The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem

The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem is the first comprehensive guide to the prose poem written from an international and comparative perspective. It covers the history of the genre from Aloyisius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit and Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen to its most important modern and contemparay practitioners. The volume gives special attention to the genre’s hybridity as well as to its propensity to engage in a dialogue with other genres, discourses and artistic forms. It addresses the complexities and complications generated by such interdiscursive and intergeneric negotiations while examining the prose poem’s capacity to reclaim other genres, functions and modes (fiction, the essay, the parable, etc.) which have come to be associated more or less exclusively with prose literature. Written by prominent scholars of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem offer analytical and historically informed narratives of the genre’s transformations and variations across the nineteenth and twentieth century and into the next. The volume provides the first international and comparative approach to the genre and includes chapters on non-Western traditions (e.g., Japan, China, the Arab World).