Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, Literature, and Culture

Rona Cran is a Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham.

"Rona Cran’s study of this highly experimental technique - particularly its evolution in late modernism and early postmodernism - is rendered in clear and provocative language. Her book unfolds as artistically as a collage, the discovery apparent in the telling." - Timothy Gray, CUNY - College of Staten Island"a thoughtful set of related essays on an American quartet – collagist and box-maker extraordinaire Joseph Cornell, novelist William Burroughs, poet Frank O’Hara, and finally Bob Dylan, the ongoing question as to whether the latter is best described as poet, musician, multi-media, or sui generis artist being one that Rona Cran answers more convincingly than most." - Geoff Ward, Cambridge Quarterly"Cran, in effect, uses her impressionistic interpretation of selected artworks as a way of curating an exhibition-like concept in book form." -Kevin J. Hunt, Journal of American Studies

• Chapter Introduction: Catalysing Encounters; Chapter 1 Habitat New York: Joseph Cornell’s ‘imaginative universe’; Chapter 2 ‘Confusion hath fuck his masterpiece’: Re-reading William Burroughs, from Junky to Nova Express; Chapter 3 ‘Donc le poète est vraiment voleur du feu’: Frank O’Hara and the Poetics of Love and Theft; Chapter 4 Bob Dylan and Collage: ‘A deliberate cultural jumble’;