Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934

by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

• ISBN13: 9780521483001
• ISBN10: 052148300X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-01-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

In Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetries, Rachel Blau Duplessis shows how, through poetic language, modernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of modernity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and African-American and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls 'social philology' - a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies - Duplessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and H. D., as well as Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still marginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry	1	(28)
``Corpses of poesy'': modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric	29	(23)
``Seismic orgasm'': sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics	52	(29)
``HOO, HOO, HOO'': some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness	81	(25)
``Darken your speech'': racialized cultural work in black and white poets	106	(29)
``Wondering Jews'': melting-pots and mongrel thoughts	135	(40)
Notes	175	(29)
Works cited	204	(24)
Index	228