Neil Roberts: Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry.

Twelve postwar poets are studied in this volume: Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anne Stevenson, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, Les Murray, Seamus Heaney, Peter Redgrove, Tony Harrison, Peter Reading and Carol Ann Duffy. The approach is resolutely in touch with ‘theory’, especially the work of Mikhail Bakhtin with its emphasis on heteroglossia and the dialogic, but in the main blessedly free from the impenetrable jargon which that so often entails. Professor Roberts, that is to say, writes for the general reader as well as his academic contemporaries; and in doing so he gives the welcome sense that the critical apparatus he uses is for the benefit of the poetry rather than the other way round.

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