Primarily a literary history, Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910-1939 provides a timely discussion of individual women poets who have become, or are becoming, well-known as their works are reprinted but about whom little has yet been written. This volume recognizes the contributions, overlooked previously, of such British poets as Anna Wickham, Nancy Cunard, Edith Sitwell, Mina Loy, Charlotte Mew, May Sinclair, Vita Sackville-West and Sylvia Townsend Warner; and the impact of such American poets as H.D., Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore and Laura Riding on literary practice in Britain. This book primarily maps the poetry scene in Britain but identifies the significance of the network of writers between London, New York and Paris. It assesses women's participation in the diversity of modernist developments which include avant-garde experiments, quiet, but subtly challenging, formalism and assertive 'new woman' voices. It not only chronicles women's poetry but also their publications and involvement in running presses, bookshops and writing criticism. Although historically situated, it is written from the perspective of contemporary debates concerning the interface of gender and modernism. The author argues that a cohering aesthetic of the poetry is a denial of femininity through various evasions of gendered identity such as masking, male and female impersonations and the rupturing of realist modes.

Based on new documents and family correspondence, and including twenty complete poems, this marvelous biography chronicles the life of British poet Anna Wickham.

This is a feminist study of a recurring character type in classic British detective fiction by women - a woman who behaves like a Victorian gentleman. Exploring this character type leads to a new evaluation of the politics of classic detective fiction and the middlebrow novel as a whole.

Sylvia Townsend Warner has increasingly become recognized as a significant and distinctive talent amongst twentieth-century authors. This volume explores her remarkable relationship with Valentine Ackland - her partner for forty years - by closely examining their letters and diaries alongside a selection of their other texts, in particular their poetry. This analysis reveals the crucial role their writing played in establishing, maintaining, and defending their intimacy and describes the emergence of an alternative textual world upon which they became wholly reliant. Examining how Warner and Ackland exploited the distance between their lived life and their accounts of it, gives rise to many fascinating and untold stories. Furthermore, in investigating the fluidity of the boundaries between letters, diaries and fiction this book also provides a fresh perspective on these life-writing forms. Warner and Ackland's need to speak as women, writers and lovers, shaped their texts, so that they became not simply records of events, nor acts of communication, but complex documents in which love is won and lost, myths are created, and lives are changed, as will be the perspectives of those who read this book.

Poetry written in English is uniquely powerful and suggestive in its capacity to surprise, unsettle, shock, console, and move. The Cambridge History of English Poetry offers sparklingly fresh and dynamic readings of an extraordinary range of poets and poems from Beowulf to Alice Oswald. An international team of experts explores how poets in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland use language and to what effect, examining questions of form, tone, and voice; they comment, too, on how formal choices are inflected by the poet's time and place. The Cambridge History of English Poetry is the most comprehensive and authoritative history of the field from early medieval times to the present. It traces patterns of continuity, transformation, transition, and development. Covering a remarkable array of poets and poems, and featuring an extensive bibliography, the scope and depth of this major work of reference make it required reading for anyone interested in poetry.

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.

An imaginatively constructed new literary history of the twentieth century.This companion with a difference sets a controversial new agenda for literary -historical analysis. Far from the usual forced march through the decades, genres and national literatures, this reference work for the new century cuts across familiar categories, focusing instead on literary 'hot spots': Freud's Vienna and Conrad's Congo in 1899, Chicago and London in 1912, the Somme in July 1916, Dublin, London and Harlem in 1922, and so on, down to Bradford and Berlin in 1989 (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the new digital media), Stockholm in 1993 (Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize) and September 11, 2001.

Explores the ways poets address the difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those killed in the First World War and beyond.

These 10 original critical essays examine the fascinating writing of the Depression and World War II. Divided into four sections--Work, Community,War, and Documents--the volume focuses on texts that are typically ignored in accounts of modernism or The Auden Generation.Chapters examine writing by Elizabeth Bowen, Storm Jameson, William Empson, George Orwell, J. B. Priestley, Harold Heslop, T. H. White, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West, John Grierson, Margery Allingham and Stella Gibbons. These authors were politically radical, or radically 'eccentric', and tended to be committed to working- and middle-class cultures, non-canonical genres, such as crime and fantasy, and minority forms of narrative, such as journalism, manifestos, film, and travel narratives, as well as novels. The volume supports further research with an appendix, 'Who Were the Intermodernists?', a listing of archival sources and an extensive bibliography.

Suzanne Churchill's well-researched and superbly crafted study is the first book-length treatment of Others, an important and neglected little magazine that served as a laboratory for modernist poetic experimentation. In discussions of influential poets such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, whose careers Others helped launch, Churchill counters the notion of Modernism as aesthetically self-isolating and socially disengaged. Rather, she traces a correspondence between formal innovation and social change in American modernist poetry and argues that this dimension of modernist formalism is lost when poems are studied in isolation. Others provides a framework for reassessing the scope and significance of modernist formalism. The little magazine not only anchors modernist poetry in a social context but also leads to new insight into major modernist texts. Churchill's commitment to her subject's broad cultural contexts makes her book important for students and teachers of Modernism as well as for those working in the fields of American poetry and poetics, gender studies, queer theory, periodical studies, and cultural studies.