BORDER BLURS

SUMMARY

"Greg Thomas’s account of British concrete poetry from the 1950s to the 1970s gives much-needed definition and clarity to what has remained a misunderstood yet determinative moment in mid- to late-twentieth- century poetry....Border Blurs will remain a definitive resource and touchstone for subsequent studies of concrete poetry."

Dr. Ross Hair, UEA, English: Review of the English Association, December 2020.

My first academic monograph offers an in-depth account of the relationship between English and Scottish poets and the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s to the 1970s. Concrete poetry was a literary and artistic style which reactivated early twentieth-century modernist impulses towards the merging of artistic media, while simultaneously speaking to a gamut of contemporary contexts, from post-1945 reconstruction to cybernetics, mass media and the sixties counter-culture. The terms of its development in England and Scotland suggest new ways of mapping ongoing complexities in the relationship between the two national cultures, and of tracing broader sociological and cultural trends in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing especially on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Dom Sylvester Houédard and Bob Cobbing, Border Blurs is based on new and extensive archival and primary research, and will fill a vital gap in contemporary understandings of an important but much misunderstood genre, concrete poetry. It will also serve as a vital document for scholars and students of twentieth-century British literature, modern intermedia art and modernism, especially those interested in understanding modernism’s wide geographical spread and late twentieth-century legacies.

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