Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-century Women's Poetry, Volume 140

Voorkant
Barbara Garlick
Rodopi, 2002 - 199 pagina's
Tradition and how far writers fit into or diverge from the demands of tradition is one of the most debated issues in literary discussion. Gender, however, is not often part of discussions which depend on such questions at the decisiveness of the Modernist break with the Victorian period or whether Postmodernism makes tradition meaningless. By contrast the very existence of a specifically female tradition is still an urgent subject of debate, and it is clear that many nineteenth-century women writers were troubled in their search for literary foremothers. This autobiographical impetus can be located in the work of each of the poets discussed in Tradition and the Poetics of Self Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Caroline Bowles Southey, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. An exploration of the self, either in the abstract or in a more closely personal sense, appears in a concern with the craft of poetry and the role of the poet, in a teasing out of language as a marker of a personal encounter with the world, in an adventurous play with genre and a rewriting of myth, and in a bold confrontation with received notions of a woman's place. Adventurousness marks the work of each of these poets and is a central focus of these essays.
 

Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

Elizabeth Barrett Brownings
23
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Problem
43
Variants and Personification 57
57
Romantic Bloodlines
97
Christina Rossettis
155
Notes on Contributors
193
Copyright

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Populaire passages

Pagina 1 - IN English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to " the tradition " or to " a tradition " ; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is " traditional " or even " too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You...
Pagina 1 - ... the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence ; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

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