A collection of original essays providing critical, international and cross-disciplinary approaches to the prose poem
The first comprehensive guide to the prose poem, this book covers the history of the genre from Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la nuit and Baudelaire's Paris Spleen to its most important modern and contemporary practitioners. It gives special attention to the genre's hybridity as well as to its propensity to engage in a dialogue with other genres, discourses and artistic forms. Written by prominent scholars of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem offers analytical and historically informed narratives of the genre's transformations and variations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the next.
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita and Resident Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. She is the author of Creative Gatherings: Meeting Places of Modernism.
Michel Delville is Professor of English, American and Comparative Literature at the University of Liège. He is the author of The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre.

Mary Ann Caws works on the relations between literature and art, and is the co-editor, with Hermine Riffaterre, of The Prose Poem in France.Theory and Practice (1983). Her recent publications include Pierre Reverdy (2013), the Modern Art Cookbook (2014), Surprised in Translation (2006), Surrealism (2004), and Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason (2017). She is a Distinguished Professor Emerita and Resident Professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the past president of the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association, the editor of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry and the translator of Andre¿ Breton, Rene¿ Char, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Ghe¿rasim Luca, Ste¿phane Mallarme¿, and Tristan Tzara.

Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liège. He is the author or co-author of The American Prose Poem, J.G. Ballard, Hamlet & Co, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism, Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde and Crossroads Poetics: Text, Image, Music, Film & Beyond. He has also co-edited several volumes of essays on contemporary poetics.

Notes on contributors; Preface, Rosemary Lloyd; Introduction, Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville;
Part I: Origins and Beginnings
1. The Birth of the Prose Poem in Nineteenth-Century France, Joseph Acquisto;
2. Impressionism and the Prose Poem: Rimbaud's Artful Authenticity, Aimée Israel-Pelletier;
3. Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht and the Prose Poem avant la lettre, Jonathan Monroe;
4. Thyrsus & Palimpsest: De Quincey's influence on Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, Nikki Santilli;
5. A Dangerous Hybridity: The Prose Poem at the fin de siècle, Margueritte Murphy;
Part II: Visual Mediations;
6. Cubism and the Prose Poem, Mary Ann Caws;
7. The Modern French Prose Poem and Visual Art, Emma Wagstaff;
8. The Homeless Heart: Abstraction and the Prose Poem, Richard Deming;
Part III: Genres and Discourses;
9. The Prose Poem, Flash Fiction, Lyrical Essays and Other Micro-Genres, Michel Delville;
10. The Prose Poem and the Anti-Novel: Unsettling Form in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes, Jane Monson;
11. Bishop, Lowell, and the Confessional Prose Poem, Lizzy LeRud;
12. Trans-verse: Prose Poetry, Translation and Border Crossing in Baudelaire and Emerson, Adam Ross Rosenthal;
Part IV: Issues and Contexts;
13. An Interruption of Boundaries: On Gender and the Prose Poem, Alyson Miller;
14. Pastoral and Ecocritical Voices in Modern Prose Poetry, Lynn Domina;
15. Grzegorz Wróblewski's Kopenhaga and the Process of Inscription, Piotr Gwiazda;
16. The Chinese Prose Poem: Generic Metaphor and the Multiple Origins of Sanwenshi, Nick Admussen;
17. The sanbunshi (Prose Poem) in Japan, Scott Mehl;
18. The Arabic Prose Poem in Iraq, Sinan Antoon;
19. After Poet's Prose: Postgeneric Writing in the Ongoing Crisis of Verse, Stephen Fredman;
20. Prose in Prose in Contemporary French Poetic Practice: Appropriation, Repurposing and Pornography, Jeff Barda; Index.