The Twilight of the Avant-garde

Download or read book The Twilight of the Avant-garde written by Jonathan Mayhew and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twilight of the Avant-Garde addresses the central problem of contemporary Spanish poetry: the attempt to preserve the scope and ambition of modernist poetry at the end of the twentieth century. Offering a critical analysis of Luis Garcìa Montero’s “poetry of experience,” and the work of José Angel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda, among others, Mayhew challenges received notions about the value of poetic language in relation to the society and culture at large. Ultimately championing the survival of more challenging and ambitious modes of poetic writing in the postmodern age, this volume argues that the cultural ambition of modernist poetics remains alive and well in our age of cynicism.