The American Poetry Wax Museum is a study of the canonizing assumptions and obsessions that animate postwar American poetry. Rasula's analysis moves from the rise of New Criticism, through the ascendancy of Robert Lowell and confessional poetics, into the current period of multiculturalism and the avant-garde provocations of the language poets. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources, Rasula combines literary criticism, cultural studies, and social history in an analysis that works to disrupt prevailing myths about poets and poetry in the public sphere and in the academy. Refiguring English Studies series. 639 pp. 1996. College. ISBN 0-8141-0138-0. No. 01380
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