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Part One sets up the analytical framework which informs the analysis in the rest of the book. It begins by bringing together key elements from relevant bodies of literature. The first section discusses key concepts from the gender and politics literature, looking at women as political actors and how political institutions and policies are gendered. The second section considers some of the key elements of the democratization literature that are useful for any gendered analysis of transitions. It divides processes of democratization into stages, and then examines central themes such as institutional choice, political parties, economic reform and the international environment. On the basis of the preceding discussions, the final section of this part outlines the framework of analysis and the case selection operationalized in subsequent parts.

The introduction briefly sets out the wider context and import of the study. It details the background of media engagement with Grass's public image and suggests that the author has developed various strategies of self-presentation in both his fiction and non-fiction to help him deal with such acute public interest. It explains how the predominantly aesthetic approach taken throughout this study offers a new perspective in Grass studies, leading away from conventional political readings of the author and focusing instead on his ability to negotiate his own authorial persona within the media-led public sphere. It is argued that this ability has gone on to inform his writing on both structural and thematic levels.

This chapter continues the focus on narrative positions, now with respect to the fictional works Der Butt (1977) and Die Rättin (1986). Through close readings of each text, it is argued that Grass uses these works to explore the limits of authorship as a kind of textual response to attacks on the socio-political model of authorship. As politics impinges on the literary realm, Grass's interest in literary self-presentation takes on an existential aspect. Within both texts the narrator represents authorship against the odds, struggling to retain his position within the text and yet implicitly defining the authorial role as the only way in which he might be able to ensure his survival. The insight yielded by these two challenging works not only accounts for their highly complex narrative structures, it introduces to Grass's later works a distinct sense of the literary author's limitations within the text on which he depends.

Wells’s utopian writing articulates his ideas towards the planning of the society of the future at their most explicit. Utopia is a literary genre with a dialectical relationship to reality: Wells keeps writing and rewriting literary utopias until actual utopia is achieved. Even then, utopia is not imagined as a perfect equilibrium, which must continue to evolve in order to renew itself and survive. Wells imagines a World State constructed on scientific, rather than nationalistic, principles, in which every individual is educated and encouraged to specialize and thrive. The utopian desire arises originally from dissatisfaction with the real world, and nothing in society is free from utopian improvement: from architecture to literature, from national identity to dusting, from the width of roads to sexual life. Texts such as The First Men in the Moon and The Food of the Gods hybridize utopia with scientific romance.

This chapter, which examines the relation between politics and literature in Russia, identifies ten historically powerful beliefs about the relationship between literature, politics, and national identity in Russia. These include the belief that Russians read more than any other people; that literature is where the formation of politics, prophecy, and national identity took place in Russia; and that one text would be on everyone's mind at a given time. The chapter also explores the struggle between texts and the state over the centuries in an archetypal Russian contest of kto kogo? (who will prevail over whom?).

Disciplinary historians imagine the classrooms around mid-century as filled with rows of GI Bill students holding mimeographed poems and listening intently while a New Critic charismatically dispenses with turgid scholarship in order to lead the class through a masterful close reading that awakens students’ appreciation of the poem on the page. Yet, turning to Cleanth Brooks’s teaching materials from Contemporary Poetic Theory and Practice at Yale University in 1963, we find a more uncertain and varied teaching method: discussions of historical references, off-the-cuff paraphrasing, and the sketching of author biography as often as the masterful formalist reading familiar to us from books like The Well Wrought Urn. In the second half of this chapter, Edmund Wilson’s teaching materials further challenge our received sense that a literature free from politics and history dominated mid-century classrooms. In Wilson’s courses on James Joyce, Charles Dickens, Civil War literature, and The Use of Language in Literature, we see how historical inquiry creates its own aesthetic and mode of value—one that links texts to life experience rather than sanctifying them within a timeless canon, one that sees literary value accrue to texts as they are read and reinterpreted over time by varying readerships.

The introduction outlines the concept of rebel poetry and the relationship between poetry and the political struggles against colonialism and dictatorship in modern Iraq. It traces the broad contours of Iraqi political history and explains how poets shaped the cultural politics of important national debates and discourses. It challenges the traditional distinctions between high culture and mass culture that have traditionally consigned poetry to intellectual and literary history and shows how the unique cultural landscape of modern Iraq allowed poetry to maintain a liminal position between these distinct cultural strata. The introduction argues that the public role of poetry in modern Iraq made poems social acts as well as literary texts and that the very popularity of poetry made it a dangerous cultural endeavor.

This chapter describes the era of the poetry of public spaces, when dissident leftist poets participated in massive popular protests and galvanized their audiences with defiant acts of public dissidence. The chapter also documents the rise of free verse poetry and analyzes the relationship between modernist aesthetics and the politics of commitment in Iraq. It shows how a young generation of modernist poets joined the Iraqi Communist Party and embraced the socialist internationalism promoted by communist poets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The chapter also addresses how a new generation of nationalist poets increasingly gravitated toward socialist ideals, embracing the Sartrean ethos of commitment and joining their communist comrades and rivals in articulating the new cultural politics of the national front.

