Edinburgh University Press Poets, the Press and the South African War: Imperial Masculinities at the Fin-de-Siècle (Edinburgh Critical Studies in War and Culture)

Reclaims newspaper poetry as a crucial lens on literary culture and British imperialism at the turn of the nineteenth century Pays critical attention to neglected poetic material from national and regional publications, showing how these voices find their way into the metropolitan colonial press and into conversation with familiar poets Presents compelling new evidence for the national and international circulation and cultural significance of newspaper poems, capturing the networks through which readers responded (with performances, parodies, censure and debate) and subjected newspaper poets to political and literary scrutiny Highlights the significance of verse forms and poetic technique to the presentation of key themes Analyses the newspaper page, including illustrations, and reconstructs the original reading experience Thousands of poems were published in British daily newspapers during the South African War. Serious poets and enthusiastic amateurs, serving soldiers and anonymous correspondents chose newspaper publication, self-consciously assuming a range of public roles and contributing to public debates. Many of these poems have been hidden away in archives ever since, and the networks of relationships between canonical names and anonymous and undiscovered poets have remained invisible. This book brings these works and relationships into the light. The stories they have to tell, of literature at work in the world, of poems speaking to and answering one another, upends received ideas about late-Victorian poetry. The extraordinary and international influence of Kipling – his voices and verse forms, as much as his politics – comes into focus, as do the outlines of vital national debates about military masculinities, British national character, imperial ambitions and the national or moral costs of a controversial war. Featuring an anthology of sixty previously forgotten poems, this essential volume will be of interest to students of colonialism and post-colonialism, literature, war studies, social history and periodical studies, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.