The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry

by Frost, Elisabeth A.

• ISBN13: 9780877458364
• ISBN10: 0877458367
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Summary

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. Frost focuses not on one particular ''writing community'' but on a diverse group of poets--Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Howe, and Harryette Mullen--who make language the site of feminist politics. Her study also captures the range of aesthetics and politics that appears in the work of avant-garde women poets. In detailed close readings. Frost shows that throughout the eighty years addressed in this study, feminist avant-gardists have refuted traditional notions of female identity, producing texts that defy essentialist ideas and work against

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	xi
PART I. Women Poets and the Historical Avant-Gardes
``Replacing the Noun'': Fetishism, Parody, and Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons	3	(26)
``Crisis in Consciousness'': Mina Loy's ``Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose''	29	(36)
PART II. Agendas of Race and Gender
``a fo / real / revolu/shun'': Sonia Sanchez and the Black Arts Movement	65	(40)
PART III. Traditions of Marginality
``Unsettling'' America: Susan Howe and Antinomian Tradition	105	(31)
``Belatedly Beladied Blues'': Hybrid Traditions in the Poetry of Harryette Mullen	136	(29)
Epilogue	165	(4)
Notes	169	(40)
Works Cited	209	(18)
Permissions	227	(2)
Index	229