The Gendered Lyric


Book Description

The Gendered Lyric portrays gender as being central to the full appreciation of nineteenth-century French poetry. Schultz contends that both male and female poets of the major movements relied on sexual difference to define their poetic.




Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice


Book Description

Gendered Persona and Poetic Voice considers the effects on poetic voice of a conventional feminine persona, the abandoned woman, in early Chinese song lyric (ci) poems. The author reads the literary cross-dressing and ventriloquism of these mostly male-authored poems in light of the highly indeterminate Chinese poetic language, resulting in a consideration of persona and poetic voice of interest to scholars of lyric poetry in any language.




Lyric Interventions


Book Description

Lyric Interventions explores linguistically innovative poetry by contemporary women in North America and Britain whose experiments give rise to fresh feminist readings of the lyric subject. The works discussed by Linda Kinnahan explore the lyric subject in relation to the social: an “I” as a product of social discourse and as a conduit for change. Contributing to discussions of language-oriented poetries through its focus on women writers and feminist perspectives, this study of lyric experimentation brings attention to the cultural contexts of nation, gender, and race as they significantly shift the terms by which the “experimental” is produced, defined, and understood. This study focuses upon lyric intervention in distinct but related spheres as they link public and ideological norms of identity. Firstly, lyric innovations with visual and spatial realms of cultural practice and meaning, particularly as they naturalize ideologies of gender and race in North America and the post-colonial legacies of the Caribbean, are investigated in the works of Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, and M. Nourbese Philip. Secondly, experimental engagements with nationalist rhetorics of identity, marking the works of Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Riley, Wendy Mulford, and Geraldine Monk, are explored in relation to contemporary evocations of “self” in Britain. And thirdly, in discussions of all of the poets, but particularly accenuated in regard to Guest, Fraser, Riley, Mulford, and Monk, formal experimentation with the lyric “I” is considered through gendered encounters with critical and avant-garde discourses of poetics. Throughout the study, Kinnahan seeks to illuminate and challenge the ways in which visual and verbal constructs function to make “readable” the subjectivities historically supporting white, male-centered power within the worlds of art, poetry, social locations, or national policy. The potential of the feminist, innovative lyric to generate linguistic surprise simultaneously with engaging risky strategies of social intervention lends force and significance to the public engagement of such poetic experimentation. This fresh, energetic study will be of great interest to literary critics and womens studies scholars, as well as poets on both sides of the Atlantic.




The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric


Book Description

Introduction to this wide-ranging body of poetry, which includes work by such famous poets as Sappho and Pindar.




Lyrical Strains


Book Description

In this book, Elissa Zellinger analyzes both political philosophy and poetic theory in order to chronicle the consolidation of the modern lyric and the liberal subject across the long nineteenth century. In the nineteenth-century United States, both liberalism and lyric sought self-definition by practicing techniques of exclusion. Liberalism was a political philosophy whose supposed universals were limited to white men and created by omitting women, the enslaved, and Native peoples. The conventions of poetic reception only redoubled the sense that liberal selfhood defined its boundaries by refusing raced and gendered others. Yet Zellinger argues that it is precisely the poetics of the excluded that offer insights into the dynamic processes that came to form the modern liberal and lyric subjects. She examines poets—Frances Sargent Osgood, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. Pauline Johnson—whose work uses lyric practices to contest the very assumptions about selfhood responsible for denying them the political and social freedoms enjoyed by full liberal subjects. In its consideration of politics and poetics, this project offers a new approach to genre and gender that will help shape the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies.




Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song


Book Description

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities.




Under My Thumb


Book Description

Women write about their experiences of loving music that doesn’t love them back – a feminist 'guilty pleasures'.e - a kind of feminist guilty pleasures. In the majority of mainstream writing and discussions on music, women appear purely in relation to men as muses, groupies or fangirls, with our own experiences, ideas and arguments dismissed or ignored. But this hasn’t stopped generations of women from loving, being moved by and critically appreciating music, even – and sometimes especially – when we feel we shouldn’t. Under My Thumb: Songs that Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them is a study of misogyny in music through the eyes of women. It brings together stories from journalists, critics, musicians and fans about artists or songs we love (or used to love) despite their questionable or troubling gender politics, and looks at how these issues interact with race, class and sexuality. As much celebration as critique, this collection explores the joys, tensions, contradictions and complexities of women loving music – however that music may feel about them. Featuring: murder ballads, country, metal, hip hop, emo, indie, Phil Spector, David Bowie, Guns N’ Roses, 2Pac, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, AC/DC, Elvis Costello, Jarvis Cocker, Kanye West, Swans, Eminem, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Combichrist and many more.




Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric


Book Description

In early modern lyric poetry, the male poet or lover often appears not as powerful and masterly but rather as broken, abject, and feminine. Catherine Bates examines the cultural and literary strategies behind this representation and uncovers radically alternative models of masculinity in the lyric tradition of the Renaissance. Focusing on Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, and Donne, she offers astute readings of a wide range of texts – a sonnet sequence, a blazon, an elegy, a complaint, and an epistle. She shows how existing critical approaches have too much invested in the figure of the authoritative male writer to be able to do justice to the truly radical nature of these alternative masculinities. Taking direction from psychoanalytic theories of gender formation, Bates develops critical strategies that make it possible to understand and appreciate what is genuinely revolutionary about these texts and about the English Renaissance lyric tradition at large.




Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle


Book Description

Poe is frequently portrayed as an isolated idiosyncratic genius who was unwilling or unable to adapt himself to the cultural conditions of his time. Eliza Richards revises this portrayal through an exploration of his collaborations and rivalries with his female contemporaries. Richards demonstrates that he staged his performance of tortured isolation in the salons and ephemeral publications of New York City in conjunction with prominent women poets whose work sought to surpass. She introduces and interprets the work of three important and largely forgotten women poets: Frances Sargent Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Richards re-evaluates the work of these writers, and of nineteenth-century lyric practices more generally, by examining poems in the context of their circulation and reception within nineteenth-century print culture. This book will be of interest to scholars of American print culture as well as specialists of nineteenth-century literature and poetry.




Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies


Book Description

Modernist Poetry, Gender and Leisure Technologies: Machine Amusements explores how modernist women poets were inspired by leisure technologies to write new versions of the gendered subject. Focusing on American women writers and particularly on the city of New York, the book argues that the poetry of modernist women that engages with, examines or critiques the new leisure technologies of their era is fundamentally changed by the encounter with that technology. The chapters in the book focus on shopping, advertising, dance, film, radio and phonography, on city spaces such as Coney Island, Greenwich Village and Harlem, and on poetry that embraces the linguistic and formal innovations of modernism whilst paying close attention to the embodied politics of gender. The technologized city, and the leisure cultures and media forms emerging from it, enabled modernist women writers to re-imagine forms of lyric embodiment, inspired by the impact of technology on modern ideas of selfhood and subjectivity.