Women's Poetry, Late Romantic To Late Victorian Gender and Genre, 1830-1900

by Armstrong, Isobel; Blain, Virginia

• ISBN13: 9780312215361
• ISBN10: 0312215363
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth-century and Enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage are themes of the collection, which includes discussion of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearslep, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

Author Biography

Isobel Armstrong is Professor of English at Birkbeck College at the University of London.

Virginia Blain is Associate Professor of English at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Table of Contents

Preface	viii
Isobel Armstrong
Virginia Blain
Notes on the Contributors	xv
Part I Changing Genres and Codes across the Century: Ways of Theorizing Women's Poetry
Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry	3	(30)
Isobel Armstrong
The Whip Signature: Violence, Feminism and Women Poets	33	(17)
Cheryl Walker
Personifying the Poetess: Caroline Norton, `The Picture of Sappho'	50	(21)
Yopie Prins
Part II The Market and the Poetess: Commercial and Aesthetic Value
The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace	71	(31)
Paula R. Feldman
Bijoux Beyond Possession: The Prima Donnas of L.E.L.'s Album Poems	102	(13)
Cynthia Lawford
Rewriting a History of the Lyre: Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the (Re)Construction of the Nineteenth-Century Woman Poet	115	(20)
Linda H. Peterson
Part III Lesbian Poetics
Sexual Politics of the (Victorian) Closet; or, No Sex Please - We're Poets	135	(29)
Virginia Blain
`I leave a page half-writ': Narrative Discoherence in Michael Field's Underneath the Bough	164	(19)
Robert P. Fletcher
Amy Levy: Contradictions?---Feminism and Semitic Discourse	183	(24)
Emma Francis
Part IV Colonial Poetics, National Identity
Hearing her Own Voice: Defective Acoustics in Colonial India	207	(23)
Meenakshi Mukherjee
Reviving Laurence Hope	230	(13)
Edward Marx
Hemans and her American Heirs: Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry and National Identity	243	(20)
Tricia Lootens
Part V Remaking Discourses-Grotesque, Devotional, Patriotic, Scientific
`Measure to yourself a prophet's place': Biblical Heroines, Jewish Difference and Women's Poetry	263	(29)
Cynthia Scheinberg
`All mouth and trousers': Christina Rossetti's Grotesque and Abjected Bodies	292	(21)
Kathryn Burlinson
Mysteries Beyond Angels in Christina Rossetti's From House to Home	313	(12)
Linda E. Marshall
Victorian Women Poets and Scientific Narratives	325	(30)
Helen Groth
Part VI Re-reading Forgotten Poets
Adelaide Procter: A Poetics of Reserve and Passion	355	(18)
Gill Gregory
Why is this Woman Still Missing? Emily Pfeiffer, Victorian Poet	373	(17)
Kathleen Hickok
Endnote	390	(3)
Cora Kaplan
Index	393