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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Lootens, Tricia,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2016]; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (344 p.)

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.

Table of 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