In this work, the authors identify a strand that is distinct from--yet interwoven with--the texture of third-generation representation and that has not been clearly articulated in extant books on this subject: a predominant sense of
belatedness evident in third-generation representation.
Citing the ubiquity of obeing lateo in post WWII American poetry, Keniston contends that
belatedness is a central, albeit seldom noticed, concern and conflates a physical condition characterized by its relation to the present with a psychological state that presupposes an act of recollection.
"Ghostly Figures: Memory and
Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry" contends that this poetics of
belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry.
The editors' helpful introduction defines the perspective that frames the volume, Yeats's deliberate
belatedness. They argue he places himself at the end of many traditions: that of the romantics; of the aesthetes and decadents; of the authentically Irish literary and cultural revivalists; of the visionary western love poets, from Dante on.
Yeats's powerful, multilayered sense of cultural
belatedness as part of his complex literary method" (1, emphasis mine).
A number of British artists considered to be outsiders were able to capitalize on the perception of
belatedness and isolation.
As Fuchs argues, England, in the later sixteenth century and beyond, experienced a 'sense of
belatedness' as to culture and literature, a sentiment often concerned with the language itself, and upon the urgency of 'enriching' its 'copiousness' (pp.
Scott negotiated David Bordwell's notion of "
belatedness" in post-classical Hollywood and eventually established authorial identity.
For years in my teens my inner life was influenced as much by Calvin and Luther as by the poetry and stories I was reading and beginning to write and I wanted my protagonist to be touched by that spiritual
belatedness as well as by the social alienation that characterised the Valleys of the '80s.
(26) Italy has arrived late on the national and imperial scenes; this
belatedness in turn gives rise to a rhetoric of urgency.
Perhaps she feels unable to keep up with time's passage; perhaps there is almost too much to gather in a single valediction, one that begins with the speaker "wearing her
belatedness."
