Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism

by Pereira, Malin

• ISBN13: 9780252028373
• ISBN10: 0252028376
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-09
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Pulitzer Prize-winner and former poet laureate of the United States Rita Dove has written prolifically since the early 1970s. In this, the first full-length critical study of her entire body of work by an American scholar, Malin Pereira traces the development of Dove's literary voice, looking at the ways she combines racial specificity with the perspective of the unraced universal.Pereira examines Dove's poetry, fiction, drama, and literary criticism closely and chronologically, charting her path through the racially charged culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. She demonstrates how Dove eventually transcended racial protocols that threaten to define her work and moves into a nomadic poetic articulation of her cosmopolitan identity. As Pereira addresses Rita Dove's cosmopolitanism, she also examines the thematic concerns that reoccur in Dove's work--themes such as incest, miscegenation, nomadism, the blues, and patriarchal oppression.

Author Biography

Malin Pereira is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(6)
Negotiating Blackness: Dove and the African American Poetic Tradition	7	(24)
Miscegenation, the Primal Scene, and the Incest Motif in Dove's Work	31	(21)
Introducing the Cultural Mulatto in The Yellow House on the Corner	52	(22)
Museum and Cosmopolitanism	74	(17)
Thomas and Beulah: Starting at the ``Source'' of the Blues Nomad	91	(25)
The Personal Become Myth: Grace Notes and Mother Love	116	(37)
Conclusion	153	(6)
Appendix: Interview with Rita Dove	159	(34)
Bibliography	193	(8)
Index	201