This book calls for a new approach to poetry criticism. Eighteen brilliant essays offer challenging new theoretical approaches by examining the work of twentieth-century women poets. Poets covered include the most famous - Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Grace Nichols, Eavan Boland - and the more neglected such as Una Marson, Jean Binta Breeze, Lorine Niedecker and Denise Riley. The essays are grouped into six sections: women poets and modernism; the politics of place; (post)colonial contexts; the body; radical poetics; and reconfigurations; and within these areas, war poetry, Caribbean, Irish and Scottish women's poetry, birth poetry and science poetry are also discussed.

Publisher Description

This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry. An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century Introduces students to figures including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Motion Takes an integrative approach, emphasizing the complex negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and pulling together competing tendencies and positions Written by critics from Britain, Ireland, and the United States Includes suggestions for further reading and a chronology, detailing the most important writers, volumes and events

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar’s Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.

Poetry, Geography, Gender explores literary and geographical analysis, cultural criticism and gender politics in the work of such well-known literary figures as Gwyneth Lewis, Menna Elfyn, Christine Evans and Gillian Clarke, alongside newer names like Zoë Skoulding and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Drawing on her unpublished interviews with many of the featured poets, Alice Entwistle examines how and why their various senses of affiliation with a shared cultural hinterland should encourage us to rethink the relationship between nation, identity and literary aesthetics in post-devolution Wales. This series of lively and detailed close readings reveals how writers use the textual terrain of the poem, both literally and metaphorically, to register and script aesthetic as well as geo-political and cultural-historical change. As an innovative critical study, this volume thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first-century Wales.

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.

What is the political potential of poetry in the contemporary era? Exploring an often overlooked history of Marxist-Feminist poetics in post-war Britain – including such poets as Denise Riley, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Wendy Mulford and Nat Raha – this book confronts this central question to debates about the value of humanities education today. Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism demonstrates how ideas of social reproduction have been central both to the forms of post-1945 British poetry and the educational institutions where poetry is overwhelmingly encountered and produced. Combining new archival research with close readings of key poets of the period, the book charts the interrelated crises both of poetry itself and literary education more widely. Paradoxically, the very marginalisation of poetry in contemporary culture serves to offer the form new opportunities as an agent of social transformation.

In Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, Jonathan Ellis offers evidence for a redirection in Bishop studies toward a more thorough scrutiny of the links between Bishop's art and life. The book is less concerned with the details of what actually happened to Bishop than with the ways in which she refracted key events into writing: both personal, unpublished material as well as stories, poems, and paintings. Thus, Ellis challenges Bishop's reputation as either a strictly impersonal or personal writer and repositions her poetry between the Modernists on the one hand and the Confessionals on the other. Although Elizabeth Bishop was born and died in Massachusetts, she lived a life more bohemian and varied than that of almost all of her contemporaries, a fact masked by the tendency of biographers and critics to focus on Bishop's life in the United States. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis gives equal attention to the influence of Bishop's Canadian upbringing on her art and to the shifts in her aesthetic and personal tastes that took place during Bishop's residence in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. By bringing together the whole of Bishop's work, this book opens a welcome new direction in Bishop studies specifically, and in the study of women poets generally.

This Companion provides new ways of reading a wide range of influential women's poetry. Leading international scholars offer insights on a century of writers, drawing out the special function of poetry and the poets' use of language, whether it is concerned with the relationship between verbal and visual art, experimental poetics, war, landscape, history, cultural identity or 'confessional' lyrics. Collectively, the chapters cover well established and less familiar poets, from Edith Sitwell and Mina Loy, through Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Jennings to Anne Stevenson, Eavan Boland and Jo Shapcott. They also include poets at the forefront of poetry trends, such as Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Patience Agbabi, Caroline Bergvall, Medbh McGuckian and Carol Ann Duffy. With a chronology and guide to further reading, this book is aimed at students and poetry enthusiasts wanting to deepen their knowledge of some of the finest modern poets.

This book reads mid-twentieth century poetry by British, American and Sub-Saharan women to postulate the desirability and possibility of feminist monolithism. It shows that there is a remarkable consistency in the themes and aesthetic preoccupations of poets widely separated from each other by both geographical space and historical epochs, which highlights that there are pertinent cross-cutting trends in women’s poetry which could be exploited as a basis for monolithism. The text identifies the main tenets of feminism as recognition of women’s oppression and a determined effort through concerted strategies to resist and thwart this oppression and to navigate women out of peripheral positions into positions of power. By showing that these tenets are uniformly present in the poetry of very different women, it posits this uniformity as a stable ground on which feminist monolithism could be constructed, without glossing over existent differences between and among women.