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The argument posed in this analysis is that the poetic excesses of several major female poets, excesses that have been typically regarded as flaws in their work, are strategies for escaping the inhibiting and sometimes inimical conventions too often imposed on women writers. The forms of excess vary with each poet, but by conceiving of poetic excess in relation to literary decorum, this study establishes a shared motivation for such a strategy. Literary decorum is one instrument a culture employs to constrain its writers. Perhaps it is the most effective because it is the least definable. The excesses discussed here, like the criteria of decorum against which they are perceived, cannot be itemized as an immutable set of traits. Though decorum and excess shift over time and in different cultures, their relationship to one another remains strikingly stable. Thus, nineteenth-century standards for women's writing and late twentieth-century standards bear almost no relation. Emily Dickinson's do not anticipate Gertrude Stein's or Sylvia Plath's or Ntozake Shange's. Yet the charges of indecorousness leveled at these women poets repeat a fixed set of abstract grievances. Dickinson, Stein, Plath, Jayne Cortez, and Shange all engage in a poetics of excess as a means of rejecting the limitations and conventions of “female writing” that the larger culture imposes on them. In resisting conventions for feminine writing, these poets developed radical new poetries, yet their work was typically criticized or dismissed as excessive. Thus, Dickinson's form is classified as hysterical, and her figures tortured. Stein's works are called repetitive and nonsensical. Plath's tone is accused of being at once virulent and confessional, Cortez's poems violent and vulgar, Shange's work vengeful and self-righteous. The publishing history of these poets demonstrates both the opposition to such an aesthetic and the necessity for it.
The argument posed in this analysis is that the poetic excesses of several major female poets, excesses that have been typically regarded as flaws in their work, are strategies for escaping the inhibiting and sometimes inimical conventions too often imposed on women writers. The forms of excess vary with each poet, but by conceiving of poetic excess in relation to literary decorum, this study establishes a shared motivation for such a strategy. Literary decorum is one instrument a culture employs to constrain its writers. Perhaps it is the most effective because it is the least definable. The excesses discussed here, like the criteria of decorum against which they are perceived, cannot be itemized as an immutable set of traits. Though decorum and excess shift over time and in different cultures, their relationship to one another remains strikingly stable. Thus, nineteenth-century standards for women's writing and late twentieth-century standards bear almost no relation. Emily Dickinson's do not anticipate Gertrude Stein's or Sylvia Plath's or Ntozake Shange's. Yet the charges of indecorousness leveled at these women poets repeat a fixed set of abstract grievances. Dickinson, Stein, Plath, Jayne Cortez, and Shange all engage in a poetics of excess as a means of rejecting the limitations and conventions of “female writing” that the larger culture imposes on them. In resisting conventions for feminine writing, these poets developed radical new poetries, yet their work was typically criticized or dismissed as excessive. Thus, Dickinson's form is classified as hysterical, and her figures tortured. Stein's works are called repetitive and nonsensical. Plath's tone is accused of being at once virulent and confessional, Cortez's poems violent and vulgar, Shange's work vengeful and self-righteous. The publishing history of these poets demonstrates both the opposition to such an aesthetic and the necessity for it.
Looking at the discourse on female weight reduction in American culture, Confessing Excess analyzes contemporary dieting and the weight loss literature by taking up the themes of confession and surveillance. Spitzack argues that dieting is characterized by confession (of "excess") which women internalize and which necessitates ongoing surveillance or monitoring of the body. Informal conversations and in-depth interviews also juxtapose women's everyday dieting experiences with the discourse of dieting texts. By evaluating the cultural construction of women in this manner, the author illuminates the power strategies that offer self-acceptance at the price of self-condemnation.
Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.
Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary poets (Ai, Carol Ann Duffy).
This guide examines the production and reception of poetry by a range of women writers--predominantly although not exclusively writing in English--from Sappho through Anne Bradstreet and Emily Bronte to Sylvia Plath, Eavan Boland and Susan Howe.Women's Poetry offers a thoroughgoing thematic study of key texts, poets and issues, analysing commonalities and differences across diverse writers, periods, and forms. The book is alert, throughout, to the diversity of women's poetry. Close readings of selected texts are combined with a discussion of key theories and critical practices, and students are encouraged to think about women's poetry in the light of debates about race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and regional and national identity. The book opens with a chronology followed by a comprehensive Introduction which outlines various approaches to reading women's poetry. Seven chapters follow, and a Conclusion and section of useful resources close the book.
"Beginning with a deceptively simple question--what do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as "black"?--Evie Shockley's Renegade poetics teases out the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. She redefines black aesthetics descriptively, resituating innovative poetry that has been marginalized becuase it was not "recognizably black" and avant-garde poetry dismissed because it was"--Back cover.
Ideology in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath provides close readings of some of Plath’s transitional and late poetry that deals with the domestic and cultural ideologies prevalent in post-war America, which affected women’s lives at the time. By examining some of Plath’s manuscripts, Ikram Hili shows how these ideologies informed her writing process.
Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and culture. Her work has constantly remained in print in the UK and US (and in numerous translated editions) since the appearance of her first collection in 1960. Plath's own writing has been supplemented over the decades by a wealth of critical and biographical material. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath provides an authoritative and comprehensive guide to the poetry, prose and autobiographical writings of Sylvia Plath. It offers a critical overview of key readings, debates and issues from almost fifty years of Plath scholarship, draws attention to the historical, literary, national and gender contexts which frame her writing and presents informed and attentive readings of her own work. This accessibly written book will be of great use to students beginning their explorations of this important writer.
The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry offers a historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s and asserts an alternative tradition to the predominantly male-dominated avant-garde movements. Elisabeth Frost argues that this alternative lineage distinguishes itself by its feminism and its ambivalence toward existing avant-garde projects; she also thoroughly explores feminist avant-garde poets' debts and contributions to their male counterparts.