The Routledge Handbook of International Beat Literature

Beat literature? Have not the great canonical names long grown familiar? Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Likewise the frontline texts, still controversial in some quarters, assume their place in modern American literary history. On the Road serves as Homeric journey epic. "Howl" amounts to Beat anthem, confessional outcry against materialism and war. Naked Lunch , with its dark satiric laughter, envisions a dystopian world of power and word virus. But if these are all essentially America-centered,