Poets, the Press and the South African War : Imperial Masculinities at the Fin-de-Siecle

Reclaims newspaper poetry as a crucial lens on literary culture and British imperialism at the turn of the nineteenth century.

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.