Incarceration in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn : serve your own sentences / Eleanor Careless.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Careless, Eleanor, author.

Series:

Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics.

Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lake, Grace.

Mendelssohn, Anna.

English poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Imprisonment in literature.

Prisons in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (302 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Distribution:

London : Bloomsbury Publishing (UK), 2024.

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

System Details:

text file HTML

Summary:

The first full-length study of the poet, artist and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this book consolidates Mendelssohn's reputation as one of the most important avant-garde British poets of her generation and explores her contribution to the powerful tradition of women writing enclosure and escape. Mendelssohn was herself incarcerated in Holloway women's prison between 1971-76, and her bold and inventive poetry foregrounds and subverts, but does not triumphantly overcome, conditions of constraint. Informed by extensive original archival research, this book reads her highly experimental lyric alongside the poetry of her forerunners and contemporaries, including Nancy Cunard, Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Riley, restoring to view a lost network of radical, Jewish and feminist modernism. With chapters on the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Women's Liberation Movement, the transformation of HMP Holloway in the 1970s and prison abolitionism, Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn illuminates the historical, political and literary contexts that shape this work and argues that Mendelssohn advances a poetics not of emancipation, but of abolition.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: 'I understand the trap of systems' - against an emancipatory poetics

Words won't break these walls

Anna Mendelssohn: A brief biography

Enclosure and escape

A note on method: Poetry's makers

1 'Reading me through Guernica': Lyric afterlives of the Spanish Civil War

Part 1: Spanish backdrops to British Sounds

Part 2: Nancy Cunard and the long epic on Spain

2 'Nowhere short of Nuremberg': A post-concentrationary poetics

Part 1: An nn.

Part 2: Muriel Rukeyser and the poetry of witness

3 'Feminized, although not without dissent': Gender, lyric subjectivity and constraint

Part 1: Bromide feminists and male power socialists

Part 2: Denise Riley and lyric constraint

4 'Serve your own sentences': Carceral poetry in the era of the therapeutic community

Part 1: Long flowing sentences

Part 2: Psychiatric sentences

Part 3: Domestic discipline

Conclusion: Towards a poetics of abolition

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781350421806

1350421804

9781350421783

1350421782

9781350421790

1350421790

OCLC:

1472990128