Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
26 - Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2012
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The stories we tell: American Indian women's writing and the persistence of tradition
- 2 Women writers and war
- 3 American women's writing in the colonial period
- 4 Religion, sensibility, and sympathy
- 5 Women's writing of the Revolutionary era
- 6 Women writers and the early US novel
- 7 Women in literary culture during the long nineteenth century
- 8 Moral authority as literary property in mid-nineteenth-century print culture
- 9 The shape of Catharine Sedgwick's career
- 10 Writing, authorship, and genius: literary women and modes of literary production
- 11 Nineteenth-century American women's poetry: past and prospects
- 12 Transatlantic sympathies and nineteenth-century women's writing
- 13 Nineteenth-century African American women writers
- 14 Local knowledge and women's regional writing
- 15 Women and children first: female writers of American children's literature
- 16 US suffrage literature
- 17 American women playwrights
- 18 Turn-of-the-twentieth-century transitions: women on the edge of tomorrow
- 19 Accidents, agency, and American literary naturalism
- 20 The geography of ladyhood: racializing the novel of manners
- 21 Self-made women: novelists of the 1920s
- 22 Recovering the legacy of Zara Wright and the twentieth-century black woman writer
- 23 Jewish American women writers
- 24 Women on the breadlines
- 25 Modern domestic realism in America, 1950–1970
- 26 Lyric, gender, and subjectivity in modern and contemporary women's poetry
- 27 Contemporary American women's writing: women and violence
- 28 Asian American women's literature and the promise of committed art
- 29 Straight sex, queer text: American women novelists
- 30 Latina writers and the usable past
- 31 Where is she? Women/access/rhetoric
- 32 Reading women in America
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter is intended as a contribution to the history of American women's literature, which is to say, it is intended as a history. But readers will quickly see in it a polemical purpose as well. For the history that I am offering here – one that insists on the coterminous centrality of lyric as a genre and subjective expression as a value (both in their celebration and their critique) – should require us to reconsider, if not abandon, our justifications for studying (or producing) women's poetry as such, that is, as women's poetry.
In the first two sections of this chapter, I attempt to show how, even in the face of the most acute critiques of lyric and its conjunction with subjective expression, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, the commitment to poetry as a vehicle for individual expression persists – indeed, it could hardly become any stronger. As I show in the second section, the effort by poets, critics, and scholars to think about the difference women make to poetic production, precisely because it raises the specter of an apparently irreducible and dispositive difference at the level of the body, yields an occasion to think about the relationship between subject position and literary form, with the inevitable effect, I argue, of making form appear to be the indexical trace of particular subject positions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 515 - 538Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012
References
and . A Glossary of Literary Terms, 9th edn. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2009, 2005.Google Scholar
and , eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983.Google Scholar
From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
“Sincerity and the Second Person: Lyric after Language Poetry.” Interval(le)s 2.2–3.1 (Fall 2008/Winter 2009):.Google Scholar
. Writing and Speaking: A Text-Book of Rhetoric. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1911.Google Scholar
. The Economics of Discrimination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, 3rd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Google Scholar
, ed. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1996.Google Scholar
, . , and . , Current Population Reports, p.60–238. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2010.Google Scholar
. Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.Google Scholar
. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World. Boulder, CO, and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2009.Google Scholar
. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Ed. . Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Google Scholar
. “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History.” New Left Review 56 (March/April 2009):.Google Scholar
and . Methods and Materials of Literary Criticism: Lyric, Epic, and Allied Forms of Poetry. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1920.Google Scholar
and , eds. Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque, Poetics. Ardmore, PA: Saturnalia Books, 2010.Google Scholar
and . A Handbook to Literature, 11th edn. Upper Sadler River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009.Google Scholar
. “The Rejection of Closure.” 1983. Reprinted in The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000.Google Scholar
and . No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973.Google Scholar
. The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
. Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
and , eds. American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
and . The Facts and Backgrounds of Literature: English and American. New York: The Century Company, 1920.Google Scholar
. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.Google Scholar
. “Suppression.” The Woman Rebel 1.4 (June 1914): 25. www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/webedition/app/documents/show.php?sangerDoc=420004.xml.Google Scholar
and , eds. Psyche: The Feminine Poetic Consciousness, an Anthology of Modern American Women Poets. New York: Dial Press, 1973.Google Scholar
, , , , , and . “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto.” Social Text 19/20 (Autumn 1988):.Google Scholar
. The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. 1936. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.Google Scholar