A History Of Nineteenth Century American Womens Poetry

A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry is the first book to construct a coherent history of the field and focus entirely on women's poetry of the period. With contributions from some of the most prominent scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, it explores a wide variety of authors, texts, and methodological approaches. Organized into three chronological sections, the essays examine multiple genres of poetry, consider poems circulated in various manuscript and print venues, and propose alternative ways of narrating literary history. From these essays, a rich story emerges about a diverse poetics that was once immensely popular but has since been forgotten. This History confirms that the field has advanced far beyond the recovery of select individual poets. It will be an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and critics of both the literature and the history of this era.

In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this volume offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women's poetry. While each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention, taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which it was always in the process of vanishing. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.

An introductory essay will identify central concerns, historical backgrounds, evolving patterns and poetic issues, as marked through the course of the century. The work of these poets provides a gripping view of the creativity of nineteenth-century American women that has been until recently almost entirely lost to literary history. Supremely relevant to today's readers, this is poetry that began the efforts at the redefinition of self, of America, and of womanhood that continues to touch the lives and thoughts of so many today.

A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry explores the genealogy of modern American verse by women from the early twentieth century to the millennium. Beginning with an extensive introduction that charts important theoretical contributions to the field, this History includes wide-ranging essays that illuminate the legacy of American women poets. Organized thematically, these essays survey the multilayered verse of such diverse poets as Edna St Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History also devotes special attention to the lasting significance of feminist literary criticism. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of women's poetry in America and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

Presents the work of nineteenth-century women poets in the context of the history, culture, and politics of the times.

Paula Bernat's anthology, based on seven years of pioneering archival research, establishes nineteenth-century American women's poetry as a major field in American literature and American women's history.

Paula Bernat's anthology, based on seven years of pioneering archival research, establishes nineteenth-century American women's poetry as a major field in American literature and American women's history.

This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.

In this book, Elissa Zellinger analyzes both political philosophy and poetic theory in order to chronicle the consolidation of the modern lyric and the liberal subject across the long nineteenth century. In the nineteenth-century United States, both liberalism and lyric sought self-definition by practicing techniques of exclusion. Liberalism was a political philosophy whose supposed universals were limited to white men and created by omitting women, the enslaved, and Native peoples. The conventions of poetic reception only redoubled the sense that liberal selfhood defined its boundaries by refusing raced and gendered others. Yet Zellinger argues that it is precisely the poetics of the excluded that offer insights into the dynamic processes that came to form the modern liberal and lyric subjects. She examines poets—Frances Sargent Osgood, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. Pauline Johnson—whose work uses lyric practices to contest the very assumptions about selfhood responsible for denying them the political and social freedoms enjoyed by full liberal subjects. In its consideration of politics and poetics, this project offers a new approach to genre and gender that will help shape the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies.

This Companion is the first critical collection of its kind devoted solely to American poetry of the nineteenth century. It covers a wide variety of authors, many of whom are currently being rediscovered. A number of anthologies in the recent past have been devoted to the verse of groups such as Native Americans, African-Americans and women. This volume offers essays covering these groups as well as more familiar figures such as Dickinson, Whitman, Longfellow and Melville. The contents are divided between broad topics of concern such as the poetry of the Civil War or the development of the 'poetess' role and articles featuring specific authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Sarah Piatt. In the past two decades a growing body of scholarship has been engaged in reconceptualizing and re-evaluating this largely neglected area of study in US literary history - this Companion reflects and advances this spirit of revisionism.