The American Hemans : Lydia Sigourney's relational poetics -- "The songs which all can sing" : imitation and working women's poetry in the Lowell offering -- "My country" : communal authorship and citizenship in Sarah Louisa Forten's Liberator poems -- "What is poetry?" : Class, collaboration, and the making of Wales, and other poems -- "Some queer freak of taste" : relational poetics and literary proprietorship in the "rock me to sleep" controversy -- Conclusion : Recovering the unremarkable.
Summary:
"Jennifer Putzi studies the composition, publication, and circulation of American women's poetry in the antebellum United States. In opposition to a traditional scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality, or a recovery method centered on author-based interventions, Putzi proposes a theory and methodology of relational poetics: focusing on poetry written by working-class and African American women poets, she demonstrates how an emphasis on relationships between and among people and texts shaped the poems that women wrote, the avenues they took to gain access to print, and the way their poems functioned within a variety of print cultures. Yet it is their very relationality which has led to these poems and the poets who published them being written out of literary history. Fair Copy models a radical reading and recovery of this work in a way that will redirect the study of nineteenth-century American women's poetry"-- Provided by publisher.
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.