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. If poetry has historically been seen as a provincial, local, or national genre, then Jahan Ramazani’s most recent book, Poetry in a Global Age, adds to an emergent discourse that rethinks poetry within transnational, global, and planetary scales. Readers of scholarship on poetry are likely familiar with the work of Ramazani, the University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia and an Editorial Board Member of this journal, particularly his two prior books that dealt with postcolonial and transnational poetry, A Transnational Poetics, published in 2009 and winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010, and The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, published in 2001. After more than two decades spent meditating on this constellation of topics, Poetry in a Global Age develops further attention to cross-cultural and cross-national poetics through “an approach to poetry that highlights literary confluences, commonalities, and conflicts that cross national borders” (9). The poets Ramazani highlights within this net include both writers who may be familiar and others who may be unfamiliar to readers, such as Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Claude McKay, Elizabeth Bishop, Karen Press, Arun Kolatkar, Daljit Nagra, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, and W. B. Yeats. Along the way, he enmeshes their work alongside theorists and scholars, including Franco Moretti, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Arjun Appadurai, and Bruno Latour, who help us view poetry through the refractive and multidimensional aspects of globalization, modernity, and theories of the world in literature. Both interesting and intriguing, the title of the book and the early announcement of the book’s approach speak directly to current discourses surrounding “world literature” as a field of inquiry and an approach or method for literary study. The key difference in terminology, besides the quite evident [End Page 121] focus on poetry, is Ramazani’s use of the word “global” as opposed to “world” or “planet.” Poetry, according to Ramazani, has a “relation to globalizing processes . . . which . . . significantly precede the 1990s” (12). Poets utilize these processes to “create textures, forms, and voices that embody and reflect on the experience of living transnationally and interculturally” and what it “feels like to live in a global age” (13). For example, Ramazani notes regarding Seamus Heaney that “his extensive travels . . . generate an ever-wider range of geographic and cultural reference in his poetry,” something that Ramazani says becomes especially evident to a student of global studies (177). The term “globe,” then, begins to highlight the “interplay between the world and the ball-like maps that help us imagine it,” and the term can “help check the national ghost in the transnational paradigm” (21). Ramazani’s approach to this paradigm is exemplified well in the introduction to the book, where he anchors his argument with a reading of Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” to situate the poem on a global and planetary scale. As Ramazani will do with readings of other poems, he notes how the globality of the poem can be found in the “coalescence of money, labor, commodities, and skills” that emerges in the planetary scales of a rather ordinary writing instrument (1). The book’s arguments are frequently reinforced by inclusions of theoretical material, usually after the analysis of a poem, such as his engagement with Bruno Latour alongside his reading of “I, Pencil.” Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the book is its international scope, which still remains rare in poetry studies. Throughout the ten chapters, Ramazani makes widespread yet specific claims about the place of globalization in poetry, so the sweep of the book—its transnational scope, transhistorical archive, attentive close readings, and large steps through poetic literary history—bolsters both a reimagining and a reaffirmation of the global range of poetry, reigniting our understanding of some individual poets and poems, and resituating broader conversations of the world within a poetry-focused literary study. These claims are supported by what I see to be three distinct parts of...

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