A History of Twentieth-century British Women's Poetry

by Jane Dowson , Alice Entwistle

• ISBN13: 9780521121415
• ISBN10: 0521121418
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry offers a detailed evaluative documentary record of the publications, activities and achievements of a lively but undervalued literary community. Part literary history, part critical analysis, this comprehensive survey is organised into three historical periods (1900-1945, 1945-1980 and 1980-2000), each part introduced by a comprehensive overview in which the emerging names are mapped against cultural, literary and poetic events and trends. Individual essays reflect and stimulate continuing debates about the nature of women's poetry and cover a range of canonical and lesser-known, but significant, poets. They offer new critical approaches to reading poems that engage with, for example, war, domesticity, modernism, linguistic innovation, place, the dramatic monologue, postmodernism and the lyric. A chronology and detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources covering over 200 writers make this an invaluable reference source for scholars and students of British poetry and women's writing.

Table of Contents

Chronology

Introduction

1900-ô45: Overview

Lyrical androgyny: Alice Meynell, Frances Cornford

A public voice: war, class and women's rights

Modernism, memory and masking

'I will put myself, and everything I see, upon the page': Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Anna Wickham and the dramatic monologue

1945-ô1980: Overview

Stevie Smith

The post-war generation and the paradox of home

The poetry of consciousness-raising

Disruptive lyrics: Veronica Forrest-Thomson

1980-ô2000: Overview

'These parts': identity and place

Dialogic politics in Carol Ann Duffy and others

Postmodern transformations: science and myth

The renovated lyric: from Eavan Boland and Carol Rumens to Jackie Kay and the next generation

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