The San Francisco Renaissance

The San Francisco Renaissance is the first overview of this major American literary movement. Michael Davidson recounts its emergence during the postwar period in the San Francisco Bay area as defined by poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and William Everson, and then as it blossomed into the literary excitements associated with the Beat movement and with writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Individual chapters are devoted to major writers of the period and to their involvement with social and political change during the Cold War era. Davidson’s penultimate chapter deals with the largely neglected context of women writers during this period, and the final chapter deals with poetry since 1965.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction: enabling fictions; 1. The elegiac mode: rhetoric and poetics in the 1940s; 2. ‘The darkness surrounds us’: participation and reflection among the beat writers; 3. ‘Spotting that design’: incarnation and interpretation in Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen; 4. ‘Cave of resemblances, cave of Rimes’: tradition and repetition in Robert Duncan; 5. The city redefined: community and dialogue in Jack Spicer; 6. Appropriations: women and the San Francisco renaissance; 7. Approaching the fin de siècle; Notes; Index.