Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-203) and index.
Contents:
Introduction : everywhere and nowhere -- Anthology publication and the woman poet -- The sick preface -- Ballad knowledge and the poetics of repetition -- Collaborative composition and sororal poetics -- Afterword : the problem of Emily Dickinson.
Summary:
In Plain Sight explores how the poetry of nineteenth-century American women that was once so visible within American culture could have, with the exception of that by Emily Dickinson, so thoroughly disappeared from literary history. By investigating erasure not merely as something that was done to these women but as the result of the conventions that once made the circulation of their poetry possible in the first place, this volume offers the first book-length analysis of the conventions of nineteenth-century American women's poetry. While each of the chapters focuses on a specific convention, taken together they tell the complicated story of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, tracing the spaces within literary culture where it lived and thrived, the spaces from which it was always in the process of vanishing. By reclaiming these conventions as a constitutive part of nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this book asks readers to take seriously the work these women produced and the role their work might play in remapping American literary history.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.