Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Liz Lochhead And The Fairies: Context And Influence In Grimm Sisters And Dreaming Frankenstein, William Donaldson

Studies in Scottish Literature

Examines the Scottish poet Liz Lochhead's period of North American travel and her response to American second-wave feminist poetics, particularly to the anthology No More Masks! (1973) and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, the treatment of myth by J.G. Frazer and Robert Graves, and the perspective on Scottish fairy tales offered by folklorists, to explore Lochhead's creative reworking of both fairy tale and classical myth in her collections Grimm Sisters (1981) and Dreaming Frankenstein (1984).

"A Stranger In America": Queer Diasporic Writers And The American Politics Of Exclusion, Caitlin Stanfield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While the academic concept of queer diasporic studies is relatively new, the epistemic future of this interdisciplinary, intersectional, and inclusive field is already imperiled. Throughout recent years, bills seeking to expunge critical race and queer theory from not only the public education sector, but from the legally-defined “general public” as well, have been proposed by legislators throughout the United States. To combat this assault upon marginalized educators, scholars, and authors, one must first understand what is at stake; the rich site of contemporary, queer diasporic poetry provides one such example. By situating these poems within their complex cultural, political, and …

'Odd Secrets Of The Line': Emily Dickinson And The Uses Of Folk, Wendy Tronrud

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emily Dickinson and her poetry have famously been used as a defining example of American lyric poetry. The traditional scholarly perspective maintains that the lyric poem and its speaker exist in isolation and at a remove from social and political contexts. Recent scholarship on American poetry of the long nineteenth century, however, has taken a more historical and cultural turn, reconsidering how poetic and vernacular forms and genres circulated both privately and publicly. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson and the Uses of Folk joins this conversation by theorizing how Dickinson’s poetry, written during the 1859-1865 period, registers the …

"She Believes She Is Herself, Which Isn't Complete Madness:" Becoming The Female Subject Through Womanhood As Relation, Isabel Rudner

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Strains Of Confessional Poetry: The Burdens, Blunders, And Blights Of Self-Disclosure, Lara Rossana Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When a provocative style of autobiographical verse had emerged in postwar America, literary critics christened the new genre “confessional poetry.” Confessional poets of the 1960s and ’70s are often characterized by scholars of contemporary poetry as a cohort of writers who, unlike previous generations before them, dared to explore in their work the personal and inherited traumas of mental illness, family suicides, failed marriages, and crushing addictions. As a result, the body of work these writers produced is often experienced as a collection of stylized, literary self-portraits. What can these self-portraits reveal to us about the connection between confessional poetry …

Anne Sexton's Environmental Animality, Dan A. Wylie Prof

Animal Studies Journal

What does it mean to study the intersection of environment, animals and literature, at this juncture in human history? How might it manifest at the level of an individual poet’s work, with what consequences? This paper approaches these questions through the poetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Anne Sexton. Sexton’s poetry has been exhaustively studied for its psychological dimensions and forcefulness, for her treatment of madness, suicide, and family relationships in particular. Despite a high density of animal imagery, this animal element is conventionally skimmed over. This article argues that animal presences constitute a minor but unavoidable strand amongst the …

Sex, Drugs, And Mingling Spirits: Teaching Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Book abstract:

Twentieth-century modernism reduced the list of nineteenth-century American poets to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and (less often) Edgar Allan Poe. The rest were virtually forgotten. This volume in the MLA series Options for Teaching marks a milestone in the resurgence of the study of the rest. It features poets, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who were famous in their day, as well as poets who were marginalized on the basis of their race (Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alexander Posey) or their sociopolitical agenda (Emma Lazarus, John Greenleaf Whittier). It also takes a fresh look at poets …

Reading Elizabeth Bishop As A Religious Poet, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Elizabeth Bishop is usually described as a modernist poet with a skeptical mind. This essay contests the critical tendency to dismiss religion as a serious concern in her poetry, by first challenging the widespread dismissal in the United States of all religious approaches to modern poetry and then challenging the tendency to disclaim attempts to read Elizabeth Bishop in religious terms. The essay includes a close reading of “The End of March” as a text which invites intertextual commentary from a Christian perspective.

Antimodern, Modern, And Postmodern Millay: Contexts Of Revaluation, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In this chapter, Walker examines questions concerning renewed scholarly interest in Edna St. Vincent Millay toward the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, these questions center on whether to rethink the principles of establishing the canon of American literature--indeed, whether the poet changes literary fashions or literary fashions change the poet. Walker's answer is the latter, and her essay examines how Millay is different received through three different periods: antimodern, modern, and postmodern. She argues that whether a poet becomes central to literary study has less to do with the "quality" of the poetry than with complex cultural factors that …

The Female Body As Icon: Edna Millay Wears A Plaid Dress, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

The female body has never been so prominently displayed or so critically examined as it is today under the dominance of late capitalism. The results of this display, we can now see, have been mostly negative: women regard themselves at best self-consciously, at worst with disgust. Given this emphasis on self-scrutiny, it comes as no surprise that middle-aged women experience a reduction of self-confidence regarding their physical presences and a concomitant increase in self-dissatisfaction. It is also worth noting that a querulous tone often afflicts them as they grow older, suggesting that they are at odds not only with others …

Teaching Dickinson As A Gen(I)Us: Emily Among The Women, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

In this article, Walker argues that those who teach the poetry of Emily Dickinson should not only compare her to other recognized and lauded American poets, such as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore. This method offers no cultural context to provide ligature. It views high art as to be only about language and, on the score of tropological discourse, any two poets could be connected, even across vast expanses of time and distance. While it's useful for students to see how elements of her work connect her not only …

A Feminist Critic Responds To Recurring Student Questions About Dickinson, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

Book abstract:

The life and the range of topics and tones of Emily Dickinson suit her to be included in such courses as American literature, Romanticism, realism, nineteenth-century culture, and women’s literary traditions. Her poetry poses numerous challenges for readers because of its compressed style, indeterminacy, and constant surprises; her biography fascinates students and critics alike.

This volume emphasizes instruction of Dickinson’s poetry at the undergraduate level. Like other volumes in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching World Literature series, it is divided into two parts. The first, “Materials,” discusses editions of Dickinson’s poetry, aids to teaching, reference works, biographies, critical …

H. D. And Time, Cheryl Walker

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

From the introduction to the volume:

"Cheryl Walker presents the work of poet H.D. as a paradigm for the changed relationship to history women have undergone during the modern period: H.D.'s early period is characterized by an avoidance of chronological time..."

Contemporarary American Women Poets: New Voices, New Visions, Diana Fuss

Senior Scholar Papers

The focus of "Contemporary American Women Poets. New Voices, New visions" is the new tradition of poetry presently being established by American women writers. With an aim towards determining what is distinctive to this tradition and why it has been formed, ten poets are considered in particular detail. Adrienne Rich, Tess Gallagher, Ai, Carolyn Forche, Judy Grahn. Audre Lorde, Louise Gluck, Kathleen Fraser, Olga Broumas, and May Sarton. Part I considers the origin of this new tradition and explores some of the obstacles American women poets are struggling to overcome. A consideration of the dilemma of the "divided woman" and …