The Political Poetess : Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres / Tricia Lootens.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lootens, Tricia, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--Women authors--History and criticism.

English poetry.

English poetry--19th century--History and criticism.

Feminism and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Feminism and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (344 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The Political Poetess challenges familiar accounts of the figure of the nineteenth-century Poetess, offering new readings of Poetess performance and criticism. In performing the Poetry of Woman, the mythic Poetess has long staked her claims as a creature of "separate spheres"-one exempt from emerging readings of nineteenth-century women's political poetics. Turning such assumptions on their heads, Tricia Lootens models a nineteenth-century domestic or private sphere whose imaginary, apolitical heart is also the heart of nation and empire, and, as revisionist histories increasingly attest, is traumatized and haunted by histories of slavery. Setting aside late Victorian attempts to forget the unfulfilled, sentimental promises of early antislavery victories, The Political Poetess restores Poetess performances like Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" to view-and with them, the vitality of the Black Poetess within African-American public life.Crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline to "connect the dots" of Poetess performance, Lootens demonstrates how new histories and ways of reading position poetic texts by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, and Frances E. W. Harper as convergence points for larger engagements ranging from Germaine de Staël to G.W.F. Hegel, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop, Alice Walker, and beyond.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction: Slaves, Spheres, Poetess Poetics

Section 1. Racializing the Poetess: Haunting "Separate Spheres"

Chapter One. Antislavery Afterlives: Changing the Subject / Haunting the Poetess

Chapter Two. "Not Another 'Poetess'": Feminist Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and the Racialization of Suicide

Section 2. Suspending Spheres: The Violent Structures of Patriotic Pacifism

Chapter Three. Suspending Spheres, Suspending Disbelief: Hegel's Antigone, Craik's Crimea, Woolf's Three Guineas

Chapter Four. Turning and Burning: Sentimental Criticism, Casabiancas, and the Click of the Cliché

Section 3. Transatlantic Occasions: Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Poetics at the Limits

Chapter Five. Teaching Curses, Teaching Nations: Abolition Time and the Recoils of Antislavery Poetics

Chapter Six. Harper's Hearts: "Home Is Never Natural or Safe"

Notes

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2016.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691196770

069119677X

OCLC:

967529890