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This chapter presents the critical context and overarching narrative of the text. Concrete poetry has not been subject to extensive literary-critical attention, particularly in a British context, partly because of the very diversity of thematic associations it is able to support, which makes it difficult to process conceptually in retrospect. To bring some clarity to current thinking around concrete poetry, and in response to some recent critical revaluations of the style, this text posits that the style represented an ongoing exploration of the legacy and relevance of early-twentieth-century vanguard activity during the 1950s-70s, especially the interplay between broadly constructivist and neo-dada tendencies in international literary and artistic culture during those decades. In England and Scotland, where the style emerged simultaneously during the early 1960s, the development of concrete poetry – and criticism around it – reflected these competing positions but also became bound up with questions of nationalism and national identity, particularly in Scotland. This chapter deals with those themes while also contextualising some gaps in the remit of the text, including the geographical restrictions placed around the subject-matter, and the relative absence of women poets from the scenes surveyed.

The Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan coined the term ‘off-concrete’ to describe one of his own concrete poems. In this chapter, the term is used to characterise his overall approach to the style, which expressed both a keen enthusiasm for the classical concrete poetry of the 1950s-60s and a pronounced scepticism regarding its formal and ideological limits. One of many styles with which Morgan experimented during the 1950s-70s – also including beat and sci-fi poetry – concrete poetry was a means both of expressing his opposition to the parochialism of Scottish literary modernist culture and of redefining that culture as internationalist and technologically oriented. At the same time, Morgan’s incorporation of narrative voices and specific thematic scenarios into the concrete poem – ranging from outer space to the animal kingdom, and periodically expressing Scottish-nationalist and anti-colonialist politics – reflects his desire to extend and subvert the grammars of concrete poetry. This dialectical movement propelled his concrete practice forwards from 1962 until around the close of the 1960s, by which time his engagement with the style was waning. However, by the 1970s, a new variant of concrete poetry, more responsive to sound poetry and new Scottish poetry in dialect, had begun to animate Morgan’s practice.

While imperialists were often dominant among the voices speaking to young people, jingoes did not entirely control the conversation. Anti-imperialism also found a home in certain segments of the literary market. Contrary impulses toward multilateralism, cosmopolitanism, and pacifism competed for children’s attention, particularly during the interwar years. Prominent among these reformers were authors like Lucy Fitch Perkins and Mary Hazelton Wade. Convinced by an increasingly professionalized class of Progressive-era child studies experts that the prejudices which produced conflict were largely a product of youthful habits, activists sought an antidote by attempting to inculcate very different values in juvenile audiences.

This chapter analyzes Bush's instant responses to 9/11, as he made the fundamental decision that the U.S. would engage in a war on terror. The chapter then traces the development of the key principles of the Bush doctrine, and examines to what degree these were the president's original ideas and to what degree Bush adopted the pre-existing views of neo-conservatives in his administration. It then considers other strategic responses – realist, liberal internationalist, isolationist – that Bush could have chosen and shows how they were inconsistent with his temperament. Finally, the chapter considers Secretary Rumsfeld's response to 9/11, thereby tracing the beginnings of the divergence in ideas between the president and the secretary of defense.

In this chapter we take a step back to think across the three cases, and ‘beyond’ them. In Section 1, we reflect on our cases in order to avoid the analytical straightjacket of national ‘models’ that can obscure similarities as much as they also elucidate differences. In Section 2, we move ‘beyond’ these cases in the sense of thinking about the internationalist and autonomous dimensions of intersectional and minority women-led organising that we see in the creative, subversive and influential voices and actions of new actors and movements in both France and Britain.