This chapter explores the collapse of national front politics and the violent cultural conflict that followed the revolution of July 14, 1958. It shows how relatively minor ideological disputes over the meaning of “Arab unity” evolved into a vicious cultural confrontation between communists and nationalists. The chapter documents the role of nationalist poets in constructing an anticommunist cultural discourse that emphasized the sexual immorality of their rivals. Their own vision of “muscular nationalism” portrayed the nationalist Baʿth Party as custodians of national honor and progressive advocates of women’s liberation. Communist poets struggled to combat these allegations by defending the progressive aspects of their agenda, but they remained hesitant to address questions of gender and sexuality directly. The poetry wars of this period critically shaped the cultural politics of national liberation and presaged the sectarian violence of the coming decades.

This chapter details the engagement of Iraqi poets with the Arab Nahda of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It provides a brief account of the social role of poetry in late Ottoman Iraq and a survey of the neoclassical poetry revival in Egypt and Syria. The chapter shows how Iraqi poets used the Nahda press to articulate their own relationship to modernity and reveals how new appreciations of the singularity of Iraq’s poetry tradition inspired proto-nationalist conceptions of Iraqi culture. Finally, the chapter examines the efforts of a new generation of young Najafi poets to promote the pioneering role of their own Najafi predecessors and reconstruct the historiography of the Arab Nahda for a broader Arab audience in the early twentieth century.

This chapter argues that the rhetoric of “patriotism” and “treason” that dominated nationalist politics evolved in the public poetry surrounding two seminal events in modern Iraqi political history, the Bakr Sidqi coup d’état of October 1936 and the Rashid ʿAli movement of April 1941. The chapter documents the popularity of each movement and shows how partisan support for military intervention was shaped by the shared logic of anticolonial nationalism. It documents the social and political consequences that socialist and nationalist poets faced and examines how political persecution inspired the new socialist-nationalist alliance of the “national front” politics that would dominate opposition politics in the 1950s. The chapter also shows how the relaxation of state censorship of the Left during the World War II allowed leftist poets to articulate a new political vision that fused anticolonial nationalism and socialist internationalism.

This chapter explores the patronage relationships between poets and political elites through the evolution of the panegyric in the colonial state. It looks at how the Hashemite state subsidized popular poets in order to cultivate their own political legitimacy and how dissident poets challenged the state through creative public performances. It argues that modern protest poetry emerged from the dissident panegyric, which became subversive when poets praised political elites for their commitment to policies that those elites could not or would not actually support. The chapter also shows how poetic engagement with social issues like women’s education and veiling shaped popular opinion and contributed to growing social cleavages between generations and how patronage rivalries contributed to new sectarian tensions in Iraqi political life.

The conclusion documents the tragic fate of many poets who participated in the anticolonial struggle for national liberation during preceding decades. It documents the experience of torture, imprisonment, and exile suffered by communist poets after the Baʿthist coup d’état of February 1963 and shows how the legacy of communist poetry was systemically erased from the historical and literary record in subsequent decades. The conclusion also discusses why the singular historical phenomenon of rebel poetry was ever possible in Iraqi and why it was no longer possible after 1963. It concludes with a discussion of poetry and dissent in contemporary Iraqi society.

Against the background of the Cold War and a period of elevated tension between the East and West Bloc states at the end of the 1970s, this chapter explores the fascination of the East German writer Christa Wolf for Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. By introducing findings from Christa Wolf’s private library, the chapter offers evidence that Wolf turned her attention to Woolf’s book-length essay while she started to write her novel Cassandra and pre-pared her Lectures on Poetics, also known as the Cassandra Project. I argue that Woolf and Wolf were strongly influenced by their reflections on politics under the threat of war. In order to promote new ideas both writers searched for innovative literary forms that involved their audiences and readers with their arguments. The essay and autobiographical forms become crucial parts of their writing. Both writers drew their attention to female protagonists from ancient mythology like Cassandra and Antigone and brought these stories into communication with their own questions during intense political contexts. I show how both writers put feminist community-building at the centre of anti-militarism and were both convinced that writers have a social responsibility, and how literature can bring about a change in thinking.

This chapter uses the concept of rebel poetry to illustrate the utility of anticolonial poetry as a method of public protest and public communication in the aftermath of World War I and the British occupation of Iraq. The chapter shows how Iraqi poets navigated divided political loyalties to rally popular support for the Ottoman Empire or the nascent Arab nationalist movement during the war and how poets accepted or rejected colonial patronage to support the British occupation. Most important, the chapter shows how prominent rebel poets challenged colonial rule and how the colonial state responded by regulating both public space and culture discourse. It also examines how Iraqi poets employed the new secular vocabulary of nationalism to challenge sectarianism and articulate their own vision of anticolonial modernity.