The Political Poetesschallenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and criticism. In performing the Poetry of Woman, the ...mythic Poetess has long staked her claims as a creature of "separate spheres"-one exempt from emerging readings of nineteenth-century women's political poetics. Turning such assumptions on their heads, Tricia Lootens models a nineteenth-century domestic or private sphere whose imaginary, apolitical heart is also the heart of nation and empire, and, as revisionist histories increasingly attest, is traumatized and haunted by histories of slavery. Setting aside late Victorian attempts to forget the unfulfilled, sentimental promises of early antislavery victories,The Political Poetessrestores Poetess performances like Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" to view-and with them, the vitality of the Black Poetess within African-American public life.
Crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline to "connect the dots" of Poetess performance, Lootens demonstrates how new histories and ways of reading position poetic texts by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, and Frances E. W. Harper as convergence points for larger engagements ranging from Germaine de Staël to G.W.F. Hegel, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Alice Walker, and beyond.
In Unbecoming Language, Annabel L. Kim examines a corpus of French literature writing against difference. Inaugurated by Nathalie Sarraute and sustained in the work of Monique Wittig and Anne ...Garréta, this corpus highlights three generations of the twentieth and recent twenty-first centuries and the direct chain of influence between them. Kim considers these writers, and the story of literature’s political potential, as a way of rereading and reinterpreting each writer’s individual corpus—rearticulating the strain of anti-difference feminist thought that has been largely forgotten in our (Anglo-American) histories of French feminisms.
Virginia Woolf, throughout her career as a novelist and critic, deliberately framed herself as a modern writer invested in literary tradition but not bound to its conventions; engaged with politics ...but not a propagandist; a woman of letters but not a "lady novelist." As a result, Woolf ignored or disparaged most of the women writers of her parents' generation, leading feminist critics to position her primarily as a forward-thinking modernist who rejected a stultifying Victorian past. In Behind the Times, Mary Jean Corbett finds that Woolf did not dismiss this history as much as she boldly rewrote it. Exploring the connections between Woolf's immediate and extended family and the broader contexts of late-Victorian literary and political culture, Corbett emphasizes the ongoing significance of the previous generation's concerns and controversies to Woolf's considerable achievements. Behind the Times rereads and revises Woolf's creative works, politics, and criticism in relation to women writers including the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, the novelist and playwright, Lucy Clifford; the novelist and anti-suffragist, Mary Augusta Ward. It explores Woolf's attitudes to late-Victorian women's philanthropy, the social purity movement, and women's suffrage. Closely tracking the ways in which Woolf both followed and departed from these predecessors, Corbett complicates Woolf's identity as a modernist, her navigation of the literary marketplace, her ambivalence about literary professionalism and the mixing of art and politics, and the emergence of feminism as a persistent concern of her work.
This title was first published in 2002: Pamela Hammons' study contributes to the booming field of early modern women writers by contextualizing and analyzing a unique configuration of underexamined ...women's texts. By examining how 17th-century English women's composition of lyrics intersects significantly with the social experiences of the writers, the book challenges assumptions that have limited the study of early modern women's writing and reveals the power of lyrics in women's reconceiving or changing of their positions in society. Here Hammons reconsiders how generic conventions were employed as a means by which women writers could borrow from socially sanctioned poetic traditions to express potentially subversive views of their social roles as mothers, religious leaders, widows, and poets. Although the narrative concentrates on early modern lyrics, it also treats contemporary plays, epics, prose polemics, conversion narratives, religious treatises, newsbook articles, and Biblical texts in building its arguments. The study engages extensively with issues concerning manuscript and social texts in the context of print culture through the close examination of a variety of textual practices.
Poetic resistance - laying hands on the harp; despised creatures - the illusion of maternal self-effacement in 17th-century child loss poetry; Anna Trapnel as holy poet and lyrical preacher; Penelope, prophet, or poet?; strategic self-figurations in Katherine Austen's "Book M"; conclusion - the harp in hand.
Pamela Hammonds
Rachel Bowlby's acclaimed book on Virginia Woolf now appears with five new essays which look at Woolf in a number of new frames - as a woman essayist; as a city writer and critic of modern culture; ...and as a writer on love. Rachel Bowlby shows, with inimitable critical panache, how it is that Woolf's writing, in its many forms and fashions, continues to provide rich matter for thinking about the histories and futures of women, writing and culture.
In this rewarding book, Laurie A. Finke challenges assumptions about gender, the self, and the text which underlie fundamental constructs of contemporary feminist theory. She maintains that some of ...the key concepts structuring feminist literary criticism need to be reexamined within both their historical context and the larger framework of current theory concerning language, representation, subjectivity, and value.
From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele
Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, Black women writers
and artists across the African Diaspora have developed nuanced and
...complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the
unexplored spaces of black women's queer creative theorizing to
learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving
beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer
imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and
genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women's
literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding
nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the
multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain
obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship.
Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference
illuminates understudied queer contours of black women's
writing.
In this book, Jaime Harker uncovers a largely forgotten literary renaissance in southern letters. Anchored by a constellation of southern women, the Women in Print movement grew from the queer union ...of women's liberation, civil rights activism, gay liberation, and print culture. Broadly influential from the 1970s through the 1990s, the Women in Print movement created a network of writers, publishers, bookstores, and readers that fostered a remarkable array of literature.With the freedom that the Women in Print movement inspired, southern lesbian feminists remade southernness as a site of intersectional radicalism, transgressive sexuality, and liberatory space. Including in her study well-known authors-like Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker-as well as overlooked writers, publishers, and editors, Harker reconfigures the southern literary canon and the feminist canon, challenging histories of feminism and queer studies to include the south in a formative role.
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